Ever had a song stuck in your head, but haven’t been able to identify it? Of course you have. It could be a hook or a lyric snippet you’re thinking about, but you just can’t name the song or the artist. This common predicament can lead to hours or even days of frustration, with the answer always just out of reach as the cogs in your brain whirr and grind.
Well, tech is here to help: The song recognition tools that have been developed over recent years are able to match up patterns of music and lyrics. You might be surprised at the quality of the results that turn up with very little information.
A lot of the tools we’re covering here do dual duty—they can recognize songs that you hum or sing part of, and they can also name tracks if the official recordings are being played within range. We’re focusing on the first job here, but you might find the other music recognition features useful too.
Google Assistant and Siri
You can load up your favorite digital assistant on your phone or tablet and have it try and identify a song for you. Just load up Google Assistant or Siri, ask “What’s this song?” and try singing or humming a part of it, or saying some of the lyrics.
Google Assistant or Siri will then do their best to find a match. In our testing, Google Assistant is more adept at identifying songs from fragments, whereas Siri tends to need a lyric line or two. Of course part of the success rate is going to be down to the quality of your singing or humming.
Both these digital assistants do well at music identification when you’ve actually got the song itself playing—though most of the time that you’re playing a track, you’ll know what it is, unless it’s in the background of a film or show, or it’s being played in public.
Shazam and SoundHound
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