There are a couple of iPhone apps called Shazam and Listen that identify music by holding up the phone to take in the sound as it’s being played or reproduced, but they’re pretty much limited to songs on the radio. Some renditions of music don’t lend themselves to that method of identification. For example, a friend of Pam recently got a music box. It had been in their family for a long time, and it played a tune that she didn’t recognize. Her background is Scottish, and although we didn’t recognize the tune, it has a vaguely folk-song sound to it, and at one part, I even detected a ‘Scottish Snap’, which is the distinctive rhythmic pattern of a short note followed by a longer one (after several of the usual long-short, long-short patterns). Here’s what the music box sounds like. I let it play the tune twice:
Any idea what this melody is? I’m guessing it’s a Scottish folk song, but it might possibly be a popular tune from years ago.
