What's this song? Taped an hour of radio in 1983.
January 30, 2015 8:25 PM
For the past thirty years I've been trying to identify every song on a cassette tape I made from the radio. I have now found them all, except one.
Can anyone tell me what the artist and title of this song is? I have only two seconds of audio here.
Here’s the backstory behind my pointless three decade old mission…
In 1983, my family spent a summer in Italy. I was just a kid. When I got bored, I would sit with our boombox and record songs from the radio. Taping a song you liked off the radio was the 1980s equivalent of downloading a free mp3.
When the summer was over, and we returned home to Canada, I started trying to identify songs on the cassette. I sort of fell into it. A couple times a year, by happenstance, I would learn that song X was by band Y.
My older sister presented me with the earliest song identification. Several months after we returned to Canada, she heard the song “Work For Love” being played on Canadian radio. She told me the DJ had announced that the band was “Ministry.” In the mid and late 1980s there several times where I encountered one of the songs. For example, I’d hear one while listening to my friends’ records.
Once the web came into being, around ’93, I really started to look in ernest. It didn’t seem likely that I’d ever find all the songs, I just enjoyed satisfying my curiosity. I had become familiar with this cassette full of little musical snippets, and it was interesting to get to hear what the rest of a song was actually like.
In the mid 90’s researching a song on the internet meant: checking “song titles” on CD mail-order websites, such as CDNow. Trying to Google (oops… trying to “AltaVista” something) for information was hit and miss. There just weren’t as many webpages in existence. But it was already better than what came before, if you knew a probable song title, and just needed to find which artist recorded it.
Once MP3s came into existence, in the late nineties, research became easier still. At this point I’d probably whittled the number of unknown songs down to half. I was surprized how feasible it has been to find a song by “brute force” - i.e.: just listening to hundreds of songs in a given genre and year. I identified “Mirror of infinity” by listening to space rock en masse. It took a couple years, but I managed to find “Show You My Love“ the same way… listening to a whole bunch of early 80s funk and uh “Boogie.”
Now that services like Shazam and SoundHound exit, I’ve been able to whittle down the list by over a dozen songs.
I’m down to the final song, and I’m not sure I have it in me to bulk-listen to AOR from 1983! Hoping someone here knows what it is.
I have previously asked for help with this over at Reddit, but no dice so far. Here’s the thread, if anyone’s interested.
Also, for context, here’s the whole cassette tape. One hour of Italian radio in 1983, accompanied by the ramblings of a very obnoxious ten year old.
In 1983, my family spent a summer in Italy. I was just a kid. When I got bored, I would sit with our boombox and record songs from the radio. Taping a song you liked off the radio was the 1980s equivalent of downloading a free mp3.
When the summer was over, and we returned home to Canada, I started trying to identify songs on the cassette. I sort of fell into it. A couple times a year, by happenstance, I would learn that song X was by band Y.
My older sister presented me with the earliest song identification. Several months after we returned to Canada, she heard the song “Work For Love” being played on Canadian radio. She told me the DJ had announced that the band was “Ministry.” In the mid and late 1980s there several times where I encountered one of the songs. For example, I’d hear one while listening to my friends’ records.
Once the web came into being, around ’93, I really started to look in ernest. It didn’t seem likely that I’d ever find all the songs, I just enjoyed satisfying my curiosity. I had become familiar with this cassette full of little musical snippets, and it was interesting to get to hear what the rest of a song was actually like.
In the mid 90’s researching a song on the internet meant: checking “song titles” on CD mail-order websites, such as CDNow. Trying to Google (oops… trying to “AltaVista” something) for information was hit and miss. There just weren’t as many webpages in existence. But it was already better than what came before, if you knew a probable song title, and just needed to find which artist recorded it.
Once MP3s came into existence, in the late nineties, research became easier still. At this point I’d probably whittled the number of unknown songs down to half. I was surprized how feasible it has been to find a song by “brute force” - i.e.: just listening to hundreds of songs in a given genre and year. I identified “Mirror of infinity” by listening to space rock en masse. It took a couple years, but I managed to find “Show You My Love“ the same way… listening to a whole bunch of early 80s funk and uh “Boogie.”
Now that services like Shazam and SoundHound exit, I’ve been able to whittle down the list by over a dozen songs.
I’m down to the final song, and I’m not sure I have it in me to bulk-listen to AOR from 1983! Hoping someone here knows what it is.
I have previously asked for help with this over at Reddit, but no dice so far. Here’s the thread, if anyone’s interested.
Also, for context, here’s the whole cassette tape. One hour of Italian radio in 1983, accompanied by the ramblings of a very obnoxious ten year old.
I got nothin'. (Got a similar project going myself -- it's weird how some little fragment of music will stay with you, forever, if it's been in your life for a long time...).
Your fragment sounds like a repetitious sequence from a larger whole -- what if you duped it repeatedly to get a larger sample to work with?
posted by Bron at 8:15 AM on January 31, 2015
Your fragment sounds like a repetitious sequence from a larger whole -- what if you duped it repeatedly to get a larger sample to work with?
posted by Bron at 8:15 AM on January 31, 2015
Does the radio station still exist? Why not try contacting them and see what they say?
If they are really bored they might even turn it into a radio contest to see which listeners might be able to identify the song.
posted by rancher at 10:43 AM on January 31, 2015
If they are really bored they might even turn it into a radio contest to see which listeners might be able to identify the song.
posted by rancher at 10:43 AM on January 31, 2015
I switched stations all the way through so I'm not sure which it was. It's still not a bad idea, I'll have to mull over the best way to do so.
posted by Italian Radio at 8:29 PM on January 31, 2015
posted by Italian Radio at 8:29 PM on January 31, 2015
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by freya_lamb at 7:13 AM on January 31, 2015