Mar 05 2011

AppSpin: SoundHound

Hum a Few Bars and I’ll Fake It.

Is there a tune in your head that you just can’t name? A song on the radio you’d like to download to your iPhone? How about the music from a TV commercial that you’d like to identify.

The iPhone app Shazam has been around since the app store first opened. Turn it on, hold it up to a music source, and it will ‘fingerprint’ the tune, consult its online database, and let you know the song, singer and lyrics and also link to the iTunes store and YouTube videos for that song. Amazing.

The newer app SoundHound takes that a bit further. It does the Shazam thing for recorded music, but is also very good at identifying songs that you just hum or sing. Even when I hum and sing. It correctly identified Hey Jude and Piano Man immediately – that is probably because so many other bad singers have tried to match the same song. It struggled when I sang ‘Jeans On’, but today that song happenned to come over the loudspeaker at Officeworks and SoundHound was able to confirm that David Dundas was the artist.

SoundHound uses the enormous user-created database of songs at midomi.com. 

You can test out the service without the app by visiting that site.