Are you a victim of an earworm? Or have you ever stuck in a situation where you heard a beautiful song but can’t remember the lyrics to search online? Fortunately, Google search now has a dedicated feature called ‘hum to search’ that lets you find a song by humming it without knowing even a single word of the lyrics! And the best part? The feature is available on both Android and iOS, and can identify songs by humming in more than 20 languages including English and Hindi.
With Google’s hum to search song feature, searching a song by humming is a pretty straightforward process. You simply whistle or hum the tune of any part of the song in your mind, Google will filter and return the most relevant results on the web using machine learning models.
To break down the whole process and help you find out the piece of music that sticks in your mind, we’ve put together this article as a guide to finding songs by humming. And as a bonus, we’ll show you how to hum a song to find it with the help of a humming song finder app. So let’s dive in..
Contents
How to Find a Song by Humming?
Below are the steps to find a song by humming online.
- First, open the Google Search or Google Assistant on your device and tap the microphone icon in the search field.
- Once the app opens, tap on the Search a song button right at the bottom of the screen.
- Now start humming the tune of the song you want to find out till the search result comes up. It can take up to 15 seconds depending on your network connection.
- Google will now come up with a list of 3 songs that match your humming. You can also click on More results to view more search results.
- If you can’t find a satisfactory result, tap on Try again and hum the song to Google again in a better clarity to see if shows up some relevant results. Note that you can try several time, but make sure the clarity of your audio is good enough for Google to identify the song. Also, try to minimize any background sounds or noise.
How Does the Hum to Search Feature Work?
Google’s hum to search feature relies heavily on machine learning. It’s in fact a modification of the Now Playing feature Google first introduced in their Pixel phones back in 2017 that used to recognize the songs playing in the background.
If you interesting in how it works and want to know more of it, let’s explain. Well, actually what Google does while you hum a tune that you remember is converting that audio into a number based sequence representing the song’s melody. It then compares it with the database of their neural networks that is trained to identify the song or music. Google’s database has now more than one million songs and recordings to compare with.
Hum a Song to Find it with SoundHound App
If you are looking for an alternative solution, an excellent humming song finder can help. SoundHound is such an app that lets you identify the melody of a song using acoustic analysis technology. Once you find a song using the app, it not only give you a playback option but also provides the lyrics and other meta data like artist, album, genre, etc.
This music discovery app also lets you sync your personal library of identified song with Spotify account and build playlist. Another incredible feature of the app is its support for commands. Just like you interact with Google Assistant with its command, SoundHound also recognize your command. So all you need is to say “Hey SoundHound…” followed by something like:
- “What song am i humming?”
- “What’s that song?”
- “Show me lyrics to ‘Baby'”
- “Add this song to my playlist” (works with Spotify only)
So, if you are looking for a song finder by humming, then SoundHound is your best bet. And, its available for free.
Download SoundHound: Android | iOS
Hum to Find Those Earworms!
If a portion of a song or tune of that continuously occupies or repeats in your mind, it’s a terrible situation unless you find it out, especially if you have musical obsessions. And with the help of this guide, we hope you’ve successfully found that song by humming and are well educated to find any earworms that arise in your head in the future. Now, let us know what you think of the app and your experience of finding that music resonating in your head.
