[HN Gopher] Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
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Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
Author : seanvelasco
Score : 86 points
Date : 2023-11-11 16:36 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| seanvelasco wrote:
| Allowed me to find the song Longer by Dan Fogelberg, a song which
| otherwise would remain a mystery to me possibly forever without
| this tech (unless I bump into a friend who happens to know this
| song)
| ajb wrote:
| This is really useful. This announcement is from 2020, but still
| not well known for some reason
| midasuni wrote:
| I've seen adverts for it on YouTube in the past
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| interestica wrote:
| 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.
| zegoo wrote:
| I use it quite often. I am bilingual and I have tried it with
| very old Chinese songs - it works.
| sharkweek wrote:
| I gotta say, as dumb as this sounds, there is almost nothing more
| satisfying than having an unidentified song stuck in your head
| and then after hours/days/years figuring out what it is.
|
| Vivid memory from when I was in middle school (before internet
| search was common) having a song tune stuck in my head for years
| that I couldn't identify. Finally years later I heard it on the
| radio randomly and it was like scratching the best itch of all
| time.
|
| For those wondering it was Primitive Radio Gods - Standing
| Outside a Broken Telephone Booth With Money in My Hand. I don't
| even love the song that much but to figure out what it was...
| whew, few feelings like it.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| I can totally see why that song in particular scratched that
| itch. It definitely has a nostalgic vibe to it (independently
| of my having grown up with it, I feel).
| ethanbond wrote:
| You're gonna love this: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-
| all/o2h8bx
| lanewinfield wrote:
| What I believe to be the greatest podcast episode of all
| time.
| sharkweek wrote:
| Two things: I have diagnosed but mostly managed OCD so that
| was fascinating
|
| And second: that is a WILD story - I was kind of expecting to
| get to the end with no pay dirt but that was fantastic.
| cycomanic wrote:
| What a story! Thanks for posting.
| xmprt wrote:
| A shame that Reply All is no more but it had a great run
| while it lasted.
| javajosh wrote:
| There's a jingle completely missing from the Internet or any
| record I can find. It's the "Sport Chalet" jingle common on
| Southern California radios in the late 80's and early 90's.
| It goes "Sport Chalet!" in this heroic way, then "we take you
| to the limit!". It's very distinctive, and I've found people
| singing it on YouTube, but no recording of the original. It
| probably exists on someone's random cassette tape of radio
| from those days, and nowhere else. Remarkable!
| bitwize wrote:
| That... is almost a Rick and Morty episode. Like one of those
| alien sidekick parasites took the form of a song instead.
| enlyth wrote:
| That was great, thanks
| euroderf wrote:
| Roger that. I had two songs stuck in ma haid for a couple
| decades(!) before I was fortunate to stumble upon them.
|
| They're Coming to Take Me Away, Napoleon XIV
|
| Johnny Cash, Ring of Fire
| burntalmonds wrote:
| I had a similar experience. Song stuck in my head for years.
| Finally found it. I honestly felt a little sad when I finally
| found out what it was. I think I'd somehow grown attached to
| the mystery of it.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| When I was younger (basically when the transition to Web 2.0
| happened), I had the melody of ,,The kids aren't alright" from
| The Offspring stuck in my head for months. I was so relieved
| when I found it.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I think what's more weird is that none of their other music
| sounds anything like that song. It's rather unique. And the
| lyrics seems to make no sense anyways. Everything about that
| song is an enigma to me.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ... there is almost nothing more satisfying than having an
| unidentified song stuck in your head and then after
| hours/days/years figuring out what it is
|
| I had a song in my head and I'd whistle it at parties / dinners
| etc. for _years_ before someone was able to tell me what it
| was.
|
| The person couldn't tell me the name but told me something
| like: _" It's a very old folkloric song but I don't know it's
| name"_. And with that description and, well, the nascent
| Youtube I've been able to find its name (not even sure that was
| even Google back then).
|
| But what's funny: _everybody_ knew it when I 'd whistle it.
| Everybody had heard it, but nobody could tell me what it was.
|
| Turns out it was "Greensleeves" which is really famous.
| Wikipedia link which has a link to the tune:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensleeves
|
| Besides that anecdote last one I had in my head and couldn't
| tell, but which I found after a few hours, was this one:
|
| https://youtu.be/nLT1-5laF0A
|
| When I've got one and can't tell, I record me whistling it and
| sent it to friends/family and asks who knows what it is.
