It's happened to all of us: the tune of a song is stuck in our heads but we can't remember the lyrics to actually look for the track online. Thanks to Google, humanity will no longer have that problem.
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The search giant just introduced a new update that allows users to quite literally hum a song in order to find the track's name, artist, music video, other recordings of the song and even its lyrics. The feature is available on mobile and Google assistant devices: all you have to do is say "Hey Google, what's this song" and hum it for 10 to 15 second.
"When you hum a melody into Search, our machine learning models transform the audio into a number-based sequence representing the song’s melody," Google wrote in an official blog post announcing the update. "Our models are trained to identify songs based on a variety of sources, including humans singing, whistling or humming, as well as studio recordings. The algorithms also take away all the other details, like accompanying instruments and the voice's timbre and tone. What we're left with is the song's number-based sequence, or the fingerprint."
Just in case you didn't know, there's an actual name to the condition that Google is trying to cure. According to the Urban Dictionary, "ear worm" refers to a "song stuck in your head." It comes from the German word "ohrwurm," which literally translates to ear worm. Interesting, right?
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