No more unfamiliar catchy tunes: From now on, songs should also be recognizable by singing, whistling or humming on the smartphone

The streaming service Deezer has announced and launched a new function in its app: since September 27, it should be possible with the so-called “Song Catcher”, To let songs be recognized not only by temporary recordings, for example when they are on the radio – but also by your own singing or the humming of the melody. A theoretically very practical function if you just can’t remember where this damn catchy tune comes from. If it works properly in practice. since dThe extension of theSong Catcher function is still new, it can be assumed that the more users use it, the better and more accurate it will become through training the algorithm. In any case, only songs from the Deezer catalog can be recognized. According to the current status, that is over 90 million.

In a first short test, we whistled at Stevie Wonder’s app “I Just Called To Say I Love You” – without any result. After buzzing, it was said the song “might” be Ezio Bosso’s “Unconditioned, Following A Bird ‘Out Of The Room'”. After the audition, SongCatcher recognized the intended original. It was similar with “Coco Jamboo” by Mr. President: no result after totals, the correct one after audition. And Deezer mistook John Lennon’s “Imagine” for “Music” by Madonna. But after a vocal interlude, the intended song was also recognized here.

This subjective and non-representative self-test would not necessarily suit Deezer if most users felt the same way: In a representative survey with the market research institute YouGov, they claim to have found out that sums are the most popular way for Germans (27 percent) to ” tell them a song they’re looking for.”

The previous “Song Catcher” function in the app is not new. It adapts for Deezer what apps like Shazam previously offered exclusively: automatic detection of music playing by comparing it to databases in a matter of seconds. Added later was the feature of being able to enter original lines of text to search for songs. This in turn was of course also possible with search engines or websites such as Genius – with Deezer you can also listen to the result directly.

The new feature of identifying songs by buzzing or whistling is also not offered exclusively by Deezer: As is so often the case, Google was faster with its own app – and presumably also more accurate due to the amount of data available to the company. However, we have not checked this.

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