Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)

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155 pointsseanvelasco93 comments

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.

I just tried it. You have to hum until it says stop. It keeps prompting you to keep going

I've had this same issue with SoundHound, as they've advertised this same feature for a while now. The problem is, sometimes I only have half of the chorus stuck in my head and I want to hear the rest but I don't remember it.

I just tried it with a guitar driven song I've had stuck in my head lately. I only remember about 5 seconds of the chorus, but it's what I would consider a fairly memorable and catchy hook.

This has always been my experience too, never had it work

Holy crap! "Brahms - Piano trio No 1 in B major" FINALLY. That's been more than half a year in my head, and me failing to figure out how to search for it.

Proud of myself I nailed the key. Does this song have some romance story behind it? Probably just my brain confusing nearby neurons.

Extraordinarily frustrating that it needs a mobile device (as opposed to, say, even Chrome only).

Still, thanks internet. Now I'm back to a 100% success ratio (lifetime) of "if I get a song stuck in my head I will dig until I know its name".

For a lot of classical music, you can get very good results just using the Parsons code (sometimes called melodic contour): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code

Worth a shot if hum to search doesn't work!

Thanks for this! I'm... embarrassed not to have heard of this before.

Sure enough, I typed "*UUUUDDDDUDRUUUUDDDUDDDUDD" into musipedia.org and BOOM. Result!

People who aren't pitch perfect will rarely sing a song it its original key, so Google likely handle that.

While I imagine Google probably does handle transpositions, people do tend to remember the pitch of a song, even if they don't have perfect pitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch#Pitch_memory_re...

> While very few people have the ability to name a pitch with no external reference, pitch memory can be activated by repeated exposure. People who are not skilled singers will often sing popular songs in the correct key, and can usually recognize when TV themes have been shifted into the wrong key.

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.

You’re gonna love this: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx

What's actually crazy is how relatively non-"lost" it really was. Once you know what it's called you can go find it on Amazon, and there's reviews from 2000 still just sitting there; it's probably been on sale this whole time. Someone put it up on YouTube in 2010.

It's funny how something can be so available and yet inaccessible at the same time. Reminds me a little of Borges' Library of Babel: what you want is there, but what does it matter if you can't find it?

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.

What I believe to be the greatest podcast episode of all time.

It’s one of the greats for sure.

Here’s another contender: https://archive.org/details/The.Dollop.Ep15.Ten.Cent.Beer.Ni...

Caution: I have almost crashed a car on more than one occasion from laughing so hard!

The ending ruins it for me. The fun mystical journey was actually just a distraction from walled gardens ruining the web.

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!

Not music, but in the late 90s or maybe early 2000s there was an anti-smoking PSA involving an old man encouraging a baby to take its first steps. After much encouragement, the baby starts walking, walks over to the old man, and passes right through him as he fades into partial transparency.

The message then rolls that you shouldn't smoke because your early death will deprive you of important moments like this one.

This PSA made far more of an impression than most do -- for example, it's mentioned on Friends -- and I think about it often as an example of how the same basic argument can be made in weak or strong terms. It may have been too strong for its own good; I once asked a friend for help finding a video of it and the response was "Oh, I know exactly the commercial you're talking about. I won't help you look for it; I hate that commercial and I don't want to see it again."

I never was able to find it.

Here's a commercial with that jingle at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M76ABmdbkTI

Wow! The last time I looked was more than 2 years ago, so this video was uploaded since then. Thanks for posting. I don't recall the vocal being a choral group, but rather a very masculine solo voice, but it's definitely the same jingle.

I remember it the same way you do. Maybe they had multiple versions of it?

That was a terrible commercial. But I did enjoy the teacher pulling her glasses down to check out that HOT math at the end.

A shame that Reply All is no more but it had a great run while it lasted.

Underunderstood was what I filled that gap with

That... is almost a Rick and Morty episode. Like one of those alien sidekick parasites took the form of a song instead.

What a story! Thanks for posting.

That was great, thanks

That song, which is such a great/weird one-hit wonder, has flummoxed so many people! I worked at a record store in high school in the early 2000s and people would come in all the time humming or attempting to sing various songs. I got freakishly good at identifying even the hardest/weirdest tracks. I used to keep a playlist on my iPod of the weirdest tracks, which sadly has been lost to time.

Over the last 20 years, that skill has ebbed some, but I still get friends sending me their attempts to express the earworm stuck in their ear. I have an 80% success rate and enough OCD to usually track it down unless someone just gets stuff straight wrong.

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.

> ... 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.

Hah, I had Greensleeves in my head since I was a kid with a digital watch that could play that song and some others. I had the feeling that I had heard it before that somehow. Many years later I suddenly hear that one somewhere and since then it's properly stuck in my head. Now I use it to get other songs un-stuck. Works wonders :-)

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

Throughout my young adulthood I enjoyed hunting down the games I played as a kid on Windows in the late 90s.

