TikTok is trying to take on YouTube Music and Shazam with a new feature called “Sound Search,” which lets users find sounds by singing, humming, or playing a song. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature is only available to some users in certain regions and isn't yet widely available.
Sound Search gives you another way to find what you're looking for on the app, and on a platform where song-based trends change quickly, the tool also helps you find and understand current trends better.
TikTok's sound search is similar to YouTube Music's song discovery tool, which lets you find songs by singing, humming, or playing them. Shazam is arguably the most well-known song recognition tool, but these new features on TikTok and YouTube Music go beyond what Shazam can do, because these new features let you identify songs by humming or singing, whereas Shazam only works if you play the actual song.
While Shazam and YouTube Music can help you find song titles, TikTok's tools are designed to not only find songs, but also show you videos in which the song is used.
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In my testing, I found that the more popular a song is in the app, the more likely the tool is to recognize it. For example, when I hummed Rihanna's “Umbrella,” the tool immediately recognized it and showed me popular videos featuring the song and its remixes. And when I sang the popular “oh no oh no oh no no no” tune, the tool recognized it almost instantly.
The tool seems to have a bit of a problem when it comes to songs that aren't used as soundtracks in many popular videos: The tool was able to detect that the Hilary Duff song “Fly” is called “Fly,” but it didn't show any videos that use the song, instead showing generic results for the term “fly.” It also had the same problem when playing One Direction's “Magic.”
TikTok told TechCrunch that the tool is designed to find songs, not sounds specific to TikTok, but in our testing, we found that the tool can detect TikTok sounds/memes, such as the popular “Oh my goodness, she's bald. She's bald and she tortures people with hair!” sound from an episode of “Totally Spies,” and the “Nobody Knows” sound created by a TikTok user.
If you have access to this feature, you can navigate to it by going to the search bar in the app, clicking on the microphone icon and selecting “Sound Search.”
Many people already use TikTok as a search engine, but this latest feature makes the app even more searchable: next time you get a song stuck in your head or hear a great tune outside, TikTok hopes you'll turn to the app instead of YouTube Music, Shazam, or even Google.
Sound is an essential part of TikTok — it drives trends and can even create hit songs for artists. Given the importance of sound to TikTok, it's no surprise that the company is developing ways to both increase discovery of songs on the platform and tap into the realm of Shazam and YouTube Music.
It's unclear when TikTok plans to release the feature to all its users.