Then began the elaborations upon the theme. Phrases hummed too slow, with long pauses in between, so that the listener’s mind helplessly waits and waits for the next note, the next phrase. And then, when that next phrase comes, it is so out of key, so unbelievably awfully out of key, not just out of key for the previous phrases but sung at a pitch which does not correspond to any key, that you would have to believe this person had spent hours deliberately practicing their humming just to acquire such perfect anti-pitch.
It bears the same semblance to music as the awful dead voice of a Dementor bears to human speech.
And this horrible, horrible humming is impossible to ignore. It is similar to a known lullaby, but it departs from that pattern unpredictably. It sets up expectations and then violates them, never in any constant pattern that would permit the humming to fade into the background. The listener’s brain cannot prevent itself from expecting the anti-musical phrases to complete, nor prevent itself from noticing the surprises.
The only possible explanation for how this mode of humming came to exist is that it was deliberately designed by some unspeakably cruel genius who woke up one day, feeling bored with ordinary torture, who decided to handicap himself and find out whether he could break someone’s sanity just by humming at them.-HPMOR, chapter 84– and also, apparently, EVERY RADIO STATION IN THE GODDAMN COUNTRY THIS TIME OF YEAR
these motherfuckers have to take these songs and “make them their own”, put their own special goddamn english on the ball, and the only way they can think to do this is by changing EVERY OTHER GODFORSAKEN NOTE into some horrible warbling yodel to show off their vocal range! bastards reluctantly dip their toes back into the original melody just long enough to remind you what song you’re listening to, before zooming STRAIGHT back to their amateur opera tryouts!
When I first read this post, I thought you were exaggerating.
“It’s not *that* bad,” I thought. “Like, yeah I’ve been nonconsensually exposed to dozens of hours of Christmas music at work over the last month, and it’s repetitive and imbalanced (it took dozens of hours! for me to hear *one* ‘Hark, the Herald Angels Sing’!), but it’s generally not especially out of tune–”
–and then I went to the bank today and holy *shit* I know *exactly* what you mean. Oh my *god*, I never thought I would be *grateful* for CHYM FM, Kitchener’s Christmas Music Mix®, but at least we’re not playing whatever the fuck the bank is on.
—
#and i’m STUCK IN A HOUSE with parents who insist on being MAXIMALLY FESTIVE, #and refuse to NOT HAVE CHRISTMAS MUSIC PLAYING AT ANY TIME FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH, #I HAVE OVER 300 CONFIRMED KILLS. I AM TRAINED IN GORILLA WARFA-
Oh, so *that’s* who the all-Christmas-all-the-time stations are aimed at? All this time I’ve been wondering why society keeps doing it, given that I have heard many complaints and zero praise for the practice.
(…do your parents also actively prefer that Daylight Savings Time changeovers exist? That’s another thing in the same category.)
(I still think CHYM should do for Christmas what they did for Halloween: mix a few holiday songs into the normal rotation for the day itself and a couple days beforehand. They *could* even do it for several weeks beforehand, if they insisted on keeping that aspect.)
Tags:
#Christmas #music #reply via reblog #venting #in which Brin has a job
Brinens and Things 