Music accompanies our lives every day. Be it your favorite radio station on the way to work, a huge rock concert you attend together with other fans, or your neighbor practicing trombone on the balcony, we are surrounded by this incredible form of art everywhere.
We are so used to thinking of music as some sort of magic that sometimes we forget to learn more about music facts. Now you might think that you have no use for facts about music if you are not a professional musician, but apart from theoretical professional knowledge, there’s heaps of music trivia that is fun to know and discuss with friends.
From interesting events in musicians’ lives to fun facts about music history and certain musical pieces, there is so much to learn and admire (or be bewildered at). And for all of you trivia game lovers out there, music trivia games can be a great pastime and challenge for all parties involved.
If you are looking for trivia about music for educational purposes or just for fun, in this article you will find all sorts of interesting facts. Do you know an interesting, amusing, or downright crazy fact about music? Share it with us in the comments.
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Reports say British naval officers play the singer’s 'Oops I Did It Again' and 'Baby One More Time' to drive the pirates away from the African eastern coast. As the pirates have a strong dislike towards Western music and culture, they try to move away from the place as fast as they can.
Ever wondered why there's no pirates in Canada? Two words:Justin Bieber.
Jimi Hendrix had no musical education and he taught himself to play the guitar. Throughout his career, he didn’t know how to read sheet music.
Singing has been scientifically proven to soothe and raise your mood. However, singing in a group is even more beneficial because it releases hormones like oxytocin that make you feel good and also reduces stress hormones like cortisol.
Yeah, I've been told I have a voice for radio...so the volume can be turned down when I come on...I can't carry a tune in a bucket with both hands.
French researchers determined that the music volume level affects the amount of alcohol consumed. Namely, if you listen to loud music, you’re more likely to drink more in less time. The researchers studied 40 males aged 18-25 who drank draft beer in bars by manipulating sound volume and observing the behavior of their study objects. So if you’re not planning on drinking a lot on a night out, maybe avoiding bars with loud music is a good idea.
If you hope to build a career in music but don’t know how to read or write music, don’t worry. If the Beatles could do it, so can you! Audiences speculated about this for decades, but in his 2018 interview, Paul McCartney finally admitted that both he and the rest of his bandmates were musically “illiterate” and had no understanding of music theory. Every single melody they wrote just “came to them,” the legendary musician said.
Finland is the most metalhead country there is. A Reddit user created a map based on data from the Encyclopedia Metallum. With 42.6 metal bands per 100,000 residents, Finland is truly the home to the largest number of bands in this genre.
Prince released his debut album For You at the age of 20. In the album notes he is listed as the musician behind all vocals, but besides that, he played 27 musical instruments: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, bass synth, singing bass, fuzz bass, electric piano, acoustic piano, Minimoog, Polymoog, ARP String Ensemble, ARP Pro Soloist, Oberheim Four Voice, clavinet, drums, syndrums, water drums, slapsticks, bongos, congas, finger cymbals, wind chimes, orchestral bells, woodblocks, brush trap, tree bell, hand claps, and finger snaps.
I'll get downvoted but while I can appreciate his talent I never got into Prince
Cows prefer slow music. A 2001 study conducted at the University of Leicester showed that when cows listen to slow, soothing songs, they produce 3% more milk. The release of oxytocin is essential for cows to produce milk, so slow music helps them relax and increases the level of oxytocin. On the other hand, cows remained indifferent to rap and techno music, showing no changes in the amount of milk produced.
Can someone please play them "Shake Your Booty" by Kc and the Sunshine Band and see if it helps make for better milkshakes?
Scottish Heriot-Watt University examined the personalities of over 36,000 music fans from different countries and discovered that the only difference between the lovers of heavy metal and classical music enthusiasts was their age. Other than that, they were virtually the same, displaying creativity, being at ease with themselves, and being introverted.
