As a traveling music therapist, I spend a lot of time in my car and on my phone. I could not imagine doing my job without immediate access to my smartphone which contains so many of the crucial components to my job (email, phone calls, music, a calculator, a stopwatch and a timer). I recently discovered a new App that blew my mind when thinking of the possibilities for not only a music lover, but a music therapist! The Sound Hound App is what I am talking about. This application that you can download for FREE has the amazing ability to recognize song titles and artists from music that is being played live or on the radio, lyrics sung or typed into the phone and you can download the songs into your iTune library almost instantly! Ever been listening to a song on the radio and wondering what the title was or the artist who performed it? This app will actually “listen” to the music being played and give you the title, artist and lyrics! Check out the link to the website and check it out further for yourself! I guarantee it’s worth it!
I’m sure this is all the music lover needs to hear to be sold on this idea. So now I will turn my attention to the music therapists out there. Here are 4 main reasons why I recommend this app as a must have for the music therapist:
1. Discover New Music for Therapy- Since I spend numerous hours a week in my car driving from session to session, I constantly am listening to music. I find that usually, I am not listening to my preferred music, but listening to the radio for new songs that I haven’t heard from all different genres. It is so frustrating when I hear a song that is perfect for a particular population or session and the radio DJs never state who sang the song or what it was called. Now if I hear a song, I can quickly open the app and press one button and the phone will identify the song! You cannot believe how many great songs for therapy I have discovered by using this app.
2. Use with Clients– Ever been in a session and your client brings up a song that they absolute love but they can’t think of what it’s called? They may supply a few lyrics or possibly even sing the chorus, but if you don’t know the song the chances of you helping them identify it are pretty small. This is always an unwanted situation as a music therapist because we want nothing more than to be able to supply the client with their preferred music. Unfortunately not all of us are human jukeboxes. With this app you can actually have the person sing into the phone and the phone will attempt to identify the song. If you have a shy client who would rather not sing you can type in the lyrics as well. Yes you can use Google search many a time to find lyrics, but this usually follows with a long list of links to search through and no direct access to purchase the song if needed. You can literally search the song and immediately download it to your iTunes library. Imagine all of the time you could save searching online!
3. One Stop Resource for Everything but the Chords– Not only will this application tell you what song you are listening to and who is performing it, the song lyrics are included as well! You get everything you need but the chords in just a few clicks. You can even access the songs you currently own on your phone and it will pull up those lyrics as well!
4. It’s Smaller than a Computer– We already have so much to carry so why add a laptop to the mix when we can access so much with just a phone! I prefer my phone which is safe in my pocket throughout the day opposed to lugging around my laptop which sadly does not fit as nicely in my pocket.
I hope that this post enlightens people about this great product! I highly recommend it and have had so much fun playing around with it! Happy song discovering!
