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The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

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Re: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

#21

Post by lordfrito »

arp242 wrote: post #17

I've been trying to find a specific ~5-minute clip I was somewhere in 2005 for years. I was shown on the BBC's "Homegrown Hollywood", which was a fairly obscure anthology of British-made short films about a variety of topics, mostly by small independent film-makers, from "art films" to short documentaries. It had quite a bit of good stuff (and also quite a bit of not so good stuff, it was very mixed). The specific cl…

There's a fantastic subreddit for old/obscure/oddball media that is on the verge of being lost to time. You never know what you'll find there, but its always fun and tends to lead to infinite scrolls. [1]

I hate plugging Reddit right now, but there's a reason we like(d) going there.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ObscureMedia/

Re: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

#22

Post by stochaztic »

I have my own mystery song, but a much more recent one, one of the songs that was playing at Google I/O. The soundtrack for the weekend was largely popular stuff from groups like CHVRCHES, but this one I could never identify using every technique I could think of. I put a minute-long clip of it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48gK7Krx0TQ if anyone here happens to be able to figure out its origin these days.

Re: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

#23

Post by spondylosaurus »

thefourthchime wrote: post #15
apendleton wrote: post #14

Sort of reminds me the Reply All episode "The Case of the Missing Hit": https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx which involves a similar search for an unidentified song (though in this case, just one that someone remembers having heard, rather than an actual recording).

IMO This is the best single podcast episode ever made.

Agreed. Someone convinced me to listen to it under the guise of "just trust me, the less you know going in, the better" and they were 100% right.

Re: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

#24

Post by brightlancer »

seanhunter wrote: post #10
thriftwy wrote: post #4

Still weird that they could not identify it. I often listen to recordings where I am an unique likely listener for years, as well as my own bootlegs. But it is never a problem to identify music or even find much more knowledgeable people to ask for pointers.

Not really. Stuff gets played on the radio all the time by obscure musicians. Example: I played (along with a few others) a tune once on BBC Radio 3 for a program about the blues. Since I just gave the lead sheet to my fellow musicians before the recording and none of us (or the song) were ever credited, there's absolutely no way that anyone could track down what that song was, who wrote it, who the musicians on it w…

Were you invited on the show? Did they have your names? Did they make a list of who performed in what order?

I've been amazed at how obscure recordings are often identified because someone kept a notebook or other recordings. It's not going to be 100%, but it's enough that it surprises/ intrigues folks when something can't be identified.

Re: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

#25

Post by civilitty »

arp242 wrote: post #17

I've been trying to find a specific ~5-minute clip I was somewhere in 2005 for years. I was shown on the BBC's "Homegrown Hollywood", which was a fairly obscure anthology of British-made short films about a variety of topics, mostly by small independent film-makers, from "art films" to short documentaries. It had quite a bit of good stuff (and also quite a bit of not so good stuff, it was very mixed). The specific cl…

> One can't help but wonder how much fantastic material is out there, seen by only a small audience, only to be lost and never seen again.

A lot of BBC content like that is just gone because they used to reuse tapes to save on costs. I don't know if they were still doing it into the 2000s but entire chunks of iconic TV shows like a third of the first six Doctor Who seasons are just straight up gone [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

Re: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

#27

Post by immibis »

Kiro wrote: post #6
tialaramex wrote: post #3

Recently discovered that this is the song playing on the radio in the crashed car you find near the end of the Doom map MyHouse.wad - because of course it is

That's hilarious because I watched a playthrough recently and wondered if copyright is ever enforced in stuff like this when I heard that, without knowing what the song was. Now I know that it's essentially (inadvertently) public domain.

As I saw in a youtube comment: this is the only song you WANT to get copyright-struck for. If your video gets taken down for copying the song, you'll be the hero who solved the mystery of which song it is.

Re: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

#28

Post by immibis »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #11

then again ... this is just a "mystery" because someone announced it as such and wrote about it somewhere. the rest is people with too much time making memes about it. apart from that it's just some rather average song someone recorded. that may sound a bit negative, but this whole meme mindset / pseudo culture thing is kind of growing old on me.

It's a mystery because the entire Internet couldn't find out where it came from.

Re: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

#29

Post by basch »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #13
soylentcola wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many of us (myself included) have become accustomed to being able to find or identify just about anything with the right software, tools, or community. But there are just so many recordings out there like you mentioned - demos, one-offs, etc. that only one or two people would even be able to identify. Despite the reach of global communication, there's a good chance those people never find out that others are searc…

In the old days of P2P MP3 sharing, there were just a few songs that were misidentified, sometimes hilariously, and the widespread nature of MP3 sharing meant that a single user's error was propogated hundreds or thousands of times across the world. One of those tracks was "Cry Little Sister", which was drawn from the Lost Boys soundtrack, and definitely was never performed by the Sisters of Mercy, despite what all t…

Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger not Paranoia by The Offspring

Re: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

#30

Post by arp242 »

civilitty wrote: post #25
arp242 wrote: post #17

I've been trying to find a specific ~5-minute clip I was somewhere in 2005 for years. I was shown on the BBC's "Homegrown Hollywood", which was a fairly obscure anthology of British-made short films about a variety of topics, mostly by small independent film-makers, from "art films" to short documentaries. It had quite a bit of good stuff (and also quite a bit of not so good stuff, it was very mixed). The specific cl…

> One can't help but wonder how much fantastic material is out there, seen by only a small audience, only to be lost and never seen again. A lot of BBC content like that is just gone because they used to reuse tapes to save on costs. I don't know if they were still doing it into the 2000s but entire chunks of iconic TV shows like a third of the first six Doctor Who seasons are just straight up gone [1]. [1] https://e…

They stopped doing that in the 70s, and already did a lot less of that before then. But they also don't archive every minute of what's being broadcast either (no one does, e.g. airing a film you licensed but didn't produce).
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