Where Does It Come From?
Imagining the people behind generic consumer products
A couple of years ago, I wrote a little appreciation of this musical Christmas clock I put up every year in our home. I picked it up in a thrift store for a few bucks, and it turned out to not quite work—the songs that play at each hour don’t play at the right hour, and in fact how many hours they’re off by varies each time I put batteries in it. I kind of like that imperfection, and it’s only 12 little songs anyway. (This currently made similar clock on Amazon, according to some negative reviews, can develop the same issue of the hours and labeled songs being off; I’m curious what’s actually happening in the clock for that to go wrong!)
I’ve always been impressed by the quality of the short (30-45 second) songs it plays, and I’ve always wondered what sort of files they began as, and who actually composed them. Are they on more than one device, or program? If there were a sound search on Google—there’s already an image search, i.e. upload an image and it can find other instances of that image—perhaps it would be possible to identify other uses of these song files.
This year, I finally did something I’ve meant to do for years, first, in case the clock stops working and I can’t find the exact one on eBay, and second, because I just think documenting this stuff is cool. What I did was take a short video of each of the 12 songs, and I’m going to put them here.
One of my favorites is Silent Night; it’s so simple and tasteful, with no alteration in the tune like a few of the others, and the organ-ish sound effect they used really makes you imagine you could be sitting in a church.
Another great one is Jingle Bells, which is a pretty wacky rendition with a non-standard intro and ending.
And We Wish You a Merry Christmas is my favorite, for how energetic and enthusiastic it sounds.
It’s so cool to me that someone actually composed these, maybe on an actual sound machine or synthesizer, or maybe on, like, a Windows 95 computer with some really good MIDI software. It seems like somehow a worthwhile thing to think about the individual people behind the little bits and pieces of consumer flotsam and jetsam.
This stuff doesn’t just appear; capitalism and globalization and free trade and container shipping aren’t just systems apart from the individuals that they ultimately reduce to. This piece of plastic loaded with a few MIDI files that came out a factory halfway across the world is fascinating. Everything is fascinating, really. And on a chilly, dark evening, with the Christmas tree lighting up our room, hearing this thing go off every hour really does make me think about the true meaning of Christmas.
Here you go:
Happy Epiphany!
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As an engineer, I've also started thinking more about who makes and, more importantly, designs the stuff we use. It's kinda a shame that products don't have credits the way that movies do.
Growing up, I often had trouble throwing stuff away because I felt bad that whoever made it was having their hard work put in the trash, even if it was something like a food container. It's interesting that part of growing up for me was learning to push down that empathy a bit. It kinda made me wonder at an early age if Consumerism as a whole has a corrosive effect on folks for that very reason. That's probably a bit of a leap, though.
I judge the quality of these Christmas musical gadgets based on how in tune the music is. Based on what I heard, your clock passes the test.