Trivia rules! You raise your eyebrows when you first hear it. Sometimes you are even generous enough to the imparter to utter an 'oh' or a 'wow'. And once you're equipped with the titbit of knowledge, you walk around with your chin up and air of superiority around you. You inflict this knowledge on clueless individuals, and look down on them as rustic boors when they don't give you an 'oh' or a 'wow'. Anyway, I guess I'm just feeding into a cycle... but here goes. Here's some:

Trivia (very) loosely related to sound and music!

From Jimmy Hendrix - Purple Haze

Purple haze All in my brain
Lately things just don't seem the same
Acting funny but I don't know why
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky

If you're thinking, 'Oh, I always thought it was 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy...', you've fallen prey to a very famous mondegreen. Mondegreens are misheard phrases or lyrics, which are sometimes widely accepted and often change the meaning of the text completely. Some famous examples are 'The girl with colitis goes by' instead of 'The girl with kaleidoscope eyes' in The Beatles - Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, and 'Jeremy spoken brass beds today' instead of 'Jeremy spoke in class today' from Pearl Jam - Jeremy. Of course, mondegreens don't have to be famous to be classified so. We create them all the time, whenever we hear a new song. The word 'mondegreen' is in itself a mondegreen, being the misheard version of "They have slain the Earl o' Murray and laid him on the green" from the 17th century ballad 'Earl o' Murray'! Anyway, there are many websites dedicated to tracking common mondegreens of lyrics.

How many times times have you had to decrease the volume when Mariah Carey started her high-pitched caterwauling in the middle of a song? And we've all heard stories about Opera singers easily shattering glass with their high-pitched voices. Although the latter depends more on precise control of the voice to match the resonating frequency of glass, you must admit that only a few chosen ones can manage to achieve a controlled high pitch. The notes in the range above the note E6 is called the Whistle Register, and only a few singers can manage to control this range. Naturally, more women make this list than men.

Mariah Carey is gifted with a five-octave range, and the highest note she has hit is G#7, which is five and a half steps above the highest note playable on a standard keyboard! Minnie Riperton, an accomplished singer, was rumoured to have hit C8. Interestingly, and perhaps coincidently, most singers who can produce notes in the whistle register seem to be the youngest in their family!

In the episode 'Worldwide Recorder Concert' of the comedy series South Park, the character Eric Cartman tries to find the 'brown Noise', the pitch that makes a person lose control of his bowels and crap in his pants. He does find it of course, but in reality brown noise is simply a sample of sound whose graphical representation mimics brownian motion, and is one of the colours of noise, as are white noise and pink noise. What he was really looking for is the 'brown note', which is quite legendary. The TV show Mythbusters tried to reproduce the brown note and failed. Their methodology has been debated. However, it is interesting to note that sound-emitting devices are being researched as non-lethal weapons, called Acoustic Weapons. It is more interesting to note that extremely low-pitch sounds have been successfully shown to cause uncontrollable defecation and urination by US army research experiments, and devices that emit directed pulses of such sounds are being developed as weapons! Infrasound also causes uncontrollable sensations, vertigo and other symptoms. These may be effectively used to decapacitate enemy troops in battle. So although the terminology used is not right, Eric Cartman could very well get a device in the near future that would let him make his friends crap in their pants!