Just 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.
I'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.
Holy 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".
> 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.
I 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.
What's actually crazy is how relatively non-"lost" it really was. Once you know what it's called you can go find it on Amazon, and there's reviews from 2000 still just sitting there; it's probably been on sale this whole time. Someone put it up on YouTube in 2010.
It's funny how something can be so available and yet inaccessible at the same time. Reminds me a little of Borges' Library of Babel: what you want is there, but what does it matter if you can't find it?
There's a jingle completely missing from the Internet or any record I can find. It's the "Sport Chalet" jingle common on Southern California radios in the late 80's and early 90's. It goes "Sport Chalet!" in this heroic way, then "we take you to the limit!". It's very distinctive, and I've found people singing it on YouTube, but no recording of the original. It probably exists on someone's random cassette tape of radio from those days, and nowhere else. Remarkable!
Not music, but in the late 90s or maybe early 2000s there was an anti-smoking PSA involving an old man encouraging a baby to take its first steps. After much encouragement, the baby starts walking, walks over to the old man, and passes right through him as he fades into partial transparency.
The message then rolls that you shouldn't smoke because your early death will deprive you of important moments like this one.
This PSA made far more of an impression than most do -- for example, it's mentioned on Friends -- and I think about it often as an example of how the same basic argument can be made in weak or strong terms. It may have been too strong for its own good; I once asked a friend for help finding a video of it and the response was "Oh, I know exactly the commercial you're talking about. I won't help you look for it; I hate that commercial and I don't want to see it again."
Wow! The last time I looked was more than 2 years ago, so this video was uploaded since then. Thanks for posting. I don't recall the vocal being a choral group, but rather a very masculine solo voice, but it's definitely the same jingle.
That song, which is such a great/weird one-hit wonder, has flummoxed so many people! I worked at a record store in high school in the early 2000s and people would come in all the time humming or attempting to sing various songs. I got freakishly good at identifying even the hardest/weirdest tracks. I used to keep a playlist on my iPod of the weirdest tracks, which sadly has been lost to time.
Over the last 20 years, that skill has ebbed some, but I still get friends sending me their attempts to express the earworm stuck in their ear. I have an 80% success rate and enough OCD to usually track it down unless someone just gets stuff straight wrong.
I had a similar experience. Song stuck in my head for years. Finally found it. I honestly felt a little sad when I finally found out what it was. I think I'd somehow grown attached to the mystery of it.
> ... 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
I had a song in my head and I'd whistle it at parties / dinners etc. for years before someone was able to tell me what it was.
The person couldn't tell me the name but told me something like: "It's a very old folkloric song but I don't know it's name". And with that description and, well, the nascent Youtube I've been able to find its name (not even sure that was even Google back then).
But what's funny: everybody knew it when I'd whistle it. Everybody had heard it, but nobody could tell me what it was.
Turns out it was "Greensleeves" which is really famous. Wikipedia link which has a link to the tune:
Hah, I had Greensleeves in my head since I was a kid with a digital watch that could play that song and some others. I had the feeling that I had heard it before that somehow. Many years later I suddenly hear that one somewhere and since then it's properly stuck in my head. Now I use it to get other songs un-stuck. Works wonders :-)
I think what's more weird is that none of their other music sounds anything like that song. It's rather unique. And the lyrics seems to make no sense anyways. Everything about that song is an enigma to me.
When 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.
I 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).
Very 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.
It'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.
I 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.
Allowed 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)
I’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.
I 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.
It 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.
Tried 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.
Record 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.
I'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.
I 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.
Yeah, 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.
Ten 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.
Way 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.
Just 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?
I 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!
Anybody 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...
I 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.
As 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.
