The game
What is Guess the Song?
Guess the Song is a guess the song game: a music quiz with the question taken out. You hear part of a recording, and the only thing to answer is what it is.
People were trying to guess song titles from fragments long before the internet. The idea has been a radio giveaway, a television game show, the intros round of a pub quiz and a daily puzzle, and it goes by many names. People call it a song game, a song quiz, music trivia, guess that song or name that tune, but the challenge is always to name the track from a short clip. What changes from one version to the next is how much of the song you are given. Guess the Song gives you very little. Each round opens at 0.1 seconds, and you choose how much more to hear before you commit to a song guess.
That is the whole of Guess the Song: name the track from 0.1 seconds if you can, lengthen the clip if you cannot, and pick the title from the search list. A run is 5 songs, each stage harder than the one before, and runs are unlimited.
- where every clip starts
- 0.1s
- the longest a clip can run
- 30s
- points for naming a song at the shortest clip
- 10,000
A short history
From Name That Tune to Guess the Song: the clip keeps shrinking
Seventy years of the same contest, and the clip has only got shorter.
1948
Stop the Music
On ABC radio, Bert Parks telephones listeners picked at random while Harry Salter's orchestra plays a popular tune. Name it and win. The show becomes a national craze.
1952
Name That Tune
Salter turns the idea into a contest, on NBC radio in 1952 and on television from 1953. The first contestant to know the song runs across the stage to ring a bell, and the show hands out sneakers.
1996
The intros round
The BBC Two pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks makes the intros round a weekly fixture, forty years after Spot the Tune began on ITV.
2002
A machine learns the trick
Shazam launches in Britain: dial 2580, hold the phone up to the music and get the title by text. The first song it identified in testing was Jeepster by T. Rex. A year later its co-founder Avery Wang publishes how it works: the clip becomes a constellation of the loudest points in its spectrogram, and pairs of those points are looked up like words in an index.
2022
One song a day
Heardle arrives in February 2022: six tries at a song, each miss adding a few seconds. Spotify buys it that July and closes it on 5 May 2023.
Now
Guess the Song
A round of Guess the Song opens at 0.1 seconds and the length is in the player's hands: guess the song early for the most points, or buy more of it first. Where Heardle was one song a day, this is unlimited: a new run whenever you want one.
Why it works
Why 0.1 seconds of a song is enough
Less than a single note, and still enough to guess the song.
Not a melody
At 120 beats per minute one beat lasts half a second, so 0.1 seconds is a fifth of a beat, shorter than a sixteenth note. It is about the length of one spoken syllable, and the shortest notes in most music last two or three times as long. No tune fits inside it, and no word.
The 1999 experiment
Psychologists Glenn Schellenberg, Paul Iverson and Margaret McKinnon played 100 students slivers of five hit records and asked them to match each one to a title on a list of the five. At 0.2 seconds, 19 listeners in 20 beat chance, and at 0.1 seconds the group as a whole still beat it. Played backwards, or with everything above 1,000 hertz removed, listeners did no better than chance. The songs were few and known in advance, and the authors took care to say that people do not usually recognise a song that quickly.
What survives is the sound
What remains at that length is timbre: the sound of one particular recording, its instruments, its voice, its production. The 1999 result puts the telling detail in the high frequencies and in how the sound changes from instant to instant. A 2014 study found listeners could tell a sung voice from an instrument in snippets a few thousandths of a second long.
Naming a record with no list to choose from is harder. In 2010 the Cornell psychologist Carol Krumhansl played students 0.4-second clips of hits from the 1960s to the 2000s and asked for the artist and the title. They got both right on 26.4 percent of trials, and on 11.1 percent once the clips were cut to 0.3 seconds. In 2019 a team at University College London watched people's eyes as they heard a favourite song: their pupils responded within 0.1 to 0.3 seconds of the first sound. The 0.1-second start in Guess the Song sits at the edge of what a listener can do. That is why you can always make the clip longer before you guess the song.
The attention economy
Why pop songs now fight for their first five seconds
Listeners decide fast, streaming pays only after half a minute, and the records have changed to suit.
