Name That Tune: A History of Guessing Songs From a Few Notes

"I can name that tune in three notes" has been a boast for about half a century. The contest behind it, hear a little of a song and be first to say what it is, has moved from radio to television to the pub to the phone in your pocket, and at every step the amount you get to hear has shrunk.

This is that story, from a 1948 radio craze to games like Guess the Song, which starts every clip at a tenth of a second. Along the way the puzzle quietly changed what it was testing.

The contest began on the radio. Stop the Music went out on ABC on Sunday evenings from March 1948, hosted by Bert Parks, with Harry Salter's orchestra playing the popular tunes of the day. The twist was that the contestants were at home. While the band played, the show telephoned a listener picked at random, and Parks would break in with a shout of "Stop the music!". If the person on the line could name the tune, they won a prize and a shot at the jackpot's Mystery Melody, usually a half-familiar piece with an obscure title.

It was an enormous hit, drawing a huge audience in a slot where it ran head to head with NBC's popular Fred Allen show. More importantly for this story, it established the idea that recognising a song was a skill worth putting a prize on.

Harry Salter and his wife Roberta Semple Salter turned the idea into a head-to-head contest. Name That Tune began on NBC radio in December 1952 and moved to television in 1953, first on NBC with Red Benson as host, then on CBS from 1954 with Bill Cullen and, from 1955, George DeWitt.

The format was physical. Two contestants stood across the stage from a pair of large ship's bells, and when the band started a tune, the first to know it ran across the stage to ring a bell and name it. The show ran until October 1959, when CBS cancelled it in the wake of the quiz show scandals that had shaken American television.

The puzzle was melodic. The studio orchestra played the tune, so what contestants recognised was a melody, not a particular recording. That distinction matters later.

Name That Tune came back in the 1970s and found its most famous form. Tom Kennedy hosted a syndicated version from 1974 to 1981, renamed The $100,000 Name That Tune in 1976, and Dennis James hosted a daytime version on NBC in 1974 and 1975.

This era gave the show Bid-a-Note, the round behind the boast. The two contestants heard a clue to a song, then took turns bidding how few notes they needed to name it, starting as high as seven: "I can name that tune in five." "Four." The bidding ended when one player challenged the other to go ahead, or when somebody bid a single note. The musicians then played that many notes, and naming the song won the point. Missing it gave the point to the opponent, and the first to three won.

The show's bonus round, the Golden Medley, asked a winner to name seven tunes in 30 seconds. The format returned again in 1984 as The New $100,000 Name That Tune, with Jim Lange, for one season.

Notice the unit. In Bid-a-Note the measure of skill was notes, a handful of pitches played by the show's musicians. That was as short as a melody could get and still be a melody.

The contest crossed the Atlantic early. Britain had its own Name That Tune on ITV, hosted by Tom O'Connor from 1976 and later by Lionel Blair.

It also found a second home that needed no studio at all: the pub quiz, where the music round, and especially the round of song intros played off a stereo behind the bar, became a fixture of quiz nights across Britain. Television took that round back. Never Mind the Buzzcocks, the pop quiz that began on BBC Two in November 1996, made an intros round a regular feature, with a twist: two members of a team had to perform a song's introduction with their voices alone, no instruments, while a teammate guessed.

In 2002 a British company called Shazam launched a service on a short code: dial 2580, hold your phone up to the music, and a text message came back with the song's title and artist. In 2003 its co-founder Avery Wang described how it worked. The service turned a clip of audio into a fingerprint, a pattern of the strongest points in the sound over time, and looked that pattern up in a database of recordings.

Shazam did not play the game; it ended it, for any song playing in the room. But it showed something the old shows never needed to: a recording, not just a melody, carries its identity in every moment. A short sample of the actual record is enough for a machine, whatever part of the song it lands on.

The television show is still going. Fox revived Name That Tune in January 2021, with Jane Krakowski as host and Randy Jackson leading a live band. Seventy years on, contestants were still racing to name melodies played by musicians in a studio.

The next shape came from a word puzzle. Wordle, which gave everyone the same word each day and a spoiler-free grid of squares to share, had become a phenomenon by early 2022, and in February that year Heardle applied its shape to songs: one track a day, six tries, and a clip of its opening that grew with every miss, from 1 second up to 16. Spotify bought it that summer and closed it in May 2023. We tell that part of the story, and why the format spread so quickly, in what the song guessing game is.

Heardle changed the unit again. The puzzle was measured in seconds of the original recording, not notes of a melody, and the recording turned out to give far more away.

Guess the Song takes that to its limit. Every song starts at 0.1 seconds of the original record, too short for a melody, a chord change or a word, and you choose how much more to hear. The less you needed, the more the song is worth, from 10,000 points at a tenth of a second down to 3,500 for the whole 30-second clip.

In its live rooms, up to 50 players hear the same song at the same second and have 20 seconds to name it, with a bonus for answering fast. It is the bell race from 1953, run on a shared clock instead of a stage. How it compares with Heardle in detail is in Guess the Song vs Heardle.

Lay the formats side by side and two things have moved steadily.

• The unit shrank. A whole tune on the radio, then a handful of notes, then seconds of a clip, then tenths of a second.
• The source changed. The old shows used a band playing a melody, so the puzzle was the tune. The modern games use the original master recording, so the puzzle is the sound: the voice, the instruments, the production, the room. A fragment far too short for a melody still carries all of that, which is why the clip could keep shrinking.

And one thing has not moved at all. It is still a race to be first to say what everybody else in the room will know a second later. Ring the bell yourself: open Guess the Song and try to name the first song in less time than one of Bid-a-Note's notes.