"The Most Unwanted Music"
Courtesy of my Tumblr dash:
MP3: Scientific Attempt To Create Most Annoying Song Ever
By Eliot Van Buskirk Email Author
April 18, 2008
8:32 am
An online poll conducted in the ’90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people’s least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners. The song is not new, but it resurfaced on Dial "M" for Musicology.
Amazingly, this "most unwanted music" contains little dissonance - that would have been too easy. For the most part, they seem to have tried to assemble these elements in a listenable way.
Komar & Melamid and David Soldier’s list of undesirable elements included holiday music, bagpipes, pipe organ, a children’s chorus and the concept of children in general (really?), Wal-Mart, cowboys, political jingoism, George Stephanopoulos, Coca Cola, bossanova synths, banjo ferocity, harp glissandos, oompah-ing tubas and much, much more. It’s actually a fascinating listen, worthwhile for the opera rapping alone. (We didn’t think that was possible either.)
That’s the entire article; to steam or download the MP3, go to
http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/04/a-scientific-at/
ETA: God help us, this thing is over 20 minutes long.
MP3: Scientific Attempt To Create Most Annoying Song Ever
By Eliot Van Buskirk Email Author
April 18, 2008
8:32 am
An online poll conducted in the ’90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people’s least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners. The song is not new, but it resurfaced on Dial "M" for Musicology.
Amazingly, this "most unwanted music" contains little dissonance - that would have been too easy. For the most part, they seem to have tried to assemble these elements in a listenable way.
Komar & Melamid and David Soldier’s list of undesirable elements included holiday music, bagpipes, pipe organ, a children’s chorus and the concept of children in general (really?), Wal-Mart, cowboys, political jingoism, George Stephanopoulos, Coca Cola, bossanova synths, banjo ferocity, harp glissandos, oompah-ing tubas and much, much more. It’s actually a fascinating listen, worthwhile for the opera rapping alone. (We didn’t think that was possible either.)
That’s the entire article; to steam or download the MP3, go to
http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/04/a-scientific-at/
ETA: God help us, this thing is over 20 minutes long.