Morning Song and Memory

On occasion I like to make note of some of the little things that make me go "oh, well that's rather nifty!" from time to time, and this morning I definitely experienced a bit of random niftiness.

Specifically, I was walking along my usual route to the lab where I volunteer and messing about with a fun ipod touch app called Bebot. Bebot is a surprisingly powerful synthesizer (for music or just random funny sound-effect making) that has a cute animated robot graphic on its main interface. And I was just sort of running my fingers over the surface when I noticed I had inadvertently hit a sequence of notes that sounded really familiar.

When I realized why this sequence sounded familiar, I stopped walking (in front of a restaurant I knew had open wi-fi access) and plugged the phrase "what is the music they play in cartoons during morning scenes?" into Google's search box.

Lo and behold, the very first link that came up in the results answered my question, awkwardly phrased as it was. The link led to a page on a site called Kick Ass Classical, where someone had kindly posted the titles of two possible songs a person entering a query such as mine might be looking for.

Not only that, but they had also included audio samples, which meant I was able to listen to bits of both candidates. Sure enough, the second piece noted was the one I'd been thinking of -- turns out it's called (unsurprisingly) Morning (or Morning Mood), by Romantic-era composer Edvard Grieg.

This probably won't be news to the innumerable folks whose cultural literacy exceeds my own, but I was interested to learn that this song (which I personally associated with animated sunrises) originally appeared in Grieg's incidental music for the Ibsen play Peer Gynt.

Anyway, I've definitely been running into this sort of thing more and more recently...that is, randomly thinking of something, having only a tiny piece of information about it, and yet being able to hack together a search phraase that lets me find out more or just confirm a vague memory or notion about whatever it is I'm thinking of.

Of course this phenomenon doesn't strike me as any sort of Great Grand Harbinger of Impending Technological Utopia, but it's still really neat. It rather amuses me as well that The Internet(TM) is associated for so many people with Progress! and The Future(TM)! and yet one of its most interesting emerging capabilities is that of enabling us to more effectively peer into the past or fill in the missing pieces of an incomplete memory.