Music
Songs, sounds and their unlikely histories.
“Happy Birthday” was copyrighted until 2015
For decades, a company collected around $2 million a year in licensing fees for the world’s most-sung song. Then a court found the claim was never valid.
A skateboard, a bottle of juice, and a 43-year-old hit
In 2020 a man skateboarded to work drinking cranberry juice and lip-syncing Fleetwood Mac. The video sent “Dreams”, released in 1977, back into the US Top 20.
Does listening to Mozart make you smarter?
A small 1993 experiment about spatial puzzles turned into the belief that Mozart makes babies clever. The science never said that.
The devil’s interval was never banned
The tritone is said to have been outlawed by the medieval Church as ‘the devil in music’. The phrase is real, but the ban looks like a story that grew in the retelling.
The mixtape we sent to the stars
Two spacecraft leaving the solar system carry a gold-plated record with whale song, a kiss, 55 greetings and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”.
The scream that has been in hundreds of films
One man’s scream, recorded for a 1951 western, turns up in Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It is named after a character who barely appears.