Yodeling was inspired by donkeys. Bored shepherds in the alps needed a way to pass the time and found inspiration in their asses. They sang to the mountains with donkey voices and the mountains sang back, or another yodeler, or a donkey. Yodeling is one of the manliest forms of singing. You start with your […]
Archive of posts tagged Major Thirds
Nailed It
There is a fine line between the spoken word and the musical tone. The more a phrase is repeated the more musical it becomes. This is illustrated in the speech-to-song illusion. Repeat a phrase over and over and listen as it magically transforms into a melody. This can be accomplished much quicker with sarcasm. Sarcasm […]
Duolingo: The Sound of Success
There’s a new Major Third in town. Move over church chimes and door bells. Eat your heart out, Big Ben. This new Major Third is nasty—it’s in F-Sharp! The Duolingo sound for correct guesses is a pair of sixteenths notes from F# to A#—the happy part of a Major chord. A reverse door bell: the […]
The Diarrhea Song
Let us now reach back through the annals of time to recover a dirty little song that children used to sing to their bowels as they danced the Valsalva. This song was passed along in the great oral tradition from camp to camp, school to school, long before anyone would think about recording such a […]
Cuckoo
The cuckoo has long been a symbol of cuckoldry from Shakespeare to the Disney channel, but did you know this musical bird also inspired the door bell and the bell itself? The common cuckoo calls in major thirds, and almost exclusively in C major. Click on the score below to listen. Common Cuckoo Call “Go-koo,” […]
Full Metal Jody
In the US Armed Forces, military cadences are called “jodies”, and usually entail call-and-response melodies sung by soldiers while marching to a cut time beat. Left-right-left, like boom-pah-boom. Sometimes jodies are dirty as is the case in Full Metal Jacket. Ronald Lee Ermey, who played the Drill Sergeant in the film, was an actual Drill […]
Wesminster Quarters
The clock tower bell song that peals from the belfry 12 times a day is called “Westminster Quarters” and was composed by William Crotch in 1793. It was first heard on Big Ben—the great bell in London—but now every clock tower wants to be like Big Ben, because he the Best Ben. In the old […]
