Midomi is a new site, now in beta testing, that lets you search for music by singing the tune into a microphone.

The site lets you search for a song by singing, humming or whistling a bit of the tune. The site then offers search results that include commercially recorded tracks or versions of the song recorded by others who have used the site. The technology also lets you listen to the section of each song in the search results that matched your voice sample.

The site also is trying to build a music community – you can listen to melodies others have sung, and discuss their version and even rate it.

The underlying speech- and sound-recognition technology, dubbed Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System, or MARS, differs from similar technologies in that it looks at a variety of factors for recognizing samples, including pitch, tempo variation, speech content and location of pauses, said Chief Executive Keyvan Mohajer, who has a Ph.D. in sound- and speech-recognition from Stanford University.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t look like it will help much when you’re looking that catchy breakbeat song that goes sort of “boom splat tenow-tenow boom boom, boom splat tenow-tenow screeeeetch”.