I was at our Fry’s grocery a few days ago, and while looking for a decent tray of organic radishes (I’m fussy about my radishes) the normally ignorable pop music they play above the low-level grocery store hubbub caught my attention. It was one or maybe two people whistling a repetitive theme. There were vocals between the whistles, but I couldn’t make them out, and was in truth way more interested in the radishes than than the music.
On the (short) drive home, I realized that the damn whistles were still playing, this time strictly in my head. I’m prone to this mental peculiarity, generally called “earworms.” I’ve evolved a mechanism to kill my earworms: I start creating parody lyrics for them. Oddly, this makes them go away. I don’t know why. As many of my long-time readers know, I’m good at parody lyrics. Here’s a sample of what I fired at the whistling earworm:
“I’m just a dope, just a typical mope, and that is all that I’ll ever be.”
That said, I sometimes hear store/restaurant music that appeals to me. Years ago I heard a piece in a restaurant in Colorado Springs that got stuck in my head, mostly for the guitar work. The lyrics were fuzzy and I heard them wrong, so having failed to identify the song on Google by its lyrics, it was years later that I heard it again on the radio of a rental car. It was “Found Out About You” by the Gin Blossoms.
But we now have better weapons: Google search on my phone listens, and you can tap a button to tell it to identify whatever music is playing. It worked beautifully for “Because the Night” by Cascada. Ten seconds and bam! I had the title, the artist, and a link to buying it. “Because the night belongs to muggers, / Because the night belongs to blood…”
Ditto last year, when they were playing an appealing item while I was standing in the line at the UPS Store. Pulled out my phone, and a coupla taps (and a few seconds) later, I had “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon. I enjoyed it enough that I didn’t try to filk it.
Back to the whistles. Now, I struggled for decades to identify an energetic instrumental for brass that I first heard at a grade school show in 1964 or ‘65. I tried to whistle it into my cell phone, but it didn’t work. (I figured it out by sleuthing, but at least I figured it out.) I’ve since found that Google can only identify recorded music. Whistling doesn’t work…
…unless the recorded music is made of whistling.
It was a perfect experiment: When I got home with the whistling earworm in my head, I pulled up Google on my phone, hit the song button, and whistled the whistle. I was startled when Google snagged it in a few seconds. The song was “The Walker” by Fitz and the Tantrums. Not generally something I like, but it was weird enough that I added it to my collection of $1.29 Amazon tracks.
There’s not a lot of whistling in pop music. I vaguely recall a song or two (Roger Whittaker?) which I’ll whistle for Google to see if whistling is just something that Google assumes is recorded music. One has to wonder if Fitz and his gang whistled it to make it easier for people to identify on Google. Or maybe dumb luck.
I’ll go with dumb luck, heh.
