I just used YouTube Music’s “hum to search” and it blew my mind

This week, I went to a place that many of you would not even understand. The dog owners out there will get it, though, as the place I’m referring to was a dog bar in Louisville KY called PG&J Dog Park Bar. It’s a place to have a drink, chill out, and let your dog run free in a dog-first area that our furry friends all tend to really enjoy.

On this day, the windows and bay doors were all open, it was a tad bit hot, and all the fans were going. Add to that noise some music, random chatter of about 30 guests, and lots of dog sounds on the top and you can quickly imagine the scenario I found myself in.

I give you all of that setup so you understand not only how loud it was, but also how many conflicting sounds were happening all at once around me. And it was in this precise scenario that I overheard a song I’d never come across over the speakers and wondered to myself, “Is that the Goo Goo Dolls?”

“Hum to search” magic

I couldn’t make out any words and could only pick up on the general melody in the chorus, but I tried to let my phone listen anyway using the general Google Search approach; however, the surroundings were simply too raucous for anything to be picked up. So, in a last-ditch effort, I opened YouTube Music and clicked on the new “hum to search” feature I’d heard about lately, and gave it a go.

I had picked up on about 6 notes of the chorus melody and as I sang/hummed that tune into my phone at close range, I figured there was no way it would work. And then, much to my surprise, a result came back. And it was a Goo Goo Dolls song called “Come to Me” off of an album called “Magnetic” that was released all the way back in 2013.

Suffice to say, I was blown away by this. The accuracy with so little melodic detail on a relatively obscure track was pretty amazing, but the ability to then add this to my library to listen to later when I could actually hear it was the simple and convenient icing on the cake. While not the first app to do this sort of thing by a long mile, I have to say I was very, very impressed.

Likely, this is the same music recognition engine that Google uses in its core search, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the next time I want to identify a song, I’ll likely reach for YouTube Music, and then if I like the song, I’ll add it to my library from there. It makes me more likely to go back to YouTube Music more often, and since this all went down the other day, I’ve been pulling up YouTube Music in the office over Spotify most days without even thinking about it. So, in some ways, the addition of “hum to search” is definitely doing its job.