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Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
- jeghsnb 3y agoLama Jjsh Jdj D D D D
- seanvelasco 3y agoAllowed me to find the song Longer by Dan Fogelberg, a song which otherwise would remain a mystery to me possibly forever without this tech (unless I bump into a friend who happens to know this song)
- ajb 3y agoThis is really useful. This announcement is from 2020, but still not well known for some reason
- midasuni 3y agoI’ve seen adverts for it on YouTube in the past
- qingcharles 3y agoYeah, it's crazy. I never noticed it until someone on HN pointed it out to me a couple of weeks ago, even though there is a LARGE BUTTON RIGHT THERE ON THE SCREEN every time you use Google Assistant on an Android phone. And while Shazam will always be my first love, Google's version is way, way better at identifying my out-of-key humming.
- interestica 3y agoThere was a competitor to Shazam when it first came out that had something like this I think. I remember preferring that app. Edit: found it. SoundHound. And it's still around.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zegoo 3y agoI use it quite often. I am bilingual and I have tried it with very old Chinese songs - it works.
- sharkweek 3y agoI gotta say, as dumb as this sounds, there is almost nothing more satisfying than having an unidentified song stuck in your head and then after hours/days/years figuring out what it is. Vivid memory from when I was in middle school (before internet search was common) having a song tune stuck in my head for years that I couldn’t identify. Finally years later I heard it on the radio randomly and it was like scratching the best itch of all time. For those wondering it was Primitive Radio Gods - Standing Outside a Broken Telephone Booth With Money in My Hand. I don’t even love the song that much but to figure out what it was… whew, few feelings like it.
- MrGilbert 3y agoWhen I was younger (basically when the transition to Web 2.0 happened), I had the melody of „The kids aren’t alright“ from The Offspring stuck in my head for months. I was so relieved when I found it.
- monktastic1 3y agoI can totally see why that song in particular scratched that itch. It definitely has a nostalgic vibe to it (independently of my having grown up with it, I feel).
- ethanbond 3y agoYou’re gonna love this: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx
- lanewinfield 3y agoWhat I believe to be the greatest podcast episode of all time.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoThe ending ruins it for me. The fun mystical journey was actually just a distraction from walled gardens ruining the web.
- Erratic6576 3y agoI used https://www.midomi.com/ https://www.midomi.com/ a long time ago. Never got it to quite work though
- hoten 3y agoJust tried on my pixel device. Can't say it worked. You hit the assistant thing, say what song is this, then hum as it prompts you. Then stop humming, but it never seems to finish the query. You tap the flat sound wave thing, and it takes that as a cancellation. Shrug.
- Jowsey 3y agoThis has always been my experience too, never had it work
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- amf12 3y agoI just tried it. You have to hum until it says stop. It keeps prompting you to keep going
- squeaky-clean 3y agoI've had this same issue with SoundHound, as they've advertised this same feature for a while now. The problem is, sometimes I only have half of the chorus stuck in my head and I want to hear the rest but I don't remember it. I just tried it with a guitar driven song I've had stuck in my head lately. I only remember about 5 seconds of the chorus, but it's what I would consider a fairly memorable and catchy hook.
- standardUser 3y agoI had the song Low by Flo Rida stuck in my head. I made an audio recording of me humming and sent it to a bunch of friends, all of whom know a lot more about popular music than I do. No one could figure it out. And neither could Google.
- kfichter 3y agoI'd be interested in hearing this recording if you're willing to share it
- standardUser 3y agoIt is truly embarrassing (and not super easy to share). For what it's worth, I tried it a few more time humming more of the song (parts I couldn't remember originally), but still no luck.
- monktastic1 3y agoTen or fifteen years ago, I sang the old Hindi classic "Kisi Ki Muskarahaton Pe" (not particularly well) into Midomi, and it nailed it immediately. One of the most delightful tech experiences I've ever had, comparable to my experience with ChatGPT. Today's Google search first suggests a medley (which presumably contains the song), and then a related song, and only the third option is correct. I also had to try twice.
- colund 3y agoSoundHound has had this for ages
- antihipocrat 3y agoI remember using a feature like this on Google Play Music ~7 years ago. It worked quite well
- satvikpendem 3y agoHow well does this do against Shazam?
- drexlspivey 3y agoShazam doesn’t work if you just hum the song so I guess infinately
- wenc 3y agoThis is way way better than Shazam. I just tried it. I hummed a song to Shazam and nothing but Google found it in one shot.
- pg_bot 3y agoI've never been able to get this feature to work on iOS.
- ulrischa 3y agoI tested it with German child songs and the results were very bad.
- ACV001 3y agoI tried it and it didn't work.
- steppi 3y agoVery cool. I tried it humming the choruses from the batch of my own songs I’m working on at the moment to see if I might have committed unconscious plagiarism. There were no close matches and I was feeling pretty good. Than I hummed the chorus of My sweet lord, 29% match to a cover, 18% match to the George Harrison original, He’s so fine by the Chiffon’s wasn’t in the results. I guess this wouldn’t have saved George.
