[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The Singing Dogs: “Jingle Bells”
From the album Don Charles Presents The Singing Dogs— A Genuine “Canine Chorus” (1955); re-released on Dr. Demento Presents the Greatest Christmas Novelty CD of All Time (1989)
The story of this charming little piece of holiday tape trickery goes back to the early 1950s, when the Dane Carl Weismann recorded the barking of five different neighborhood dogs with a portable tape recorder. In his amateur home studio, he cut and spliced the tape to create a remarkably convincing melodic rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Through channels unknown, Weismann’s experiment made it over the Atlantic to the United States, and was released on record by RCA in 1955, along with three additional songs: “Oh! Susanna,” “Pat-a-Cake,” and “Three Blind Mice.” The album sold half a million copies that year and earned a write-up in Life magazine entitled “The Caroling Dogs of Copenhagen.”
Amazingly, that was not the end of the Singing Dogs. The album was unearthed around 1970 and re-released by RCA the following year, this time with “Oh! Susanna” as the sole B-side. The record sold another 500,000 units, making Weismann’s Singing Dogs unlikely platinum-selling artists.
Weismann’s little piece is a remarkably early example of “tape music,” and one of the first such compositions created on an entirely amateur basis. It is also striking for its humor—was Weismann poking fun at the young genre of electronic music, or simply extending its techniques to new forms of expression? In any event, musique concrète inventor Pierre Schaeffer would probably not have appreciated Weismann’s cantabile canines. In his 1967 Solfège de l’objet sonore (Theory of the Sound Object), Schaeffer dismissed “the apparently logical idea, which was to prove foolish, that music could be produced by anyone or anything.” As an example of this “foolishness,” Schaeffer presented two recordings: first, a series of unprocessed dog barks, then the same sounds, manipulated to form the pitches of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
Special thanks to Acousmata listener William Weir for making me aware of this gem.
Played 90 time(s).
December 21, 2010, 10:29pm
