The present study assessed an intervention aimed at increasing phonetic awareness among 95 university English non-majors through self-selected songs. It was primarily designed to boost the students' interest and raise the attractiveness of a course of descriptive phonetics (Nowacka, 2022). The focus is twofold: to show how the students performed the tasks and to exhibit how useful they found the approach. Data collection consisted of three consecutive tasks: 1) transcription of lyrics used for reading aloud; 2) analysis of the occurrence of 51 phonetic and morphophonemic features; and 3) the students' evaluation of the attractiveness and usefulness of the activity to improve their understanding of phonetic theory. The results show that the identification of some features was difficult. Among the issues which require further classroom intervention are: /ŋ/ followed by /g/, aspiration, -s forms pronounced as /-ɪz/, KIT vowel, spread vowels, centring diphthongs, and schwa spelt o, u, and a. Nonetheless, the respondents found this activity (extremely) attractive (71%), (extremely) useful (76%) and more attractive than other phonetic tasks (49%). It was praised for the autonomy it offered in the choice of a text/song for analysis and for the practical application of phonetics.