Bone music: the Soviet bootleg records pressed on x-rays (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Bone music: the Soviet bootleg records pressed on x-rays (2015)

theguardian.com

73 pointsTanakaTarou19 comments

> the small ads of music papers in the 1960s were frequently littered with desperate pleas from people who had heard a song once, sometimes years previously, and were haunted by the memory

Understandable. I'd very much like to know what was that song that died together with my hard disk almost fifteen years ago: a simple repetitive upbeat-but-relaxed rhythm of mid-bass synth with animeish girl voice chattering over it, and a refrain with the words “Ichi ni san go.” The melody of which refrain is somehow almost identical to that of “Perfect” by Princess Superstar—which didn't help me one bit in my search. And the only metadata I know about the song is that it was ‘12.mp3’ in some compilation.

With the google-fu, I've managed to find two cartoons from my childhood just by vague descriptions, but no such luck with this song.

I also sometimes get a melody stuck in my head for days on end until I finally remember where it comes from. And sometimes, only a chance listening to the album relieves the curse when I'm pretty much ready to wade through the entire genre that in fact turns out to be mostly unrelated (damn you wild Japanese synth-jazz experimenters).

Reddit's tip of my tongue subreddit is pretty good at finding out this sort of thing.

Tried that too, in relation to the ‘12.mp3’―no luck, though I posted only once so far. I'll probably have to barge in on some similar Japanese resource.

At other occasions, I'm usually having trouble describing what I'm looking for, since it's practically all instrumental and sometimes rather vague.

(“Circusey frantic melody?” Good luck with that to me. Turned out to be from the excellent and, critically, diverse “World Shopping” album by Space Ponch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-VxYG0nRWhk).

If you can remember enough of it you might try writing down a Parsons Code and searching against, say: https://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code

I've tried using Musipedia on several different occasions, and achieved absolutely nothing. It lures me with the ‘microphone’ section, into which I tried whistling after jumping browsers to resurrect Flash from the dead. I've clumsily transcribed a couple melodies into the ‘keyboard search,’ tried the contour thing and even knocked something out in the ‘rhythm search.’ Bupkis. More often, it emits an error during processing my pitiable attempts, so I don't even know if it can actually find anything with those offending inputs.

There's also Midomi, into which I similarly whistled, hummed and even made some endeavors at singing, and likewise got no luck.

I feel like there indeed should be a music search engine that works from whistling, but I haven't encountered one so far.

In a vaguely topical sentiment, I several times had success with Audiotag.info—but you need a piece of the actual music there. It worked better for me than Shazam, SoundCloud or Picard. Probably because I'm unlikely to be looking for a hit song—now, ‘William Tell’ on a xylophone is closer to my thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXajSUb29ZY (also related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRXUzWNdLx8&t=9m40s).

> “Ichi ni san go.” […] was ‘12.mp3’

IIRC, those syllables are similar to the Japanese words for “One , two, three, go”, so could “12” actually be the title? As in, not “twelwe”, but “one, two”.

Also, I found this on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Your_Time_(album)

It's supposedly “one, two, three, five”―though ‘go’ was indeed pronounced like the English one, IIRC. And yes, I've googled all that in variations and with what keywords I could conjure. We're talking advanced loss. Had to exclude Scatman, too―respect to the dude but he's not a Japanese girl.

> Had to exclude Scatman, too―respect to the dude but he's not a Japanese girl.

He was reportedly popular in Japan, so perhaps your remembered song is a derivative or reference to his song “Ichi Ni San… Go!”?

That's really stretching the idea, but I did listen to the song back then, and probably the whole album because why not—but nope, no relation.

Now, the Princess Superstar's song is uncannily similar, also consisting largely of banter (though with noticeable differences in delivery)—but the Japanese connection eludes me. I, in fact, first discovered ‘Perfect’ randomly and rather recently through a remix, and then listened to all the other versions, and still found no leads. Googled for Japanese covers or sources, for good measure, to no avail.

Did you try midomi.com or similar sound-based search?

Yup, and I described my experiences with them here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232444

Also, my taste for un-melodicality tends to cause trouble in this department.

Speaking of bootleg uses of xrays - apparently they are made of ultra high molecular weight polyethylene, which when sandwiched in many layers works as impromptu body armor (proper laminates are used when lightweight or positive buoyancy armor is required).

The Filipinos were using this during one of their recent disturbances when they began duct taping discarded xray sheets from their local hospital to their chests.

It helps a lot to have alternating layers with very different hardness/elasticity.[0] So maybe x-ray film and metal foil?

0) https://www.nrl.navy.mil/techtransfer/available-technologies...

Apparently also popular in Thailand. This guy tested one, and it did work against .22 and some .38 pistol rounds, which is surprising. Failed with anything more powerful: https://www.theboxotruth.com/the-box-o-truth-58-homemade-x-r...

This is an _excellent_ Radio Documentary on a Russian Pianist that mentions these records 'Music on the Ribs'(41:00~). He was persecuted and sent away to work camps. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03csqbn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadim_Kozin

Thank you so much for the link to Vadim Kozin! Lovely voice and music.

and a bit from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287608

And a 99% Invisible episode: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bone-music/

Obligatory documentary on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMCCYnDvpJQ

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