TikTok is taking on Shazam and YouTube Music with a new feature that lets you discover sounds by singing, humming or playing.
TikTok is introducing Sound Search as a new feature to compete with Shazam and YouTube Music, allowing users to search for sounds by singing, humming, or playing. The feature is currently only available to users in some regions, but it does indeed seem to help users find the currently popular sound clips trending on TikTok.
TechCrunch reports that the feature is similar to YouTube Music’s song discovery tool, which lets you find songs by singing, humming, or playing them. Shazam is the better-known song recognition tool, but it’s not actually as powerful as YouTube Music or TikTok’s new Sound Search. Shazam only recognizes actual songs when you play them, not when you sing or hum them.
Taking it a step further, TikTok’s sound search is designed not just to find songs, but also to show videos that songs are featured in. TechCrunch’s testing suggests that the more popular a song or sound is on the app, the more likely the tool is to recognize it.
As such, the tool can be hit or miss when it comes to finding songs or sounds that aren’t used in many popular TikTok videos. TikTok told TechCrunch that the tool is designed to find songs, not sounds specific to TikTok, but in testing, the tool seems to have no trouble finding currently popular sound clips and memes on the platform.
Users who have access to this feature can do so by going to the app’s search bar, clicking on the microphone icon and selecting “Sound Search.”
For those who already use TikTok as a search engine, the new tool further strengthens the platform’s search capabilities, especially with the emphasis on sound and music throughout TikTok. The feature replaces the existing way of searching for specific songs on TikTok, which was significantly less intuitive.
It’s unclear at this time when TikTok plans to release Sound Search to all users, but the tool’s success so far suggests that a wider rollout is certainly planned.