Once you watch the below video from Quartz, you won't be able to un-hear it: the ubiquitous musical signature that musician Patrick Metzger has named "the millennial whoop."
"It's a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale," writes Metzger, "typically starting on the fifth. The rhythm is usually straight 8th-notes, but it may start on the downbeat or on the upbeat in different songs. A singer usually belts these notes with an 'Oh' phoneme, often in a 'Wa-oh-wa-oh' pattern. And it is in so many pop songs it's criminal."
The similarity has been the basis of at least one partially successful copyright-infringement lawsuit, but trying to own the whoop is an uphill battle — as Metzger notes, the sequence dates back to the mists of folk history. The Quartz video points out that it's in Beethoven pieces including Für Elise as well, not to mention countless other pieces of classical music.
When it comes to music, sometimes great minds — from Beethoven to the Buggles — just think alike.
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