AIRPLANE MUSIC
Boarding my flight home on Sunday after a brief vacation thanks to the long Easter weekend, I noticed something strange:
Between when I found my seat and when the flight attendant made her first announcement, 3 muzak songs played over the public address system. I didn’t recognize the songs, but I did notice that all three were in the same key.
What made this salient was that the hum of the engines was perfectly matched to the tonic note (the “1″) of all three songs. That’s right, all three songs were in the same key, and the engines were playing along.
As an observation, it was definitely an interesting experience. To some degree, it reminded me of the sruti (drones) common in Indian music (though they usually include both the tonic and dominant notes, the “1″ and the “5″). It was a cool experiment in listening to the natural music that occurs in real-world sound.
Which led me to wonder: was this just a coincidence, or is it possible the airline actually coordinated this?