How does Google Song Search guess the song from just humming?

Question

I am not the most musically inclined and I’ve been told my humming is very out of tune yet google somehow is always able to find the song I was thinking of. How does it work?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Its just matching the relative timing and pitch of notes. Imagine a barcode where the width of the bars of the length of the note, and the pitch is the color. The same song hummed will match the real song.