- autoexec 3y agoIt's rough for independent song writers. Any meaningful success paints a massive target on your back. Tools like this could help, but only for as long as you can trust them. If this tool worked like domain name searches do, then Google would instantly copyright any melody you hum that didn't match over a certain percentage so that they could sue you later when you tried to use it. Music copyright is a huge problem. Having just four notes in the same sequence can be enough to count as infringement (the so called "four note rule") but avoiding that won't save you. You could write a song that was completely different from someone else's song, and still get sued successfully for copyright infringement just because your song happened to be in same the genre! Worse, if they don't sign their rights over to the RIAA, the cartel can just bankrupt an independent musician in the court system no matter how weak their case. It doesn't help that the Obama administration stacked the justice system with ex-RIAA lawyers and that courts have been willing to bend over backwards to the RIAA's increasing demands over the years.
- crazygringo 3y agoI've used this probably at least 100 times over the past couple of years, and it's pretty bad. It finds a match maybe only about 20% of the time. Usually I just get a truly bizarre set of random songs from across the globe that say something like "5% match". And none of the stuff I'm looking for is obscure -- they're all top-40 songs from some decade or other that I just can't remember the artist. And the crazy part is that I have a strong musical background, so when I'm humming, the melody and rhythm are exact. I mean, my input is accurate. I wish I knew how the algorithm worked, if there were a way to know how to get better matches. Like does it not care about rhythm at all, is it just sequences of melodic pitches? Or is rhythm super-important? Is it better to hum just the chorus, or just a verse, or try to get the end of a verse going into a chorus? Does it only want you to hum the vocal part, or does it want you to hum whatever the main instrumental part is during the vocal breaks? I wish I had some notion of precisely what intermediate information it was deriving from humming and from songs that it was trying to match up and how. Most of Google's "smart" services work pretty well. Of all of them, I think hum-to-search is the absolute worst-performing "smart" service they offer, by a huge margin. On the whole, it's probably wasted more of my time, than the value I've gotten out of it when it was helpful. It feels like a half-baked feature that they just forgot about rather than trying to improve. Hopefully they use some newer AI model to rebuild the feature from scratch in the future. Or it's a ripe opportunity for a startup to build and sell in a bidding war to Apple/Google/Spotify/Bing.
- parasti 3y agoA completely opposite experience. Been using it for years, and (when it doesn't lag) it gets the right match almost every time.
- steppi 3y agoI think even timbre matters. I got a 95% match singing the first verse of Smells Like Teen Spirit using vocal fry to add some rasp, but couldn’t get over 80% singing in an unaffected soft head voice, though I got a 79% match for a cover by Malia J which wasn’t even originally in the results. Maybe I unconsciously matched the melody more closely when trying to do my best Kurt impression? I just tried it belting from my chest voice like Michael McDonald and only matched covers; the best match only 33%. None of them sounded like Michael McDonald.
- vitaflo 3y agoThis seems to have been removed in the most recent Google app. Typical Google.
- jakub_g 3y agoWorks for me: click microphone icon in search field, then click "Search for a song" in the bottom.
- crazygringo 3y agoNot on iOS, at least. Just tap the microphone icon in the search box, and a button "Search a song" appears. I've never understood why it's only part of the mobile apps, though, and not part of web search.
- standeven 3y agoI just downloaded the Google app for iOS and this feature was missing until I force-closed and reopened it. Then it appeared.
- CrimsonChapulin 3y agoI’m his worked for me as well. Otherwise it would just do a Google search for “what’s this song” which was very frustrating. At least the song came up, even though it was in Spanish which I didn’t know whether it was used to train the models/input they use before trying.
- asveikau 3y agoI just did it on my android phone. It couldn't figure out the song though. It did try.
- anon_cow1111 3y agoBack in my day, we had to hum the song in a youtube video and wait for google to flag it with a copyright strike against our account!
- cellis 3y agoTried it with a childhood song/tune that I might have heard at 8 or 9 ( maybe 10 or 11) that is otherwise forever lost to history for me and while it did find matches, they weren't the song.
- profsummergig 3y agoRecord your humming. Post it online. Ask the sub-reddit someone mentioned (tipofmytongue). Don't lose it to history. Have managed to recover a few songs from my childhood this way. Like someone else mentioned, it's one of the most satisfying things.
- inquirerGeneral 3y ago[dead]
- bogwog 3y agoDoes anyone remember SongTapper? It was the same idea, except you'd tap your spacebar instead of humming the song.
- _ink_ 3y agoYeah! Worked surprisingly well.
- amanzi 3y agoI hummed an obscure Zulu song we used to sing as kids and it found a recording of the song on YouTube. Pretty amazing.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoI just tried this on my Pixel. I tried humming the synth part to Just What I Needed. It was stuck on "still working" for a whole minute because it couldn't distinguish my humming from the faint background noise outside my apartment. After trying 3 times I just gave up.
