YouTube Music will let you search by humming into your Android phone

YouTube Music will let you search by humming into your Android phone

Tap the waveform icon, circled above, to search with sound. | Screenshots: YouTube Music

The Android YouTube Music app is rolling out a feature that’s part Shazam and part your friend when you say, “hey what’s that song that goes...” right before you hum out a bar. The feature lets you hum, whistle, sing, or play a recording of a song to figure out what it is.

If you have the new feature, you’ll see a new waveform icon next to the microphone icon that appears when you tap the search button in the upper right corner of the app. Tap this, and the app will start listening. It’s not too shabby, either! When I tested, it was able to identify actual recordings with what seemed like uncanny speed, making it a great replacement for Shazam.

As far as listening to me hum, it accurately picked out most of the songs I sang, whistled, and hummed at my phone, but there were some funny misses:

Screenshot: YouTube Music

To be fair, some Tom Waits songs make for good Halloween music.

This is not Tom Waits’ “Fumblin’ With the Blues.” Even a little bit.

Screenshot: YouTube Music

This song has a great string arrangement, though.

This was supposed to be “Dead,” by They Might Be Giants.

Screenshot: YouTube Music

Eh, I’ll take it.

I was whistling “Bat Out of Hell” by Meat Loaf here. At least Finnish hair metal throwback band Reckless Love is at least in the ballpark, kind of?

I can’t fault it too much for the misses. I was throwing songs at it that I’d guess most people wouldn’t pick out from a few seconds of humming. Overall, it works quickly, perhaps faster than the same feature that Google Assistant has had for years. Humming to search has reportedly been spotted in YouTube Music for iOS in recent months, too, though it doesn’t appear to have gone out widely there, yet.