My humming just went from annoying to useful.
YouTube Music has launched a new way to search for songs on its Android app for those struggling over lyrics or titles. Just hum, whistle, sing, or play a recording of the tune and the app will find it for you to listen to or add to your playlist.
How Humming Search Works
To use the new feature, just follow these steps:
- On your YouTube Music app home page, tap the search icon.
- Then, click on the waveform icon located next to the microphone icon beside the search bar.
- Once tapped, the app will prompt you to play, sing, or hum a song. Just do so until it shows the best-suited songs. There’s no restriction on which part of the song you should sing so feel free to play around with it.
- Finally, you can choose which song to listen to or save the results to your music library.
Accuracy and Speed: A Potential Shazam Rival
I tested YouTube Music’s humming search, and the results were quite impressive. More often than not, YouTube Music’s humming search found songs with good speed and precision.
In fact, it seems to work faster than the similar capability that has been available on Google Assistant for years.
My first attempt was the classic “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel.
Now, I’ll admit my singing skills are, well, lacking. I likely messed up the melody and key. Even so, the app managed to recognize the song before I could finish humming the famous chorus.
Though, it did show the electric version, so it’s unclear how it picks which version to suggest.
That level of quickness and accuracy was consistent across most of my tests, making this feature an extremely handy tool for song discovery. Of course, there were a few misses, like when I tried “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin or “Wasted Time” by the Eagles.
But let’s be honest, the hits far outnumbered the misses.
The quick results, combined with the seamless integration within the YouTube Music app, make it a potentially preferable choice over Shazam, as it requires fewer clicks to find and play the desired track.
Limitations and Areas for Improvement
As impressive as YouTube Music’s humming search is, it’s not perfect.
For one, the feature seems to struggle when tasked with finding instrumentals or classical pieces like Claude Debussy’s “Reverie.” In those cases, it either provided very inaccurate suggestions or flat-out asked me to try again.
Another small issue: the app currently doesn’t confirm when a found track has been added to one of your playlists, which is a feature that’s included with regular searches.
It would also be nice if the app kept a dedicated audio search history, as hummed searches don’t get logged alongside your typed queries at the moment.
Oh, and while glimpses of the humming search ability have been spotted on the iOS version of YouTube Music recently, it hasn’t officially rolled out widely for Apple users yet.
Still, YouTube Music’s “hum to search” is an impressive new way that makes music discovery more accessible and enjoyable than before. As someone constantly stuck with a tune in my head but no clue what it’s called, I’m absolutely loving this fresh feature.