A Musical Mystery

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:

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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.

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