For a techie, my relationship with technology has been rather atypical.  So much so that my friend once called me a Luddite! Facebook is one thing which I resisted for a very long time, though it seemed to be all the rage, but now, I've made my peace with it and am even enjoying it. I used to argue that it would never be like lj, and on that score, I'm still right: lj still holds a place much closer to my heart, but the fact is, most of the people I know are not on lj.  I use fb, and sometimes even twitter for sharing links and videos. I often find links to interesting videos and news articles on twitter and fb, which I read when I find time for it.  However,  if there is one major difference between lj and the rest, it's permanence. If I post something on lj and come back after a month, it's still there. My friends who are interested to go through my posts can find it right away, unlike on fb and twitter where wallposts/tweets get buried under tons and tons of other content that keeps going up every moment. The lifespan of content on fb is a few minutes, most often, and a few hours, if it's a slow day for others.  I often get the feeling that I can't really keep pace with fb and twitter, but it doesn't really seem to matter much now.  For me, lj is where I go when I have something important to share.  fb and twitter are what I think as random babble gatherers and I like them for their own strengths.  I've even started to post links to my lj posts on fb and I daresay more people seem to be reading my blog these days as a result!

The technology that I refer to in the subject line of this post however has nothing to do with facebook or even lj.  It's simply the technology that's literally come into our hands and into our lives.  The technology that we have today that we couldn't even dream about a few years ago.  How often was it that we'd have a haunting melody in our heads but couldn't  look it up simply because we didn't know the name of the song or the lyrics, even partially? Often, it was just a tune in the head.

Enter software like SoundHound and Shazam. I have SoundHound, a free application, installed on my Android phone.  How does it work? You simply launch it and either sing the song or better yet, hum the tune into the microphone and then it does its magic: within a few seconds, it furnishes the name of the song, the band/singer and a lot more information, just like that. The success rate with international songs seems much higher, but I've had success with a few old Hindi songs too. There was this beautiful song that I'd heard several years ago.  The music was so hauntingly beautiful that the tune had stayed in my head for years, yet I'd never been able to find the song itself over the years. I remembered that tune all of a sudden today, and equally suddenly, I realized that I now had the power to find the song! I pulled out my phone, launched the app, hummed the tune and waited with bated breath for the results. Within about ten seconds, it came up with a bunch of 'possible' matches. I launched youtube and entered the first 'possible' match and immediately realized that I'd found the song I wanted.  Technology does change the way we experience life.  It changes the experience called 'life'.

The song, called Ameno by a new-age group called Era, for your listening/viewing pleasure: