Google now lets users search for a song by singing, humming and whistling

An update released by Google today (October 16) allows users to search for a song by merely singing, humming or whistling the melody.

Announced at Google’s Search On event, and effective from today, users will now be able to search for a song without knowing its title or even the lyrics.

Users can access the ‘Hum To Search’ feature by opening the ‘Google Search’ app or using the Google Search Widget. Once you tap on the microphone icon, you can ask “what’s this song?” or click the ‘Search a song’ button.

Additionally, if using Google Assistant, users can ask “Hey Google, what’s this song?”.

From there, users will have a 10 – 15 second window to hum, whistle or sing the melody of a song they’re thinking of, and Google will deliver a variety of matches, beginning with the highest per cent match.

“An easy way to explain it is that a song’s melody is like its fingerprint: They each have their own unique identity,” a post on The Google Blog says.

“We’ve built machine learning models that can match your hum, whistle or singing to the right ‘fingerprint’.”

“When you hum a melody into Search, our machine learning models transform the audio into a number-based sequence representing the song’s melody, models are trained to identify songs based on a variety of sources, including humans singing, whistling or humming, as well as studio recordings,” the post continues.

“The algorithms also take away all the other details, like accompanying instruments and the voice’s timbre and tone. What we’re left with is the song’s number-based sequence, or the fingerprint.”

The feature is currently available on both iOS and Android, with the latter providing the feature in over 20 different languages.

:story: NME