There are so many stories around about people leaving their 9 to 5 jobs to pursue a career in the arts, which they dreamt about for their whole life. However, the story goes the other way around as well. James Lilja, the first drummer of the pop-punk band The Offspring, left the band after 3 years. There had been no falling out with the other band members, but Lilja wanted to attend medical school. He later became an obstetrician-gynecologist and gynecologic oncologist.
Covering up a gross comment. Nothing to see here. Move it along, folks.
One of the greatest musicians and composers of the Renaissance era Orlande de Lassus was kidnapped three times during his childhood. The reason behind all three kidnappings was his beautiful singing voice.
It is hard to believe, but there are people who don’t feel anything toward music. The University of Barcelona conducted a study in which 5 percent of participants reported not experiencing any emotion or even the desire to tap their feet when listening to music. These were otherwise physically and psychologically healthy young people who enjoyed other things in life but naturally didn’t care for music in any form.
In 2013, Metallica played a concert for 120 scientists and competition winners at Carlini Station in Antarctica. The performance took place in a transparent dome. After that, the band received a new Guinness World Record title as the first musical act to play on all seven continents. In fact, Metallica toured all seven continents in the same year.
Canada celebrated the country’s 150th anniversary in style. Part of it was a concert that lasted from March 17 to April 5, 2017, and included the Epidemic Music Group. At a length of 453 hours, 54 minutes, and 40 seconds, it was recorded as the world’s longest concert by multiple artists.
In 1974 Elvis Presley approached Dolly Parton for the rights to record a cover of her undying hit I Will Always Love You. However, after his manager asked for half of all profits on the song, Parton refused to let Elvis record it.
In 2016, Mozart sold more CDs than Beyoncé, Adele, and Drake. 2016 marked the 225th anniversary of Mozart’s death, and to commemorate this event, Universal Music Group released a box set containing 200 discs with the great artist’s creations. The thing is that for statistical purposes, each disc was counted separately. But the box set was also a huge hit and, despite its significant price of over $600, practically sold out straight away.
The oldest musical composition in the world dates back to the 1st century AD and is called Seikilos Epitaph. You can find it on a column at a grave in Turkey. Including both a musical score and short lyrics, it reads:
“While you live, shine / Have no grief at all / Life exists only for a short while / And time demands its toll.”
The oldest *discovered/documented* composition. As long as there have been people, there has been music!
Popular opera singer Leonard Warren died at the age of 40 while performing on stage. On March 4, 1960, he was performing Don Carlo’s part in the opera La Forza Del Destino when right after finishing the third act’s song, he collapsed. While no autopsy was performed, it was assumed that the singer suffered a heart attack. The most disturbing fact is that the lyrics from his last act included the words “to die, a momentous thing.”
You often hear about free concerts that gathered over a million people in the audience, but these numbers are often exaggerated. However, Guinness World Records maintain that the largest-ever free concert was attended by an estimated 4.2 million people. It took place on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was organized to celebrate the 1993 New Year’s Eve. The artist on stage was Rod Stewart.
Astronaut Chris Hadfield became the first Canadian to walk in space, but he also turned out to be a talented musician. He first went viral for his cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. During his 144-day stay at the International Space Station, Hadfield recorded 11 original songs. In 2015, he released them in an album aptly titled 'Space Sessions: Songs for a Tin Can'
Everyone knows music can affect your mood, but it turns out it can also have a significant effect on your perception of the world. During a 2011 study at the University of Groningen, participants were asked to identify smiley faces while listening to music. If the faces corresponded to the music, participants identified them more accurately. And even when there were no smileys, participants thought they saw a happy face or a sad face, depending on what music they were listening to at the moment.
You can tell a lot about a person by the music they listen to, and the books they read
If you perform music or have received musical education in any form, chances are you will score higher on the SAT or similar exams. Reports show that music students usually score 63 points higher on verbal and 44 points higher on math. They also tend to display higher self-confidence and be good team players and responsible risk-takers, while also being more creative and emotionally developed.
