GROOVE WITH “HUM ON”

You sing well!! You have a nice voice!!

Such comments have always followed me since my early teens and made me realize the blessing I have been bestowed by GOD. I always underestimated myself till my college fest in the year 2012, where my voice was put as a bait to attract more number of juniors to be in our favor. I received numerous compliments and even suggestions to adopt singing as a profession and take some technical training, but I turned deaf to those advices and carried on my own path to be an Engineer.

I had my share of struggle while building my career graph in an ascending pattern, and somehow got lost with the touch with my singing skills. My job, my clients, projects involved and least to mention my team proven extremely demanding, to justify with the recurring requirements singing took a back seat in my life and an Engineer flourished.
Albeit, while driving back home from home, I tuned to radio on various occasions and tried to croon the latest songs, but to my surprise, I was left offbeat as I never heard the latest song so couldn’t remember the lyrics, indeed my profession has left me swindle between technology infused in the client’s imagination, so my own interest was lost or dumped in the junkyard of my skill set.

To revive my own, I decided to take a break from work and get detoxed from work, so I packed my bags and headed to Ladakh to enlighten my inner peace, on plane, I put the headphones on but again same issue occurred NO KNOWLEDGE of latest song made me frustrated, and I end up humming a tune which hit my brain cord to reach my vocal cord, my most favorite genre has always been soft music and unknowingly I crooned my very much own invented tune a little louder and my co-passenger in his mid 30s (who, I suppose, was a native of south-east Asian country) smiled at me and showed me a thumb gesture, I mortified and shrunk myself somewhere within myself only and prayed to God to make me invisible, his gesture meant I was crooning aloud!!

I gained my confidence and nodded as a gesture to acknowledge his praise, in return he asked in jumbled English expression “Are you Indian, flying Ladakh? Nice music… I ignored his last comment and replied in a patronizing tone. He confirmed me he was on a trip to India and native of South-Korea, In a continued speech he told me about his work, he was an employee with Samsung and once he learnt about my job profile, he was more keen to know more about my work process, I kept on answering reluctantly and suddenly he stopped me and opened his advanced technology filled laptop and showed me a document , titled “ Samsung- Hum On” An Android app, it was mentioned and he explained further about the app, this app can turn your painful, meaningless hums into a song.Your hummed melodies would transform into musical notation and then gives you the ability to add your preferred music genre flavor to it and play it back.

I, who have, completely disconnected myself from technology and its news, in order to rejuvenate myself, was sounding and behaving as a novice and was gaping at him with curious twinkling eyes. Well, he told me further about social media platform called Waffle, a platform that fosters collaborative content creation and how it will reduce the friction users face when publishing content. Waffle will allow users to create a new feed of expandable content. “Waffle enables users to add their own perspective to someone else’s content, and vice versa,”. On the other hand Hum On, which is in beta for Android, utilizes analysis software, to detect the pitch and duration of your voice. Once it has done that, it leverages machine learning to “create a suitable accompaniment in the same way a musician considers melody and chords. At, the last of his technical speech he said a magical line in dissembled English“ you prove your talent with this app”.

His suggestion and Samsung’s innovation were more than enough for me to wriggle down my talent umbrella and pick one string in a more practical and accessible way. This app (on its launch) would be an asset to the people like me out there, who have talent but no time to showcase or polish it further.
I salute Samsung to invent HUM ON to unleash the skills of thousands of dark horses present in our society. No price for guessing I am waiting desperately for this App’s final launch so I can hum till the end.