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Uhhrrr

I just tried this with a melody I've had stuck in my head for days - no results.

Then I tried "Happy Birthday" and got three results:

"Las Mananitas" by Canticos

"Iyi Ki Dogdun Melissa", by Eser Ulun

"Iyi Ki Dogdun Zarife", by Eser Ulun

I'm no Pavarotti, but I can sing on pitch and have played the violin for 40 years.

EDIT: Heh, "Iyi Ki Dogdun" is Turkish for Happy Birthday, and the links would have taken me to YouTube videos of the song sung in Turkish, then English. But why not to videos in English? YouTube has some, and I'm an Anglophone user in the USA.

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I'm not sure how you were doing it, but when I think of "hum", I think of making a noise with my mouth closed. I found opening my mouth and making a tone worked much better.

I'm not sure how many people think of hum the same way. I've noticed lately some words being used slightly differently than I am used to (the one coming to mind right now is "giggle" in a story that in context I would interpret as meaning "chuckle"), and at this point it's happening enough that I'm not sure if there's a shift in perception of these words or if I just always interpreted them more narrowly than they were intended.

Your interpretations of "hum", and "giggle" being different from "chuckle" (tee-hee vs heh heh), are the same as mine.

I tried using my mouth open and didn't get significantly different results, though.

Sorry, it's built for people who can't sing. You'll have to find a friend with a chalkboard voice.

That's probably it. I'm not a great singer, and I wanted to see if it could recognize my attempt at a challenging melody. It got "Everybody Wants You" by Billy Squier, first try.

My Turkish isn't great but, iyi ki dogdun translates to "good thing you were born" which always amused me. Happy birthday is more like "dogum gunun kutlu olsun" (something like, may your day of birth be celebrated). It's always fun to see how language gets worked with to fit a certain melody.

I think that, as of this moment, the tool does not take the user's current region into account. I know two songs that are very similar[0][1], but from vastly different regions, and I could easily get them both detected by this tool just by humming slightly differently.

[0] https://youtu.be/E8gmARGvPlI?t=17

[1] https://youtu.be/mSu5cz2GFts?t=43

"Las Mañanitas" is a traditional Mexican birthday song. "Cánticos" means just "chants".

Huh! So it is. But the couple versions I found started with a verse with a different melody before going to Happy Birthday.

Google probably based the suggestion on this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynnhJiGRcVo) which is actually a section from Las Mañanitas followed by Happy Birthday.

"Happy birthday" was the first thing I tried. Worked perfectly with a loud TV on in the background.

There was some nonsense about "Happy Birthday" being copyrighted.. maybe it's a holdover from that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Copyrigh...

I would have thought this system would work _mainly_ with copyrighted songs.

It was a big deal, but yeah regardless of how it used to be, that copyright has expired

I hummed it very roughly and got "Las Mañanitas" followed by "Happy Birthday to You."

What's the melody? Vocaroo it!

https://voca.ro/7Cx7OD3Vqc2

I'm pretty sure it's an instrument line, not vocal.

Hmm, doesn't ring a bell :(

Twin Peaks theme?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXrjMaVoTy0

I love that theme and it matches notes 2-4, but nope. I'm fairly sure it's an intro/outro/solo melody over a rock song.

I wonder, does it know how to transpose? People may end up humming tunes in different keys that their voices can more easily reach.

Also, why the hell do I need an app for this? Is it actually running a local model? Because my guess is that it's just hitting an API.

I wondered whether pitch might play a role. EDIT: singing in a higher key got me English results, so I guess so?

There's no way it would do much locally, but maybe they just wanted to make sure the audio passed to the API has a certain sample rate and encoding?

Very unlikely that they are considering the actual sung or hummed pitch as very few people, including professional musicians, would start singing at the correct pitch without accompaniment.

Most likely they are mapping the interval between the sung notes and using that as part of the ‘melodic fingerprint’ for matching.

I just tried "Hymn of the Fayth" and got none, despite the fact that there's a version of it that's literally just hummed.

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