Word play of the month

September 5, 2021 @ 12:37 pm · Filed by under Humor

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Featuring Bready Mercury:

There's a Typewriter Orchestra —

But as a far as I know, no toaster orchestra.

September 5, 2021 @ 12:37 pm · Filed by under Humor


8 Comments

  1. bob coard said,

    September 5, 2021 @ 2:58 pm

    Not even a Towcester Orchestra?

  2. Bob Ladd said,

    September 5, 2021 @ 3:52 pm

    Humour aside, I was interested to hear the guy speaking at about 1:46 in the typewriter sequence, who very clearly pronounces whacky with a clear /h/ (or /ʍ/, perhaps) at the beginning. (I checked it on Praat but I don't know how to upload the result to this comment.) I thought it was only oldies like me who still have a functioning contrast (wail/whale, wear/where, Wight/white, etc.), but this speaker looks like he's in his 40s.

  3. Chiara Maqueda said,

    September 5, 2021 @ 4:45 pm

    Then there was (alas long gone) Darwin's 4th Estate, a band that featured local journalists playing typewriters (joined by real musicians).
    https://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2011/04/17/darwins-4th-estate-last-drinks-on-20-years-of-typing-to-dance-to/

  4. Anthony said,

    September 5, 2021 @ 8:20 pm

    I'm 70, born in New York City of parents born in NYC. I've always pronounced whale as wail, whether as weather, where as wear, and so on. In elementary school I thought that what the teachers were telling us was some sort of theoretical distinction.

  5. JPL said,

    September 5, 2021 @ 9:01 pm

    And then there is John Cage, who would have said, "Oh, no. don't deliberately make sounds with those objects, just listen to the sounds they and other beings are already making in your ambient world, at least for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. (Do we have crickets in the house, (I did see one today) or is the source of that sound my own head? (Substitute "relations" for :"sounds" and we have the central question in philosophy of language since Kant.).)

  6. Rodger C said,

    September 6, 2021 @ 10:28 am

    Hideo Nutt's Bolt-O-Drome?

  7. maidhc said,

    September 7, 2021 @ 3:51 am

    Confession..I sort of know this person indirectly. But still. This idea has been around for a long time. I don't even remember when "Toolbox Christmas" came out, but it was a while ago. It was all over NPR at the time.

    https://gourd.com/toolbox.html

  8. Daniel Deutsch said,

    September 12, 2021 @ 8:45 am

    The first piece I ever heard with a typewriter part:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aePrSe6DMsc

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