Heardle: Like Wordle For Music

It’s like Wordle, but for music: Heardle is a free app that plays on the format of the popular daily word game to test players’ ability to identify a song rather than a word.

Modeled on the popular daily word game, Heardle challenges players to guess what song is playing after hearing only one second of audio. Incorrect guesses unlock more of the recording but players only get a maximum of six guesses and sixteen seconds of music to correctly identify the song.

The game can be played online for free at here. Simply press play and listen to the first second of the song. If you think you know what it is, type the name of the song or artist, then submit your answer and it will tell you if you are correct. If you guess incorrectly, or if you have no idea what to guess, you can listen to the next seconds of the recording and try again. Once you have submitted six incorrect guesses, the name of the song is revealed.

As with Wordle, Heardle releases a single new puzzle each day, so rather than sitting and playing for hours, the game becomes a part of players’ daily routine. Instead of testing your vocabulary like Wordle, however, Heardle exercises your memory and music knowledge, making it a perfect daily break for music-lovers. Of course, Heardle also incorporates another crucial element of Wordle’s highly successful model: You can share your results on social media so everyone knows just how high your music I.Q. really is.

The game’s London-based developer recently spoke to Variety about the project on the condition that their identity remained anonymous.

“I was working for a start-up until December 2021, when they ran out of money, and I was out of a gig,” he said. “I’m still between jobs at the moment, and like everyone in January, I began playing Wordle and posting my scores on a group chat site where my friends would also talk about their scores.”

After he joked online that someone should make “something called Heardle where you’d have to guess songs rather than words,” the unnamed Heardle designer was talked into doing it himself. “My friend had been a music journalist,” he said, “and reminded me that I had nothing else going on, so why not.”

Using the easily-embeddable SoundCloud as the basis for the song selections, the developer was able to get the app up in a matter of days. The app creator claims that Heardle has quickly jumped from eight users to more than a million per day. Read the full interview here.

Head to the Heardle browser app here to start playing.