I know well the feeling of watching an entire episode of The Price Is Right while eating an entire box of Triscuits. I’ve been a retired housewife most of my life. How I dreamed of being on this show! I wouldn’t run down the aisles like the other Karens. I would stride confidently when my […]
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Duolingo: The Sound of Failure
In our last post, we covered the Duolingo “Sound of Success,” a happy Major Third inspired by door bells, store chimes, dial tones and car horns, which were in turn inspired by Big Ben’s bell song “Westminster Quarters.” Now we turn our aural gaze to a more dissonant, evil sound—The Sound of Failure. If the […]
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 […]
DiC Bumper
TV and film bumpers can pack a lot of music into a short window. They often run through multiple key changes in mere seconds. Cadences bleed into other cadences. Power choruses stacked upon lesser choruses. The TV bumper does all the work of a three-minute pop song in the course of fifteen seconds or less. […]
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 […]
Lost Doggies
The long-awaited sequel to Dos Doggies is finally here. Lost Doggies by Los Doggies, not to be confused with Los Doggies (2001) by Los Doggies, our first album. Dos Doggies (2002) was the sequel, and this is a kind of third one in a Godfather III sorta way. An album 20 years in the making […]
Air Horn
Before the government bans all manner of horns, let’s have a timely post on everybody’s favorite—the portable air horn. Like Pavlov’s bell, I’m pretty sure every living creature despises this cruel sound. More jump-scare than sound object. The loudness is definitely the most annoying aspect, but the portamento also plays a role in this handheld […]
