TikTok is trying to take on YouTube Music and Shazam with its new feature “Sound Search,” which lets you search for a sound by singing, humming, or playing it. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature is available to some users in select regions and is not yet widely available.
Sound Search provides another way to find what you’re looking for on the app. On a platform where song-based trends change quickly, this tool can also help you discover and better understand current trends.
Sound search on TikTok is somewhat similar to YouTube Music’s song detection tool that lets you find the name of a song by singing, humming, or playing it. While Shazam is arguably the most popular song recognition tool, these new features on TikTok and YouTube Music go beyond what’s available on Shazam as they let you identify songs by humming or singing, while Shazam only works when you play the actual song.
And while Shazam and YouTube Music can help you find song names, TikTok’s tool is designed to not only find songs, but also show you the videos they’re used in.
From my testing, I found that the more popular a song seems to be on the app, the more likely the tool is to recognize it. For example, when I hummed Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” the tool recognized it immediately and then showed me popular videos that included that song or a remix of it. And when I sang the popular “Oh no oh no oh no no no” sound, the tool recognized it almost instantly.
The tool seems to be a bit glitchy when it comes to songs that aren’t used as the soundtrack in many popular videos. While the tool was able to figure out that Hilary Duff’s song “Fly” is called “Fly,” it didn’t show me any videos containing this song and instead showed me generic results for the word “fly.” And when I played One Direction’s “Magic,” it did the same thing.
TikTok told TechCrunch that the tool is designed to find songs, not TikTok-specific sounds. However, in our testing we found that the tool was able to recognize TikTok sounds/memes, such as the popular “Oh my gosh, she’s bald. She’s bald, and she’s torturing people who have hair!” sound taken 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 your search bar in the app, clicking the microphone icon, and then selecting “Voice Search.”
Many people already use TikTok as a search engine, and this latest feature makes the app’s search capabilities even better. The next time you get a song stuck in your head or you hear a great tune in the woods, TikTok hopes you’ll visit its app instead of YouTube Music or Shazam or even Google.
Sounds are an integral part of TikTok: they’re what drive trends and in some cases create chart-topping songs for artists. Given the importance of sounds on TikTok, it’s no surprise that the company is introducing a way to boost discovery of songs on its platform, as well as entering the territory of Shazam and YouTube Music.
It is unknown when TikTok plans to release this feature to all users.
