Tech giant Google has launched a new feature that will help you remember a song if you are trying to get the full song, lyrics or even the artist.
It is like Apple’s Shazam but better as all you have to do is, hum any part of the song to Google and Google will do the rest – no lyrics, artist name or perfect pitch required
Google Hum to Search feature helps you find the melody that’s stuck in your head with machine learning technology and it helps identify potential song matches. Then you can 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.
How to Hum to Search
- On your mobile device, open the latest version of the Google app or find your Google Search widget
- Tap the microphone icon and say “what’s this song?” or click the “Search a song” button
- Then start humming for 10-15 seconds to get your results
If you are using Google Assistant, just say “Hey Google, what’s this song?” and then hum the tune.
How Machine learning works
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. The models are trained 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. What is left, is the song’s number-based sequence, or the fingerprint.
Google compares these sequences to thousands of songs from around the world and identify potential matches in real time.
These machine learning models recognize the melody of the studio-recorded version of the song, which we can use to match it with a person’s hummed audio.
All this is built on the Google’s AI Research team’s music recognition technology
This feature is currently available in English on iOS, and in more than 20 languages on Android. Google hopes to expand this to more languages in the future.
Photo by Tachina Lee on Unsplash
