You probably have been going through what has also been upsetting me for years. Every time while traveling and a piece of good music plays on the radio, I keenly listen hoping that the presenter would mention the name of the song or artist, unluckily, they always end up in premium tears when they play the signature tune or an advertisement. It leaves me pondering on how to get it throughout the day, especially when I can’t spell any word, you know how those rap lyrics are. Well, Google has now announced a new feature that lets users figure out which song is stuck in their heads by humming, whistling, or singing.
No lyrics, artist name, or perfect pitch required, just you and your voice, and the AI models will help you match the melody to the right song. When you hum a melody into Search, Google’s machine learning models transform the audio into a number-based sequence representing the song’s melody and works 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 then compare these sequences to thousands of songs from around the world and identify potential matches in real-time.
“This builds on the work of our AI Research team’s music recognition technology. We launched Now Playing on the Pixel 2 in 2017, using deep neural networks to bring low-power recognition of music to mobile devices,” said Krishna Kumar, Senior Product Manager at Google Search in a blog post.
“In 2018, we brought the same technology to the SoundSearch feature in the Google app and expanded the reach to a catalog of millions of songs. This new experience takes it a step further because now we can recognize songs without the lyrics or original song. All we need is a hum,” he wrote.
You will need to open the latest version of the Google app on your mobile device or find your Google Search widget, then tap the mic icon and say “what’s this song?” or click the “Search a song” button. It will allow you to start humming for 10-15 seconds. On Google Assistant, it’s just as simple. Say “Hey Google, what’s this song?” and then hum the tune. After you’re finished humming, the machine learning algorithm will take it from there.
Google says you don’t need to worry about a perfect pitch to use this feature since it will show you the most likely options based on the tune. You will then be able to select the best match and explore information on the song and artist, view any accompanying music videos or listen to the song on your favorite music app, find the lyrics, read analysis and even check out other recordings of the song when available. The feature is currently available in English on iOS and more than 20 languages on Android.
See: Google is fostering quality journalism through its new initiative, Journalist Studio
