How do corporations rule the world when corporations rule the world? Why, with simple melodies played on idiophones like the hand chimes pictured left.
Germans call them “ohrwurm,” meaning earworm. A catchy song crawls inside our ever-open ears like a musical parasite and lays egg-songs in our brains.
There is no more insidious melody on Earth than the dreaded NBC chimes.
The NBC chimes are derived from the popular bell-song Westminster Quarters. It consists of three notes – the Fifth (G), the Third (E), and the One or Root (C). The door bell has these last two notes, which form the interval of a Major Third.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the ABC melody has 4 notes. Whereas the NBC chimes have a distinctly Major flavor, the ABC melody is Minor all the way.
This modern take sounds like sonar pings. Disney is apparently broadcasting from a submarine.
I don’t know which melody is more nefarious—the child-like chimes of the Major NBC motif, or the slick Minor turnaround of the ABC pings? I’m not even going to get into the FOX fanfare, because let’s face it: TV sucks, and their cute major-minor melodies can go to hell.
HEY, aren’t there any birds to transcribe? Or any other new animals to make Yankovician parodies of?
Friends, these corporate melodies are but a passing footnote in the Los Doggies Electric Encyclopedia.
Read more of this very boring history (http://www.radioremembered.org/chimes.htm).
