How well does this do against Shazam?
Shazam doesn’t work if you just hum the song so I guess infinately
Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
21–30 of 98 posts
Re: Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
#22I tested it with German child songs and the results were very bad.
Re: Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
#23I tried it and it didn't work.
Re: Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
#24Very 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.
Re: Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
#25This is really useful. This announcement is from 2020, but still not well known for some reason
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.
There 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.
Re: Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
#26I'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.
Re: Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
#27I'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…
A completely opposite experience. Been using it for years, and (when it doesn't lag) it gets the right match almost every time.
Re: Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
#28This seems to have been removed in the most recent Google app. Typical Google.
Re: Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
#29Very 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.
Re: Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
#30This seems to have been removed in the most recent Google app. Typical Google.
Not 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.