Have you ever had a song stuck in your head but had no idea what it was? Maybe you didn’t even know any of the lyrics, which makes it hard to search. This has happened to me more times than I care to think about. But those days are gone because now you can hum songs to Google Search. And it’ll give you results.
The new feature is available on both iOS and Android in the Google app or using Google Assistant. Using it couldn’t be easier, either—tap the microphone, then search for a song. Hum, sing, or whistle what’s in your head. Search will then use machine learning to do its best to find a matching track.
While it seems like a pretty simple thing, it’s actually pretty fascinating in use. Google says that it’s able to dissect the audio by “transforming [it] into a number-based sequence representing the song’s melody”—that means it should work even if you can’t carry a tune in a bucket (thanks for that phrase, mom).
In Google’s blog post, it explains that a song’s melody is “like its fingerprint” in that each one is unique. If you can hum something that remotely sounds like what’s in your head, the pitch doesn’t have to be accurate at all because the variations and changes are still unique to that particular song. Well, for most songs anyway.
So yeah, the next time you get an earworm and have no idea what it is, you have a solution. I, for one, and thankful.
Source: Google