List of childhood DOS games:

- Descent

- Tyrian

- X Wing vs. Tie-Fighter

- Jazz the Jackrabbit

- Super Solvers

- Sim Theme Park

- Let’s Explore the Airport

- The Lie

- Are you Afraid of the Dark

- Lego Creator

- Lego Loco

- CartoonNetwork.com shockwave games

- Lego.com shockwave games

- A slew of shockwave games from now defunct websites that you can find on flashpoint (penack silat, area flat, etc.)

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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)

Does anyone remember SongTapper? It was the same idea, except you'd tap your spacebar instead of humming the song.

Yeah! Worked surprisingly well.

This seems to have been removed in the most recent Google app. Typical Google.

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.

I just downloaded the Google app for iOS and this feature was missing until I force-closed and reopened it. Then it appeared.

I’m his worked for me as well. Otherwise it would just do a Google search for “what’s this song” which was very frustrating. At least the song came up, even though it was in Spanish which I didn’t know whether it was used to train the models/input they use before trying.

Works for me: click microphone icon in search field, then click "Search for a song" in the bottom.

I just did it on my android phone. It couldn't figure out the song though. It did try.

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.

I'd be interested in hearing this recording if you're willing to share it

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.

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.

Record your humming. Post it online. Ask the sub-reddit someone mentioned (tipofmytongue). Don't lose it to history. Have managed to recover a few songs from my childhood this way. Like someone else mentioned, it's one of the most satisfying things.

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.

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.

A completely opposite experience. Been using it for years, and (when it doesn't lag) it gets the right match almost every time.

Might be trained on bad hummers.

This is really useful. This announcement is from 2020, but still not well known for some reason

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.

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.

I’ve seen adverts for it on YouTube in the past

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.

I hummed an obscure Zulu song we used to sing as kids and it found a recording of the song on YouTube. Pretty amazing.

For anyone struggling with a song (or a movie, or a TV show, or whatever) that they can't remember, r/tipofmytongue on Reddit is a great resource.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

I use it quite often. I am bilingual and I have tried it with very old Chinese songs - it works.

Way back in the days, someone on IRC mentioned they'd had a song stuck in their head for days and they just couldn't figure out what the song was. I asked them how it went, and he replied something along the lines of

  da da daada da da daada, da da daada da da daaadaa

After thinking about it for a few seconds I wrote the name of the song and the artist[1] and he replied THATS IT!

Not sure how many other songs it would work with but that one was kinda easy to be fair.

[1]: https://www.discogs.com/master/449592

Just tested it. I hummed 'Frère Jacques, frère Jacques Dormez-vous ?', a common nursery rhyme in english-speaking UK, despite being french and not many people here speak French well.

However, Google gave me 3 results, none of which were in either English or French. They were Spanish and Italian (I think!), and both had the correct tune, but weren't what I was looking for.

I wonder if the search engine could better handle this case by recognising cases where lots of songs use the same tune, and showing results for the ones which are most popular in the region the searcher is searching from?

I had to uninstall/reinstall on iOS, but then the song search became visible. It helped me track down this ballad our school jazz band played back in high school. I searched fruitlessly every few years or so through playlists of ballads, and one time six or so years ago I recorded me playing it on Alto Sax and posted it to Reddit, but no luck for nearly two decades, til now, so thanks!

Here’s the song for the curious: https://youtu.be/wcAkEl6AV5Y?si=CI93V_Kp_ve_lGWG

I used https://www.midomi.com/ a long time ago. Never got it to quite work though

Songs get stuck in your head because you can’t remember the ending, e.g.

I’m a Barbie Gi-

To get a song out of your head, design an ending that resolves.

The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.

I hated you for making me earworm barbie girl but I gave it a strong orchestral resolution and it went away. Thanks for the tip!

You monster.

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!

Anybody ever played Cranium? Humans cannot name songs their friends are humming. Therefore, a true AI should also not be able to, or perhaps it's the singularity at the first moment they can...

Humming sounds much better to the hummer than the listener.

I always liked the anecdote that Mel Brooks couldn’t write music, so he hummed all the songs from “The Producers” into a tape recorder and those recordings formed the basis of all the arrangements.

I tested it with German child songs and the results were very bad.

I've never been able to get this feature to work on iOS.

Son can you play me a memory I’m not really sure how it goes But it’s sad and it’s sweet And I knew it complete When I wore a younger man’s clothes”

SoundHound has had this feature for yonks. I remember humming the Portal ending song to it in like 2012 and getting correct hits.

Related tangent: song stuck in your head (maybe you know what it is) and want it to go away? Finish it to the last note.

How well does this do against Shazam?

Shazam doesn’t work if you just hum the song so I guess infinately

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.

SoundHound has had this for ages

I remember using a feature like this on Google Play Music ~7 years ago. It worked quite well

This is so nice, if only it worked it would be even better.

I wonder if Google is just innovative and not invasive.

Midomi has been doing this since 2005.

I tried it and it didn't work.

Lama Jjsh Jdj

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.

The silent downvotes are funny, mere weeks after getting into it with HN commenters about how Google-related posts are astroturfed.

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