We’ve all had that happen to us: there’s a melody stuck in our head but no matter how hard we try, we can’t connect it to the actual song it’s coming from. It’s the worst. Okay, maybe not the worst, but on the first-world-problem scale, it’s pretty high up.
Well, cross that off the list, because it’s a problem no more! The “Good things that happened in 2020” column might not have many entries in it, but now we can add “song search by humming” to it, thanks to Google.
Days after Apple showed how you can search for a song by giving Siri part of the lyrics for it, Google went a step further and announced that you can now search for songs by simply humming its tune as best as possible. We’ve all tried it at least once before with no success, but now that the Google Assistant knows what’s expected of it, the outcome is far different.
The feature is already live, so you can give it a try. We did, and so far it seems to be working as described. We got 3/3:
Sure, the songs are popular, but the humming was far from perfect. Of course, you don’t have to necessarily hum, you can also whistle the song or sing it.
The way Google matches your input to the songs won’t surprise anyone, it uses AI and machine learning. Or, in Google’s words:
An easy way to explain it is that a song’s melody is like its fingerprint: They each have their own unique identity. We've built machine learning models that can match your hum, whistle or singing to the right “fingerprint.”When you hum a melody into Search, our machine learning models transform the audio into a number-based sequence representing the song’s melody. Our models are trained to identify songs based on a variety of sources, including humans singing, whistling or humming, as well as studio recordings. The algorithms also take away all the other details, like accompanying instruments and the voice's timbre and tone. What we’re left with is the song’s number-based sequence, or the fingerprint.
AI, solving the world’s problems, one at a time.
So, the next time a tune is stuck in your head, just tap that microphone icon next to the Google search bar, start humming and tap on the “what song is this?” button. Make sure you have enough air in your lungs because you might be humming for a while before Google comes up with a match. Just a heads up.
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