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Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

SoundHound came out with this feature in their iPhone app in 2008. It worked well in my experience. It’s amazing how quick we are to go ooo ahhh when big tech replicates what is already common place in little tech or academia.

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I remember that, and I remember playing a game with my girlfriend at the time where we tried to get it to recognize any song we hummed. We had an in-joke where Smooth Operator was literally the only song we could get it to recognize.

This isn't just "big tech replicating a commonplace feature", it's big tech implementing it at all where little tech could not.

This is a common fetishization on HN, but HNers forget that execution is all that really matters. Little tech demos do not. Though we on HN act like tech demos are the hardest part.

I don't know how it was back then, but I used SoundHound recently to hum Bizet's March of the Toreadors and it worked on the first try.

SoundHound is definitely not a tech demo.

> This isn't just "big tech replicating a commonplace feature", it's big tech implementing it at all where little tech could not.

Well I guess our experiences were quite different then. I was able to get SoundHound to recognize the vast majority of the tunes I hummed for it back in 2008/2009. And I used it a lot. I did only choose popular songs though. It's not surprising IMHO that a company 12 years later with much greater resources could extend recognition to a much larger variety of songs. So I wouldn't call it "little tech could not."

I think you are underestimating how popular Soundhound was (or overestimating how popular Google's version is). I bought my first smartphone just because I was blown away by Soundhound app. I was going to upgrade a year later but apps like SoundHound sealed the deal for me

My wife and I had a real wow moment with Shazam after we’d taken a trip to Germany and she’d heard some music played on a carousel at a park. She had a video of the carousel running and we played it to Shazam. In about 20 Seconds we were listen to a very similar recording of “Sie will nicht blumen und nicht schokolade” (She doesn’t want flowers or chocolate). It was a really awesome moment of technology working for us.

Song: https://youtu.be/eHwCraFXx90

Wow, nice find! I'm glad I scrolled through the YouTube comments a bit to see this note on the background of the recording in wartime Berlin:

"Recorded in Berlin, June 17, 1941. This was based on an old Yiddish song 'Yossel, Yossel' (by Nellie Casman) which Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin later retitled 'Joseph, Joseph.' Wonder if the censors realized this."

I seem to remember that they even had an option to play back recordings of other users who hummed the same song you were humming. Of course it was a privacy minefield, so that feature was discontinued pretty quickly. But it was hilarious while it lasted, hearing e.g. a Japanese granny croon Madonna.

I remember that feature. Out of my, like 20 to 30 tries, it literally worked only once. I told about that feature to my friends too but they said that it wasn't working either.

So it was really not working at an acceptable level, or both me and my friends are terrible hummers.

I worked there from 2012 for 5 years. The query by humming was pretty amazing to me which is why I joined. And I'm pretty terrible at humming... Unfortunately though the database wasn't as extensive as the direct music match database. Perhaps you were trying songs that weren't included?

Fun anecdote: I witnessed one user sing a song into SH so pitch perfect that (from the results) it had made a direct music match!

We often heard that Google were attempting to replicate this technology. They even hired key employees involved in this part of the app. Still we maintained that particular technical moat for 12 years!

I'm pretty sure it's been a great experience for a system like that!

Maybe I was humming something not included in the humming database then (I didn't know they were separate), or maybe, I'm just bad at humming :)

That was my first thought too. SoundHound worked 90% of the time for me, very impressive for the day IMO. Too bad it was fairly short-lived - I think they removed that functionality within a year or two. It's nice to have the ability to search like this again.

Huh? SoundHound still works, I have it installed on my phone.

Shazam was decent too if you hum a song iirc

Recently getting on a tirade about how utterly pointless the comment "Linux had this first!" "Android had this first!" "Lisp had this first!" is. It's just as bad when it's "iPhone had this first!".

So what?

> It’s amazing how quick we are to go ooo ahhh when big tech replicates what is already common place in little tech or academia.

Translation: "You're dumb for liking this thing I had years ago". What an empty comment.

I don't have an Android and never heard of SoundHound, and I'm quick to go "ooo ahhh" because last weekend my mom was humming a song she didn't know the name or words of, and next time I talk to her I can tell her to try song humming on OK Google, and her phone now does this by default, and if it works I'm predicting she will tell some of her friends or sisters as well.

perhaps I should make sure to remind her that she shouldn't be impressed if it works, because a thing she would never have paid that much for, didn't care about and never owned, could do it years ago, would that help?

> Translation: "You're dumb for liking this thing I had years ago". What an empty comment.

That’s just your extremely uncharitable and incorrect insinuation of my comment. What I was saying was not about the user’s reaction to the feature but instead about the admiration of the company. It’s not impressive if Ford uses a wheel on their car because a wheel is old technology that others have already done well.

When you say “we” are too quick to X, but you personally are not Xing, then it is saying “you are too quick to X”.

Is it not impressive that Ford model T became the mass-market car recognisable a hundred years later, because “we’re too quick to ooh and ahh other companies have used wheels before”?

Look at the people in this comments thread saying it made their morning and they found songs from childhood and they’ve been experimenting with foreign songs, and I ask again, what does “I’m not impressed it’s been done before” add? Why do you think that’s a good, useful, comment? so what if it’s been done before?

When the Model T came out, people weren't impressed by the wheel, they were impressed by the low cost of a well-working automobile. I don't think you understand my analogy.

If another company had come out with a low cost well-working automobile 12 years before Ford, then people should not be as impressed by Ford. That's my point.

Why shouldn't they, why is that your point? If an uncharitable read of your comment is that you are mocking people and trying to gain hipster points by knowing about it before it was popular, then maybe a charitable read is that "we are too quick" is a warning of some hazard or danger that happens if we ooh and aahh about things too quickly which (in some way) objectively haven't earned it, by not being first, and that being first is in some way a majorly important criterion. If so, what is it that you are warning about?

What exactly is your problem with people being excited or impressed by something that was done before, which makes it worth a comment?

> Why shouldn't they, why is that your point? If an uncharitable read of your comment is that you are mocking people and trying to gain hipster points by knowing about it before it was popular, then maybe a charitable read is that "we are too quick" is a warning of some hazard or danger that happens if we ooh and aahh about things too quickly which (in some way) objectively haven't earned it, by not being first, and that being first is in some way a majorly important criterion. If so, what is it that you are warning about?

Again, you are completely misinterpreting my comment. Google is a trillion dollar company. It's not impressive that they recreated something a startup was doing 12 years ago.

> What exactly is your problem with people being excited or impressed by something that was done before, which makes it worth a comment?

For the third time, I'm not saying people shouldn't think the feature is cool. They should just IMHO not be heaping praise on Google for it since it's old tech, and perhaps the scrappy startup that did it first a long time ago deserves more of the credit.

Who is “heaping praise on google” here?

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