Musical variety

[vvvexation]

An ice cream truck drove by a short while ago playing "Home on the Range." I've heard half a dozen different tunes around Berkeley, but this is a new one on me. Can it be that they actually change them every so often so that people don't go completely insane? Or is it just that the Oakland ones are different than the Berkeley ones?

If they do change tunes periodically, they really ought to do some consulting work for University Health Services. Their phones only ever play one damn piece of hold music, and it's been the same one for five years. It wouldn't be so bad if it were classical or something, but of course it's not; I'm not sure it qualifies as elevator music either, because it tries just a little too hard to be upbeat rather than mellow. They'd've done much better to stick with mellow, at the very least. Upbeat makes you feel too much of a sense of expectation, like something is about to happen, which is not a pleasant feeling to have prolonged for five to ten minutes. I mean, I guess I can understand why they'd want you to feel like your call is going to be answered any moment, but once you've been through the drill a few times and you know it's not, it's just irritating to be kept in a subconscious state of anticipation--not to mention how irritating the music in and of itself is. What they should be going for is calm and soothing, to assuage the irritation you're already feeling at being on hold in the first place.

Okay, I hadn't really intended to rattle on about that. But now that I have, I'm kind of glad to have figured out precisely what it is that annoys me about it. I love how often writing things out has that effect.

Comments

[terpsichoros.livejournal.com]

When I lived in Hayward, I lived two houses down from a nest of ice cream trucks. The worst of it was that some of the music boxes were mechanical, and the tune would speed up with the trucks. The notes wouldn't change pitch - it was probably a large version of an old-fashioned music box. Since most of the time I heard the trucks, they were on their way back, instead of driving along at 5 mph to draw the kiddies out, they were driving along at 25 or 30 mph to get "home". So their music boxen would be playing "Turkey In The Straw" or whatever about 5 times as fast as normal. You really notice how out-of-tune they are at that speed...

ice cream

[http://users.livejournal.com/_duncan/]

Around here it's almost always Fur Elise ((audio (http://punk.net/~duncan/media/random/2004.03.21.icecream_furelise_sanitorium.mp3)(~140k)) with the occasional exception of some loop including "<quack><quack> Hello."

If you're walking and the truck approaches from behind the driver will restart the loop: He-he-he-he-hello-hello.

Sometimes they drive fast enough for Mr. Dopplar to adjust the pitch. Sometimes it's played by two trucks in a sick sort of offtune round where they agree on neither the pitch nor the tempo.