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Heardle is like Wordle for pop music

Heardle is like Wordle for pop music

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Guess the song based on progressively longer clips

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It’s hard to guess a song in the first few seconds.
It’s hard to guess a song in the first few seconds.

If you’ve finished your Wordle, Worldle, and Octordle and have more room in your heart for more Wordle-alikes, may I suggest trying out Heardle.app? It’s a guessing game where you’re given progressively longer snippets of a pop song and get six tries to figure out what it is. It’s a fun twist on the Wordle format, especially for those of us who are significantly more interested in music than words like “knoll” or “vivid.”

An interesting twist with Heardle is that it gives you a skip button. Mechanically, it makes sense — with Wordle, you’re only going to get closer to the answer by guessing a word and seeing what letters are or aren’t in the correct answer. But when you’re guessing a song, hearing a new snippet will give you more information regardless of whether you’ve made a guess.

Heardle also, of course, has a similar sharing feature that lets you copy a series of emoji to your clipboard so you can tell people how quickly you guessed the song.

Heardle’s about screen says that it pulls songs from “a list of the most streamed songs in the past decade,” which hopefully means you won’t be stuck trying to identify some song that only 1,000 people have heard. That also makes it a lot easier to guess — without giving too many spoilers, I thought that today’s answer might have been some sort of ambient soundtrack song after hearing the first few seconds. But once I realized it was looking for a pop song, I found the answer to be pretty obvious.

The about screen also says that Heardle is pulling the songs from Soundcloud, which is good to hear — while Wordle has all its answers stored in a text file, doing something like that with clips of pop songs is a good way to get DMCA’d off the internet real quick. And I’d hate for that to happen because I think Heardle might be the game I end up checking back in with every day. I’ve always suspected I’d be good at game shows like Name that Tune or Beat Shazam, and Heardle is a way to prove it (or privately embarrass myself).