How to Recognize Any Song Just by Singing It
Do you know this song. You know the chorus, the beat, that solo, even that crazy drumming. You know this song, but you have no idea what it’s called. It happens all the time: whether it’s a track you heard on the radio or a track a friend introduced to you years ago, you’ve got music stuck in your head that you can’t identify. Modern technology has solutions, but usually only if you have a real song on hand.
As it turns out, the Google app is your new best music friend. If you use this app, you may know that it is a one-stop shop for search, news, and other Google-related activities. However, perhaps the best feature that no one knows about is the ability to identify songs. Of course, you can use it just like Shazam or something similar: you can hold your phone to a song in your area and the Google app will analyze and identify it. But Google goes one step further: when you activate song search, it will listen to any type of music, including your own voice. This means that whether you know all the words or just a vague tune, you can sing or hum into the app to try and identify the song.
This works surprisingly well. For some reason, the first tune that came to my mind to try out was “Seven Nation Army” by Jack White. So, I gave it a hum. Wow, Google came up with the correct answer with a 63% match (I thought my buzz was more accurate). He was also able to identify Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down”, The Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” (although the MonaLisa Twins version seemed to match my singing better), and Weezer’s “Buddy Holly”.
I was introduced to this feature by TikTok creator Fentydrone, whose video showed the successful identification of Alanis Morissette’s “Hand In My Pocket” and Tracey Chapman’s “Fast Car”. It really works and it’s really cool.
Each result is assigned a percentage match based on your sample, and it seems to change for no particular reason (singing with the correct words, compared to humming the melody, didn’t seem to have a noticeable effect on the match). You also see other possible matches: while these additional matches are often covers of different versions of the same song, sometimes they are completely different tracks. It’s interesting to click on one of these options to see how similar or different they are to the song you were thinking of. This can be a good resource for finding inspiration for your favorite tunes or new songs that have clearly been inspired by your music.
To try it yourself, make sure you have the Google app installed on your iPhone or Android . Open the app, then tap the microphone icon in the search field. From here, tap “Find a Song”, then start singing.