Photo Credit: Olivier Bergeron
TikTok takes on Shazam and YouTube Music with a new feature that allows you to find a sound by singing, humming, or playing it.
TikTok is rolling out a new feature to rival Shazam and YouTube Music with Sound Search, which allows users to find a sound by singing, humming, or playing it. Though the feature is only available now to some users in select regions, it looks like it can actually help users to find sound clips currently popular in TikTok trends.
TechCrunch reports the feature is similar to YouTube Music’s song detection tool, which lets you find the name of a song by singing, humming, or playing it. Shazam, although the more well-known song recognition tool, is actually not as robust as either YouTube Music’s or TikTok’s new Sound Search — it only recognizes when you play the actual song as opposed to singing or humming it.
Taking that a step further, TikTok’s Sound Search isn’t designed to only find songs, but to show you the videos that use them. From TechCrunch’s testing, it appears that the more popular a song or sound is on the app, the more likely it is that the tool will recognize it.
To that end, the tool seems a bit hit or miss when it comes to songs or sounds that aren’t used in many popular TikTok videos. TikTok tells TechCrunch that the tool is designed to find songs, not TikTok-specific sounds, yet testing reveals the tool seems to have no problem finding sound clips and memes currently popular on the platform.
Those with access to the feature can navigate to it by going to the app’s search bar, clicking the microphone icon, and selecting “Sound Search.”
For those who already use TikTok as a search engine, this new tool serves to beef up the platform’s search capabilities even further, especially with the importance of sounds and music on TikTok as a whole. The function replaces the existing method of searching for specific songs on TikTok, which was notably a lot less intuitive.
It’s currently unknown when TikTok intends to release Sound Search to all users, but the success of the tool thus far tells us its wide rollout is definitely in the pipeline.
