TikTok is looking to take on YouTube Music and Shazam with a new feature called “Sound Search,” which lets you find 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 offers another way to find what you’re looking for on the app. On a platform where song-based trends change rapidly, the tool could also help you find 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 famous song recognition tool, these new features from TikTok and YouTube Music go beyond what’s possible on Shazam because they let you identify songs by humming or singing them, whereas Shazam only works if you play the actual song.
And while Shazam and YouTube Music can help you find the name of songs, TikTok’s tool isn’t just designed to find songs, but to also show you videos that use them.
From my testing, I found that the more popular a song seems to be on the app, the more likely the tool is able to recognize it. For example, when I hummed Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” the tool recognized it quickly and then showed me popular videos that feature the 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 immediately.
The tool does seem to be a bit glitchy when it comes to songs that aren’t used as sounds in many popular videos. While the tool was able to detect that Hilary Duff’s song “Fly” was called “Fly,” it didn’t show me any videos featuring the song and instead showed me generic results for the term “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, and not TikTok-specific sounds. However, in our testing we found that the tool was able to detect TikTok sounds/memes like the popular “Oh my gosh, she’s bald. She’s bald, and she’s torturing people who have hair!” sound lifted from an episode of “Totally Spies” and the “Nobody’s gonna know” sound created by a TikTok user.
If you have access to the feature, you can navigate to it by going to your search bar in the app, clicking the microphone icon and then selecting “Sound Search.”
Many people already use TikTok as a search engine, and this latest feature enhances the app’s search capabilities even more. The next time you have a song stuck in your head or hear a good tune out in the wild, TikTok is hoping you will go to 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 lead to chart-topping songs for artists. Given the significance of sounds on TikTok, it’s no surprise that the company is rolling out a way to boost the discovery of songs on its platform while also cutting into Shazam and YouTube Music’s territory.
It’s unknown when TikTok plans to release the feature to all users.