Before they had their breakthrough, the members of Guns N’ Roses had to earn their living doing some weird jobs. One of the most interesting ones included the frontman Axl Rose and his co-founder and first rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin smoking cigarettes for a scientific study at UCLA. According to some sources, they earned $8 per hour (or $19 in today’s money).
We find inspiration everywhere we can. Even if it is your own cat walking on the keys of your instrument. This is exactly what Domenico Scarlatti observed before he got the idea to compose his Fugue in G Minor for a harpsichord. He even nicknamed the piece Cat’s Fugue to honor the cat.
Music helps to enhance physical performance, especially if you synchronize a repetitive exercise with the rhythm. It will not only help you work out longer but also be more efficient at it. During one study, cyclists reported that they required 7% less oxygen when exercising in time to music than people who performed the same exercise with a random, unsynchronized background score. This shows that temporal cues provided by music help you use your physical energy more efficiently.
If the students at my school I work in are to be believed it helps you learn if you have 2 air pods, turned up to full volume, in both ears while your teacher is trying to deliver a lesson
Some musical instruments use chimes to produce sound. The musical instrument with the largest number of chimes is also known as tubular bells and was created by Simon Desorgher. He used 120 aluminum tubes, varying in length from 473 mm to 4,877 mm, tuned to musical scales.
Most musicians hate having to change strings on a guitar. It’s a tedious job that takes time and effort and requires a lot of patience. But instrument technician and music store owner Thomas Silkman decided to prove this to be wrong. On April 20, 2018, he set a world record by changing 226 strings within an hour. Interestingly, he wasn’t pushed by any dire circumstances to do so; he just dreamt of setting a world record.
If you thought that a conductor has ultimate power over their orchestra, well, you’re not wrong. As a rule, orchestras include instruments from each of the five instrument groups. However, the conductor has the power to select the instruments they need to perform the musical program. Also, in the 20th century, a new tradition was introduced, where not only classical musical instruments were allowed to be a part of the orchestra. These days, should the conductor deem it necessary, you might see an electric guitar, a synthesizer, or any other modern instrument in an orchestra.
Need more Theremin, Pyrophone, Didgeridoo, and Glass Armonica! Edit: spelling Didgeridoo :-)
The best-selling album of all time belongs to Michael Jackson. It is his sixth studio album Thriller, which was released in 1982. With an estimate of over 60 million copies sold worldwide, it still keeps the title to this day.
In 2014, scientists from the Museum of Science and Industry conducted an online test under the name “Hooked on Music.” The test consisted of one thousand quips from pop hits, from modern hits to hits from the 1940s. 12,000 participants were required to identify each song as fast as they could. While the average span of identifying most songs was 5 seconds, Wannabe by the Spice Girls took only about 2.3 seconds, which made it the catchiest song of all time.
The world’s longest performance started in September 2001 and is set to end in 2640. Yes, the 27th century! It takes place at St. Buchard Church in Germany where an automated organ plays As Slow As Possible, a piece by the avant-garde composer John Cage. Visitors have to wait for months to catch a chord change; that is how slow it is. Interestingly, the performance started even before the organ was fully completed — some pipes were added in 2008, and it didn’t affect the music.
Almost everything the Simpsons do becomes history, and that’s why the show’s creators decided Bart and his family could also produce pop hits. 'This is how Do the Bartman' was born in the early 90s. The rumors of Michael Jackson being the ghost composer have been around since then, which made sense as the artist was a huge Simpsons fan; however, the producers kept denying it. Only many years later did Matt Groening confess that Jackson did, indeed, write the track, but it was kept a secret since the King of Pop was legally forbidden to write for an outside label.
The largest known performing rock band included 953 musicians. Staged by the Beijing Contemporary Music Academy on June 16, 2016, the concert was performed in Tianjin, China, and included the following musicians: 349 singers, 154 guitarists, 151 drummers, 100 bassists, 100 keyboard players, and 98 players of wind instruments.