- yterdy 3y agoAs with most Google Search features, it seems to have been degraded/nerfed over the years (as has competitor Shazam). I'm starting to think it's purposeful and on account of limited compute: devote a lot on launch to convince people of its quality, then gradually lower resources devoted to it. As long as 90% of searches - the ones for the most popular songs - work, the complaints from the subset of the 10% that don't won't rise to the level of requiring attention.
- yterdy 3y agoThe silent downvotes are funny, mere weeks after getting into it with HN commenters about how Google-related posts are astroturfed.
- Lucasoato 3y agoThis is so nice, if only it worked it would be even better.
- d--b 3y agoMidomi has been doing this since 2005.
- bitwize 3y agoSoundHound has had this feature for yonks. I remember humming the Portal ending song to it in like 2012 and getting correct hits.
- pgt 3y agoSongs get stuck in your head because you can’t remember the ending, e.g. I’m a Barbie Gi- To get a song out of your head, design an ending that resolves. The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.
- whobre 3y agoSon can you play me a memory I’m not really sure how it goes But it’s sad and it’s sweet And I knew it complete When I wore a younger man’s clothes”
- whartung 3y agoI always liked the anecdote that Mel Brooks couldn’t write music, so he hummed all the songs from “The Producers” into a tape recorder and those recordings formed the basis of all the arrangements.
- fsckboy 3y agoAnybody ever played Cranium? Humans cannot name songs their friends are humming. Therefore, a true AI should also not be able to, or perhaps it's the singularity at the first moment they can...
- pokstad 3y agoHumming sounds much better to the hummer than the listener.
- magicalhippo 3y agoWay back in the days, someone on IRC mentioned they'd had a song stuck in their head for days and they just couldn't figure out what the song was. I asked them how it went, and he replied something along the lines of da da daada da da daada, da da daada da da daaadaa After thinking about it for a few seconds I wrote the name of the song and the artist[1] and he replied THATS IT! Not sure how many other songs it would work with but that one was kinda easy to be fair. [1]: https://www.discogs.com/master/449592 https://www.discogs.com/master/449592
- productk 3y agoI had to uninstall/reinstall on iOS, but then the song search became visible. It helped me track down this ballad our school jazz band played back in high school. I searched fruitlessly every few years or so through playlists of ballads, and one time six or so years ago I recorded me playing it on Alto Sax and posted it to Reddit, but no luck for nearly two decades, til now, so thanks! Here’s the song for the curious: https://youtu.be/wcAkEl6AV5Y?si=CI93V_Kp_ve_lGWG https://youtu.be/wcAkEl6AV5Y?si=CI93V_Kp_ve_lGWG
- loxias 3y agoHoly crap! "Brahms - Piano trio No 1 in B major" FINALLY. That's been more than half a year in my head, and me failing to figure out how to search for it. Proud of myself I nailed the key. Does this song have some romance story behind it? Probably just my brain confusing nearby neurons. Extraordinarily frustrating that it needs a mobile device (as opposed to, say, even Chrome only). Still, thanks internet. Now I'm back to a 100% success ratio (lifetime) of "if I get a song stuck in my head I will dig until I know its name".
- bobbiechen 3y agoFor a lot of classical music, you can get very good results just using the Parsons code (sometimes called melodic contour): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code Worth a shot if hum to search doesn't work!
- loxias 3y agoThanks for this! I'm... embarrassed not to have heard of this before. Sure enough, I typed "*UUUUDDDDUDRUUUUDDDUDDDUDD" into musipedia.org and BOOM. Result!
- rjh29 3y agoPeople who aren't pitch perfect will rarely sing a song it its original key, so Google likely handle that.
- NobodyNada 3y agoWhile I imagine Google probably does handle transpositions, people do tend to remember the pitch of a song, even if they don't have perfect pitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch#Pitch_memory_related_to_musical_context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch#Pitch_memory_re... > While very few people have the ability to name a pitch with no external reference, pitch memory can be activated by repeated exposure. People who are not skilled singers will often sing popular songs in the correct key, and can usually recognize when TV themes have been shifted into the wrong key.
- chrisweekly 3y agoRelated tangent: song stuck in your head (maybe you know what it is) and want it to go away? Finish it to the last note.
- ThinkingGuy 3y agoFor anyone struggling with a song (or a movie, or a TV show, or whatever) that they can't remember, r/tipofmytongue on Reddit is a great resource. https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/
- meatjuice 3y agoI wonder if Google is just innovative and not invasive.
- londons_explore 3y agoJust tested it. I hummed 'Frère Jacques, frère Jacques Dormez-vous ?', a common nursery rhyme in english-speaking UK, despite being french and not many people here speak French well. However, Google gave me 3 results, none of which were in either English or French. They were Spanish and Italian (I think!), and both had the correct tune, but weren't what I was looking for. I wonder if the search engine could better handle this case by recognising cases where lots of songs use the same tune, and showing results for the ones which are most popular in the region the searcher is searching from?