Just walked past my partner who was playing a video of a crowd of people singing Happy Birthday to someone. Sort of.
“Happy birthday to you” let’s say they did this much more or less in the key of C
“Happy birthday to you” this was badly mangled, with several people apparently unable to figure out how to get to the right pitch on “to” – it goes up a 5th. This isn’t difficult. WTF??
“Happy birthday dear whoever-it-was” bloody fucking hell NO ONE was making it anywhere close to the octave jump at “birthday”. Yeah OK so you aren’t an opera singer and maybe this wasn’t your key, but what’s with people singing any old wrong note way way below where it’s supposed to be?
“Happy birthday to you” for the last time, not in any key so far attempted but a surprisingly strong consensus, all things considered.
I don’t get it. Is there a fad to deliberately sing it badly or something? I mean, NO ONE needs to do THAT bad a job on it. We learned the damn thing as kids. We sang it as kids. We did a shitload better job on it as kids. I swear, it sounds and feels like adults want to distance themselves from any impression that they might be able to sort of carry a tune. Like they’d be embarrassed to be caught singing it like a person who can, you know, sing, or something.
It goes up a fifth. I guess it’s obvious to you what this means and you can do it in your sleep. But I have absolutely no idea what these words mean, let alone any ability to do it.
I thought that Western music all operated on powers of two: half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, etc. Where do “fifths” fit in the whole thing? What are they (other than sizes of liquor bottles)?
Even if you could intellectually explain to me what a fifth is, I would have no idea how to make my voice do exactly a fifth of anything.
When singing Happy Birthday in a random group you run into the problems of:
Few people have perfect pitch. They will start singing in a variation of keys.
Some people are really bad singers. They will not only be in a different key than most others, but they will also sing the wrong notes in that key.
Most people cannot keep to a key, or the right notes, when singing in a group where there are multiple keys and also wrong notes.
The people who do know how to sing will not have a sufficiently strong proper key to latch on to and stick to, so they’ll just be one more voice in the confusion.
Is this the video? I was just looking for examples (which I assumed would be better), and I found one that sounds a lot like what you describe. (Except you didn’t mention a wondering key.)
If so, it’s very clear that there’s one kid that is both very confident and very bad. And everyone else is automatically accommodating said kid. The kid seems to be singing really close to a break, and thus can’t really get anywhere near the correct intervals, but is singing with gusto anyways. Like most bad singers, they aren’t at all listening to themselves or anyone else, so they don’t have any clue that they are off.
And I agree that this is particularly bad. In my experience, one person clearly starts and everyone else matches. And while people may have trouble, they stay in the key–just not in unison. In most (like 60%), it’s close enough that I can sing harmony at the end, which is far more fun.
Still, it’s very similar to what I’ve heard when you have a lot of kids singing. There’s always at least one that is this far out. It’s why my choir director at church would crank up the prerecorded vocals in kids productions, to help them stay on pitch.
If most people are in the same key, it’s by accident. I don’t mean accidentals, I mean they’re doing something purely based on chance, because for most people, a key is something they use to get into their home.
Nobody knows what a fifth is unless you add “of vodka” or similar.
Go up an octave? You might as well ask them to invert a binary tree, or write a finite state machine, or cons up a list.
Again, key is a matter of chance, not choice, for most people.
We learned the words and cadence as kids. We learned the lyrics and the basic stress patterns.
I agree with the first, and I doubt the second. I sing it the same way I always have.
Well I have to disagree there. The way Happy Birthday usually starts is that somebody starts it. They go “Haaaaaaaa” for about two seconds, then everyone else knows where to start.
However, if they choose badly, they may pick a key that’s too high for the group. Since Happy Birthday starts at its very bottom note, it’s really easy to choose badly. Hence…chaos on the top note
I can’t say it, or sing it, any better than **Derleth **did.
I know a little musical theory and most of the vocabulary. I could describe to you how to read music and know what most of the little symbols mean. My wife is a musician skilled on several instruments. I can even look over her shoulder and correctly follow the written music as she plays.
I can no more make my voice change pitches repeated and reliably than I can sink 3-point baskets from the 23ish foot line. I can make my voice go up some. And down some. Beyond that whatever happens is all a surprise to me.
So I revel in my abject incompetence by belting it out with uncommon gusto. The way I see it, everybody is good for something. Me? I’m a bad example.
Schools aren’t particularly good at teaching singing. The teacher plays the piano or the music and everyone sings along. If you happen to get it, you get it, if not, then you can happily sing along forever not knowing that you really suck unless some tells you. Most people are too polite for that.
I always knew that I’m bad, but I didn’t realize how terrible I sang until I was an adult and sang something front of some children who hadn’t learned how to filter their reactions.
Think about how most people learn that song. They don’t learn it from professional singers or from sheet music, because of the copyright entanglements that song has been through. They don’t learn it from someone playing on a piano, because the piano player would be playing it off of sheet music that mostly doesn’t exist. They learn it from hearing other non-professionals singing it, who in turn learned it from other non-professionals, and so on. You know that it’s supposed to go up a fifth, but what if you had only heard it from folks who didn’t know that? Then you wouldn’t know it, either. So even when you have multiple good singers in a group, they might not know quite the same tune.
I could play Happy Birthday on a number of instruments. I know what a fifth is. I still can’t sing for shit. If you ask me to sing a fifth or major third or whatever, I’ll get into the ballpark of it, but I’ll have to slide all over the place to match the correct pitch, even if I play it first on an instrument. I just suck at singing. There are many people like me.
You’re talking about the duration of notes, not the pitch. And while the note lengths you mention are the basic ones, you can have triplets, quintuplets, etc. so the length don’t necessarily have to correspond to a power of two. For example, an eighth note triplet would be 1/3 the duration of a quarter note. You might be also be thinking of time signatures, which 99.99% of the time are over a power of two, but there are twentieth century and beyond exceptions to this.
But a randomly chosen cluster of four years olds does a much better job. A party-full of 10 year olds nails it. That’s despite the handful of people who have a tin ear or the person who can’t get up to the high note and does something screechy and flat.
I’m talking about adults doing a massively worse job on the song than kids do when they sing it.
Umm, you don’t know have to know “this is where I go up a fifth” or “we’re doing this in C” in order to be on the note and go up where it goes up. People learn how to sing by imitation. And everyone knows the damn tune. Everyone in the western hemisphere knows how the song goes.
Same here. I love to sing but no matter how I try or practice I suck at it. It’s a talent you are born with.
Example: art ability. I spent a large part of my life as a professional artist. I’ve been a commercial illustrator, I’ve been a logo designer and I’ve sold a respectable amount of fine art. I’ve also taught art at a private school. To me, reproducing what you are looking at with a pad and pencil is as natural as breathing. Yet there are people that no matter how much they want to be artists, no matter how they practice or how well they are taught will never be that good at it. At least with Happy Birthday it’s always for fun and casual.
ETA: Everyone in the western hemisphere knows what the Mona Lisa looks like too, that doesn’t mean they can paint one.