There are two days in music history that have received the name of the Day the Music Died. The first one happened on February 3, 1959, when musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper died in an airplane crash in Ohio. Several years later, in 1963, another plane crashed in Tennessee, taking the lives of Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and Cowboy Copas who were onboard.
Country music is firmly associated with the American countryside. But with time, this genre has become increasingly popular worldwide. One example of this is Indian singer Bal Kishore Das Loiwal who performs under the pseudonym of Bobby Cash. He built a career as a country music artist in Australia, and in 2005, received recognition from the Country Music Association of Nashville, Tennessee.
Australia has its own Country Music scene. As it did with rock, punk, pop and produced world class acts in all of them
Elvis Presley was a truck driver. However, to fulfill his dream of becoming a singer, he attended auditions whenever he could. During his very first stage performance at the Grand Ole Opry in Tennessee, Elvis was told by talent manager Jim Denny that he lacked talent and should go back to his previous occupation.
You probably love your motherland very much if you write a 158-verse-long national anthem. This is exactly how long the Greek anthem is. Singing it may take from six minutes to 35 years, depending on your style.
We know music is good for your mood and overall well-being, but researchers from the University of Pavia (Italy) proved that it physically helps your heart. It triggers physiological changes that modulate your blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory functions. And if a classical music phrase lasts for over 10 seconds, it causes the heart rate and some other parts of the cardiovascular system to synchronize with the music. At the same time, the study showed that music showed stronger physiological responses in musicians than in people with no musical training.
The longest team marathon drumming in the world lasted for 3 days, 8 hours, and 2 minutes. Janel Spalding, Aaron Houseago, Holly Jones, Ryan Murray, and Lorraine Dorrington played from August 26 to 29, 2016, with their performance being live-streamed all over the world.
There are two ways to read musical notes. In most Western countries they are known as Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si. In some others, these names are substituted with the first seven letters of the alphabet. However, seven notes are not a full octave. An octave consists of eight notes, where the eighth one is the same as the first one. And if you count all the sharps and flats in between, you get 12 notes.
It is common knowledge that different areas of our brain are responsible for different aspects of life. However, in 2011 Finnish researchers revealed in a groundbreaking study that when perceiving music, various areas of the brain, including those that control motor actions, emotions, and creativity, are all involved. This study helped them to understand how the brain processes rhythm, tonality and timbre, also known as sound color, as well as other aspects of music, and how expansive the effect of music is.
A sea organ might sound like something straight out of The Little Mermaid animation, but it does exist. After the destruction caused by World War II, the city of Zadar in Croatia underwent major reconstructions. One of them was a concrete wall on the city’s seacoast. The interesting part of this wall is located under large marble steps and is a set of tubes. When hit with sea waves, they produce musical sounds. After its completion in 2005, Zadar’s sea organ became very popular both among the locals and tourists.
Most countries have military orchestras, but there is only one whose military orchestra is larger than the actual army, and that’s Monaco. The country’s military orchestra counts 85 people. At the same time, its army counts 82 soldiers. This is understandable since Monaco is a pretty small country and the only time it put its army on alert was when the president of neighboring France threatened to cut the water and electricity supply in 1962 if an income tax wasn’t imposed on Monaco’s residents.
Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen is often considered to be pro-American. President Regan even used it for his reelection campaign in 1984. But in fact, the artist wrote it to express his anger about the way Vietnam veterans were treated by the country. He spoke in Rolling Stone magazine about their selflessness and the sacrifices they made.
Before the Renaissance, non-folk music was predominantly written and played in church services. After the Middle Ages, the Renaissance put more emphasis on humanism, which allowed musicians to experiment with new instruments and styles. The music they composed became less religious and more secular. One of the biggest things the Renaissance gave us was opera, which was created as an attempt to bring Ancient Greek theater back to life.
