Google has announced a feature that we have always wanted when we want to remember an earworm stuck in your heads.
The company has announced that they can now help you figure out that song stuck in your head without using lyrics, artist name or perfect pitch. All you have to do is hum for 10 to 15 seconds to find it.
You will need the latest version of the Google app to do this. To conduct the search, tap the mic icon and say “what’s this song” or “search a song” button then start humming for 10-15 seconds.
Google is banking on their always impressive machine learning technology to make this possible. They have machine learning models that can match your hum, whistle or singing to the right “fingerprint”, where the fingerprint is the song’s melody.
When you hum, their machine learning model transform the audio into a number based sequence representing the song’s melody. These models are trained to identify songs based on a variety of sources including humans singing, whistling or humming. The algorithms take away all the other details (accompanying instruments and voice’s timbre) and what is left is the song’s number based sequence, or fingerprint. They match the sequences to thousands of songs from around the world and identify potential matches.
Google says this feature will be available in English on iOS and in more than 20 languages on Android.
This is one of the ways Google shows its immense software capabilities as a company. Shazam is cool and all with searching songs by shoving your phone near a speaker, but identifying earworms is not its strong suit. Now if people are able to hum and Google is able to identify it, this will make our lives so much easier and will lead to more people using software to identify their favourite songs.
