Okay, this is going to be a quick one.
A couple of days ago, a melody from a song I’d heard ages ago popped back into my head. I couldn’t recall anything about it except that somewhere in the song, the singer (or singers) mentioned the word “dangerous.”
I did what any normal person would do, I cleared my throat and started trying to imitate a piano and a synthesizer to the best of my poor abilities, so that Shazam might be able to help. I put a lot of effort into it, but I couldn’t get it to recognize the sound; it was probably because my attempts at imitating instruments are pretty awful.
To add a bit of humor and context, this is me trying to make myself sound as close as possible to the song:
After no luck with Shazam, I figured I’d try ChatGPT. Here’s what we managed to piece together, based on what I could remember:
- Dreamy male vocals
- A romantic, almost retro-futuristic vibe
- A synth melody that kind of carries the whole thing
- Simple piano chords
- A medium-speed tempo (~100 BPM)
- That feeling of electronic/synth-pop music
- A smooth, understated rhythm
- A cosmic and slightly melancholic atmosphere
But still, nothing. After all that, I hadn’t found the song. Some of the suggestions were interesting, and some even had a similar feel, but none of them were it. So I mentioned the problem to a couple of people, hoping someone might recognize it, but they just shrugged and said they couldn’t quite figure it out even when the sounds sounded (heh) familiar to them. Bad, bad luck.
I recalled the song had a simple structure, and I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it sounded like, so I decided to give GarageBand a shot , to see if I could make a melody as close as possible to the original to then feed it back to Shazam. I was (and still am) basically a GarageBand newbie at the time.
The project ended up looking like this:
I figured that maybe, just maybe, a few seconds of the track would be enough for it to recognize it. It was a long shot, but hey, you’ve got to try. And the track itself wasn’t super complex – just a piano, a synth, and a basic drum beat. I wasn’t even sure if the drum beat should’ve been played along with the piano, so I experimented with different options.
I ended up with something like this:
A second attempt with Shazam, and boom, there it was! I finally found what I was looking for. The song is called I Like Chopin by Gazebo, and it’s not exactly synth-pop, though it has some of those elements. It doesn’t have two male voices, but it does have a very distinctive sound, and it definitely doesn’t have the word “dangerous” anywhere in the lyrics (which is what I’d been searching for! Silly me). That’s probably why ChatGPT couldn’t help me. 😔
Here’s a sample of the song:
To wrap things up, just in case
I was curious whether it was really my fault that I couldn’t find the song with ChatGPT’s help, so I started a new session and gradually fed it all the corrected information. I even told it to focus on searching for songs that included the words “rainy days”, which are actually part of the lyrics, and even then it didn’t give me a satisfactory answer. It seems like it can’t “read” the lyrics of songs to accurately identify them.
Here’s how I tried to give ChatGPT better clues about the lyrics:
Here, I tried to help it out by specifying the genre:
And then, after I told it the title of the song, this is what it said:
It seems like it’s not the best resource for finding music, even though it’s helped me out a few times in the past.
The GarageBand project can be downloaded from this link.