Hearing this story recently on This American Life reminded me about the terrifically ridiculous World’s Most Unwanted Song. It was carefully composed according to poll data on people’s least favorite musical elements, and is virtually guaranteed to offend your sensibilities. From the composers’ notes:
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe, […] banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer […]. An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children’s choir sings jingles and holiday songs. […]
Here’s some more background. Also, please, have a listen:
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This is the story of how Honda engineers screwed up a big expensive project with a simple arithmetic mistake, tried to fudge their result with sound editing software, and congratulated themselves for being totally awesome.
When I was a kid, my family used to drive up to The Pinery in Ontario, a beautiful park by Lake Huron. Very scenic. My favorite part, though, was a stretch of road a half-hour outside of the park. To discourage reckless Canadians from barreling past the houses and barns, the local government carved five sets of grooves in the road before every stop sign. Drive over them, and the car would vibrate: “vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb.” The faster you drive, the higher the pitch.
My Dad is a musicologist, with a particular interest in tuning. So there was no way he was going to pass up the chance to experiment with this instrument. Every time we approached some grooves, he’d start fast over the first set, and try to slow down by the last set, to play a descending scale: G-F-E-D-C. If there was no oncoming traffic after the stop sign, he’d swing over to the other side of the road and play an ascending scale as we sped up. Continue reading…