Intros shrank from 20 seconds to 5
Hubert Léveillé Gauvin at Ohio State measured 303 singles that reached the American top ten between 1986 and 2015. The introduction, the time before the voice comes in, averaged more than 20 seconds in the mid-1980s and about 5 seconds by 2015, a fall of 78 percent. Over the same years tempos rose and the title arrived sooner.
A quarter of plays end in five seconds
In 2014 Paul Lamere, then at The Echo Nest, looked at Spotify listening data and found that 24 percent of plays were skipped within the first five seconds, 35 percent within the first 30, and nearly half before the song ended.
Thirty seconds to count
Spotify counts a play as a stream only once it passes 30 seconds, so a record has half a minute to hold a listener before it earns anything. A song that can be recognised in its first moments has a head start on the skip button.
The listener in these studies is doing, without meaning to, what a round of Guess the Song asks of you on purpose: deciding from a fraction of a record whether it is one they know.
The method
A listening method for Guess the Song
Four habits for Guess the Song, each one taken from the research above.
01
Ask whether you know it before asking what it is
In the Cornell study, listeners who felt sure they could name a clip were right more than nine times in ten. That flash of recognition is the signal. If it does not come, lengthen the clip instead of trying to guess the song blind.
02
Listen to the top of the sound
The 1999 slivers stopped working once the high frequencies were removed. The bright detail carries a recording's identity: cymbals, the edge of a guitar, the consonants of a voice.
03
Wait for a syllable
Clips that held even part of a word from the title were named about twice as often as clips that did not. If the clip opens before the singer does, a little more length is usually worth its price.
04
Lengthen early, in small steps
A wrong song guess costs 500 points and the music carries on, so a guess in the dark is rarely the cheap option. The table below shows what each clip length is still worth.
| 0.1 seconds | 10,000 points |
|---|---|
| 0.5 seconds | 7,388 points |
| 1 second | 6,417 points |
| 3 seconds | 5,093 points |
| 10 seconds | 4,006 points |
| The whole clip, 30 seconds | 3,500 points |
The scale is logarithmic, as hearing is: the stretch from 0.1 seconds to 1 second takes up as much of the scrubber as the stretch from 3 seconds to 30, and the early part is where the points are. Nobody can guess the song in 0.1 seconds every time, and Guess the Song does not ask you to.
In this game
How Guess the Song turns a clip length into points
The less of the record you needed, the more the song is worth; a wrong guess costs points and nothing else.
Guess the Song scores a song by how much audio you took to name it, on a curve that falls fastest at the start, because the first moments hold the most clues. Naming it at 0.1 seconds pays the full 10,000; with the whole 30 seconds open it pays 3,500 points. A wrong guess costs 500 and never ends the song, so you can keep guessing until you have it.
A run is 5 songs, dealt by how often the world has streamed them, the most familiar first, and there is no daily limit: finish a run and the next is one press away.
Vocabulary
Song game terms, defined
The names people give this kind of game, and the words the research above relies on.
- Song game
- Any game where the answer is a song. A music quiz, a song quiz and music trivia all belong to the same family; a guess the song game is the kind that plays you the record.
- Song guessing game
- A music quiz where you identify a song from a short audio clip. In Guess the Song, you choose how much of the recording to hear before picking the title.
- Guess that song
- The spoken form of the same idea: a track comes on, and someone in the room dares the others to guess that song. It needs no rules beyond that.
- Song guess
- One attempt at naming the title. In Guess the Song you pick your song guess from a search list, and a wrong one costs 500 points.
- Timbre
- The quality that makes one recording sound unlike another playing the same note: the instruments, the voice, the room and the production together.
- Intro
- The opening of a record before the voice comes in. In American hits it has shrunk from more than 20 seconds in the mid-1980s to about 5.
- Hook
- The phrase a song is built to be remembered by, often the title itself. Modern hits reach it sooner than they used to.
- Audio fingerprint
- A compact summary of a recording that a machine can match against millions of others. Shazam's is a pattern of the loudest points in the sound over time.
- Name that tune
- The title of the 1952 show, now the everyday phrase for the whole genre. The phrase guess that song is the same idea in newer words.