Tencent’s Penguin Helps You Find Music on New Song-Recognition Web App

Finding a piece of music can be frustrating if you don’t know the name of it, or even who sung it. But China’s biggest social media company, Tencent (HKG:0700), has the solution with its brand-new song-recognition web app. It allows anyone to just sing at their computer, and the familiar penguin mascot (pictured above) will point you in the direction of some songs that sound like what you’re looking for.

It’s called ‘Soso Hum.’ It is – aside from being useful and quite fun – a double PR boost for the company’s search engine, Soso, and for its Soso Music portal. After singing or humming a tune, the penguin should be able to give you five suggestions:

Click on any of these and you’re whisked off to – you’ve guessed it – the Soso Music site.

Tencent has partially revamped its free music streaming and downloading service to contain licensed content, but there’s still pirated stuff in there. The site retains the controversial deep-search mechanism that allow it to hot-link to random mp3 files all over the web so that people can download them. That’s the kind of thing that the country’s largest search engine, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), has had to stamp out, causing it to move towards its licensed streaming service instead.

Right now, there’s no mobile app to go along with Soso Hum – unlike, say, SoundHound, which has been doing this song-finding trick for years – and, after testing it out (thanks to someone much more tuneful than I), it seems to work best with Chinese singing. Being a lousy singer, I played it music from my phone, but it failed to recognise any of that.

Give Soso Hum a try, and let us know what you make of it – and Tencent’s Music portal – in the comments.

[Thanks to @kailukoff for tipping us off via Twitter].