How to find a song by lyrics, melody, or humming: from Shazam to neural networks

When a track is stuck in your head but the title and artist won't come to mind, there are several reliable ways to track it down. The fastest option works when the music is playing right now: just open Shazam, the built-in search in Yandex Music, or ask a voice assistant. For cases where you only remember part of the lyrics or the tune, other tools come in handy: searching by words, radio station playlists, and soundtrack lists.

Searching by a phrase from the lyrics is one of the most dependable approaches. It's enough to recall a few words from a verse or chorus, ideally keeping their exact order. In a search engine like Yandex or Google, type the phrase you remember and add words like "song," "song lyrics," or "who sings it." If you're confident about the word order, put the phrase in quotation marks — for example, "не жалею, не зову, не плачу." The search engine will then look for pages with an exact match rather than individual words in any order.

If you can't recall the exact lyrics, keywords and a description of the storyline can help. Try queries like "song about a train and parting," "Russian song where a girl waits for a sailor," or "foreign track about running uphill." The more details you can remember, the better your chances of getting the right result. A neural network may handle this task better than a regular search: artificial intelligence will offer several options at once, and you can pick the one that fits.