In Japanese, “karappo” means “empty”, and “okesutura” is the Japanese pronunciation of the word “orchestra.” So if you put these two words together you get “karaoke,” which translates into “empty orchestra.”
Even so many years after the Spice Girls disbanded, the individual members are still referred to by their nicknames. But interestingly, it was not the girls themselves or anyone at the label who created those nicknames. Early in their career, they did an interview for a famous British teen magazine, Top of the Pops, whose editor came up with the nicknames. All five of them stuck and were later officially used by the band.
The highest price a musical instrument was sold for is $15.9 million. Of course, it was a Stradivarius violin, namely the “Lady Blunt.” It was sold in 2011 at a price four times exceeding the previous record for a Stradivarius. Industry experts say that returns on Stradivarius and Guarneri del Gesu violins are about 10%-12% annually.
The biggest erhu ensemble gathered for a performance in Raoyang, China, on October 19, 2019. 2,024 participants played the traditional violin-like Chinese musical instrument for 5 minutes and 18 seconds. The concert was sponsored by Raoyang Gold Suona Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co. Ltd.
On November 13, 2009, the Tom Lee Music Company assembled 6,131 musicians in Hong Kong to participate in what would become a concert given by the largest harmonica ensemble in history. The entire performance lasted 7 minutes and 25 seconds.
No one is surprised by two people performing at a single piano. But how about 23 people? The students of Isidor Bajic Music School proved this to be possible on September 20, 2019, when they performed in Novi Sad (Serbia). The piece they played, titled Zora (“dawn” in Serbian) was composed by one of the school’s alumni specifically for the event.
When the Japanese pop group AKB48 started out, they only had 48 members, hence the name. However, with time, they decided the more the merrier, and currently, the band includes 130 members, not counting those who left the band throughout its existence. This makes AKB48 the largest pop group in the world.
The London Symphonic Orchestra was supposed to travel to the US for a performance aboard the infamous Titanic. However, as the launch of the ship was delayed due to an unrelated ship accident, the entire orchestra had to take a different ship to arrive at their destination on time. It was only in the US that they learned about the fate the Titanic met with.
Whoever tells you that Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, is dead, don’t believe them! He might not be with us physically, but today, he continues to be the best-selling solo artist in the world with over 1 billion sales worldwide. For a musician whose peak career fell in the 50s and 60s, that’s a tremendous achievement.
Research on the word 'Jazz' suggested that it is related to the word “jasm,” meaning “pep, energy” back in 1860. The first recorded use of this word wasn’t even connected with music. In a 1912 Los Angeles Times article, a minor league baseball pitcher called a pitch a “jazz ball” because “it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.”
Jazz ensembles vary in the number of performers and types of instruments, but the most basic one is called the piano trio. Consisting of a piano, a bass, and drums, it is absolutely enough to perform and share the essence of jazz with your audience.
A University of Sydney professor conducted a study examining the deaths of artists in the period between 1950 and June 2014. He compared the longevity as well as the proportion of suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths by sex and decade to the same indexes among the common US population. The conclusion he came to was not particularly reassuring: On average, musicians live 25 years less than general folks.
Italian composer Gioachino Rossini is one of the most famous opera writers in the history of music. Among his works, there is an opera called Tancredi which includes a piece Di Tanti Palpiti. Rossini himself called it the “rice aria” because he composed the entire piece while waiting for a dish of rice to finish cooking.
The word “orchestra” doesn’t indicate a particular number of musicians. Chamber orchestras are usually on the smaller side and include no more than fifty performers. Symphony and philharmonic orchestras go bigger, and you’ll often find over eighty musicians. Depending on the program, you can even expect more than a hundred performers in one orchestra.
On October 15, 2017, David Stanley and The Music Man Project gathered 1,521 triangle players to perform together as part of the Music is Magic concert in London. This ensemble was recorded in history as the largest triangle ensemble.