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| I used https://www.midomi.com/ a long time ago. Never got it to
| quite work though
| hoten wrote:
| Just tried on my pixel device. Can't say it worked. You hit the
| assistant thing, say what song is this, then hum as it prompts
| you. Then stop humming, but it never seems to finish the query.
| You tap the flat sound wave thing, and it takes that as a
| cancellation. Shrug.
| Jowsey wrote:
| This has always been my experience too, never had it work
| standardUser wrote:
| I had the song Low by Flo Rida stuck in my head. I made an audio
| recording of me humming and sent it to a bunch of friends, all of
| whom know a lot more about popular music than I do. No one could
| figure it out.
|
| And neither could Google.
| kfichter wrote:
| I'd be interested in hearing this recording if you're willing
| to share it
| standardUser wrote:
| It is truly embarrassing (and not super easy to share). For
| what it's worth, I tried it a few more time humming more of
| the song (parts I couldn't remember originally), but still no
| luck.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Ten or fifteen years ago, I sang the old Hindi classic "Kisi Ki
| Muskarahaton Pe" (not particularly well) into Midomi, and it
| nailed it immediately. One of the most delightful tech
| experiences I've ever had, comparable to my experience with
| ChatGPT. Today's Google search first suggests a medley (which
| presumably contains the song), and then a related song, and only
| the third option is correct. I also had to try twice.
| colund wrote:
| SoundHound has had this for ages
| antihipocrat wrote:
| I remember using a feature like this on Google Play Music ~7
| years ago. It worked quite well
| satvikpendem wrote:
| How well does this do against Shazam?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Shazam doesn't work if you just hum the song so I guess
| infinately
| wenc wrote:
| This is way way better than Shazam. I just tried it. I hummed a
| song to Shazam and nothing but Google found it in one shot.
| pg_bot wrote:
| I've never been able to get this feature to work on iOS.
| ulrischa wrote:
| I tested it with German child songs and the results were very
| bad.
| ACV001 wrote:
| I tried it and it didn't work.
| steppi wrote:
| Very 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'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.
| parasti wrote:
| A completely opposite experience. Been using it for years, and
| (when it doesn't lag) it gets the right match almost every
| time.
| steppi wrote:
| I think even timbre matters. I got a 95% match singing the
| first verse of Smells Like Teen Spirit using vocal fry to add
| some rasp, but couldn't get over 80% singing in an unaffected
| soft head voice, though I got a 79% match for a cover by Malia
| J which wasn't even originally in the results. Maybe I
| unconsciously matched the melody more closely when trying to do
| my best Kurt impression?
|
| I just tried it belting from my chest voice like Michael
| McDonald and only matched covers; the best match only 33%. None
| of them sounded like Michael McDonald.
| vitaflo wrote:
| This seems to have been removed in the most recent Google app.
| Typical Google.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| standeven wrote:
| I just downloaded the Google app for iOS and this feature was
| missing until I force-closed and reopened it. Then it
| appeared.
| anon_cow1111 wrote:
| _Back in my day, we had to hum the song in a youtube video and
| wait for google to flag it with a copyright strike against our
| account!_
| cellis wrote:
| Tried it with a childhood song/tune that I might have heard at 8
| or 9 ( maybe 10 or 11) that is otherwise forever lost to history
| for me and while it did find matches, they weren't the song.
| bogwog wrote:
| Does anyone remember SongTapper? It was the same idea, except
| you'd tap your spacebar instead of humming the song.
| _ink_ wrote:
| Yeah! Worked surprisingly well.
| amanzi wrote:
| I hummed an obscure Zulu song we used to sing as kids and it
| found a recording of the song on YouTube. Pretty amazing.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| I just tried this on my Pixel. I tried humming the synth part to
| Just What I Needed. It was stuck on "still working" for a whole
| minute because it couldn't distinguish my humming from the faint
| background noise outside my apartment. After trying 3 times I
| just gave up.
| yterdy wrote:
| As with most Google Search features, it seems to have been
| degraded/nerfed over the years (as has competitor Shazam). I'm
| starting to think it's purposeful and on account of limited
| compute: devote a lot on launch to convince people of its
| quality, then gradually lower resources devoted to it. As long as
| 90% of searches - the ones for the most popular songs - work, the
| complaints from the subset of the 10% that don't won't rise to
| the level of requiring attention.
| Lucasoato wrote:
| This is so nice, if only it worked it would be even better.
| d--b wrote:
| Midomi has been doing this since 2005.
| bitwize wrote:
| SoundHound has had this feature for yonks. I remember humming the
| Portal ending song to it in like 2012 and getting correct hits.
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(page generated 2023-11-11 23:00 UTC)