Wordle is the word game that took the world by storm and was then quickly acquired by The New York Times. In Wordle, each day a five-letter word is chosen, and the player gets six tries to guess the word. Compete with friends, family, and colleagues to see who can guess each day's Wordle the quickest - and half the world seems to be doing just that.
Sure enough, a host of Wordle alternatives have landed. Like Heardle. As the name might suggest, Heardle is the music version of Wordle. Each day, a new song is chosen, and you have to listen to six short clips of the beginning of a song to try and guess the song being played. A modern take on 'guess the song', essentially.
How to play Heardle on desktop or mobile
With the browser of your choice on either desktop or mobile, simply head on over to Heardle.app to play. Remember, you're listening to a song, so you'll need to be able to hear what's playing.
Heardle tries to keep things fair and understandable through repetition. You listen to the beginning of a song split up into six increasingly long clips, but you'll hear all the previous clips that have already been played first before each new clip.
So, if you're about to listen to the final clip, you'll hear all the previous clips first and then you'll hear the final clip. In effect, this means you'll easily be able to process what's going on in each clip and make an actual guess.
You can guess the song at any point during your listening, and you can even repeat each clip (which includes all the clips that came before it) as many times as you'd like before moving on to the next clip.
There are six clips, and the first clip starts out at just a second long. The second clip is two seconds long; the third clip is four seconds long; the fourth clip is seven seconds long; the fifth clip is 11 seconds long; and the sixth and final clip is 16 seconds long.
You can make a guess while listening to each clip, and if you guess wrong, you'll automatically move onto the next clip where you can guess again. You can "skip" a clip and move onto the next clip without making a guess, but if you have a guess, there's no reason not to throw one out there.
Once you either guess incorrectly on the final clip or skip it, the game ends, the song is revealed, and the full song will begin to play. You'll get a rating, depending on how well you did, and there are links to share how you did on social media.
What's today's Heardle?
Well, we don't want to ruin today's... But looking back, on Wednesday 10th March, the Heardle was That's What I Want by Lil Nas X. However, over the course of the last few weeks the Heardle has been Black Skinhead by Kanye West, Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana, and The Scientist by Coldplay, to name a few.
Heardle doesn't seem to have a specific genre or time period when it comes to picking songs, rather Heardles tend to be huge, massively successful songs. Songs that even if you don't particularly like, chances are you've heard before, even you don't realize it in the moment when it counts.
Though, while there are some older picks for Heardles, expect a bit of a general bias towards newer music, so if your collection ends in the year 1999, Heardle might not be the game for you. Even still, though, it's worth a shot, given its free and only takes a few minutes at most.
Personally, I failed to have any idea whatsoever what the song was on my first Heardle, and I didn't feel like I recognized it any more than I had already after it was revealed to me, so I struggled... But that's how it goes; it's fun if you know and not so much if you don't.
After the fact, though, I looked up what songs had been previously chosen as Heardles, and I quickly realized I would have been able to guess an awful lot of them if I had been playing for even a few weeks.
While I definitely won't be able to guess every Heardle, I should be able to get more right than I do wrong, and that's good enough for me when it comes to music trivia. If you're more than a casual music listener and think you might be able to fair well enough doing musical trivia, Heardle is a fun, easy way to test out your skills.
MORE:
Read our guide on how to build the perfect hi-fi system
And on everything you need to know about high-res audio
Or check out the What Hi-Fi? 2022 playlist
