Apart from cartoons, it is uncommon to hear music used in a humorous way. Part of the reason may be that, while it’s relatively easy to write funny lyrics, it’s much harder to make music sound funny. The 1990s musical
When Pigs Fly, conceived by Howard Crabtree and Mark Waldrop with lyrics by Waldrop and music by Dick Gallagher, used clever lyrics and sight gags to great effect, especially when juxtaposed with its rather straightforward Broadway musical style, but there was one number that used humor in an especially creative way.
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Tags: humor by Jon O
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In 1996, geophysicist Frank Scherbaum teamed up with composer Wolfgang Loos to release “Inner Earth: a seismosonic symphony” (Traumton Records), a recording of natural seismic signals from the earth that Loos creatively rearranged for the CD. The remarkable sounds that are produced — at once electronic and natural — are strange and mesmerizing. As Scherbaum writes, “The fault beats, the volcano whistles and howls, and the Earth rings and hums.” 
Many of us are familiar with the classical system of delineating the sections of the orchestra as strings, winds, brass and percussion. A more precise system — known as the Sachs-Hornbostel system — categorizes musical instruments according to how they produce sound. 
What would the Arctic sound like if it could be expressed musically? John Luther Adams is a composer who created a sound-and-light installation at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks that reflects that environment, called “The Place Where You Go to Listen.” Occupying a small room in the University’s Museum of the North, “The Place” translates data from seismological, meteorological and geomagnetic stations around Alaska into “an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound,” in the words of Alex Ross, writing in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker. 
