The Spookiest Thing just happened

[Martin Milner]

I was in my room at the top of the house on my PC (here, in other words) and downstairs I had left an MD playing of chat & tunes that I had made as an Audio Diary while visiting Ireland in March 2002.

I had to go downstairs to check something, and as I had a fiddle next to me, I grabbed it and played Haste to The Wedding as I went down. When I reached the bottom, the MD started playing Haste to the Wedding It was myself playing whistle!

As the tune is over in a minute, and there's about 4 hours of stuff on the MD, that's got to be a 1/240 chance right there. Add the fact that I was playing both instruments, not too shabbily (at least I recognised the tune), two years and three months apart and yet near as a smidge in time with myself, that's got to be a healthy dose of randomness. Also I haven't played that MD in two years since that trip.

Anyone else found themselves playing the same tune on two instruments at the same time, 27 months apart? Major Time warp.

I'm now going to lie down and think about the randomness of it all. There's got to be a great tune name here somewhere.

The expression on my avatar once again sums up what I can barely express in words.

[dubhlinn]

Spooky is right.....!
The whole thing reminded me of a Christy Moore song called "Matty" where a man goes out to the pub for a bit of crack and on the way ,meets himself coming back. This spooked him so much that he died of fright .
The song is based on a true story from the songwriters family.My copy of the CD is out on loan at the moment and I can't recall the songwriters name.

Having played fiddle for many years, I would question the wisdom of doing it while coming down a flight of stairs!
That alone is pretty spooky.

Slan,
D.

[anniemcu]

go out and buy a lottery ticket, NOW!...

[Daniel_Bingamon]

I've sung songs in my head only to hear someone else start singing the same song a few minutes later.

[Joseph E. Smith]

Pretty cool story. I think that you have already named the tune you might compose after this experience..."27 months apart".

[Chuck_Clark]

Forgive my skepticism. FWIW, I don't think its as spooky or as coincidental as it looks on the surface.

1. Martin first recorded the disk
2. Martin has listened to the disk often enough that he is, at least subconsciously, deeply aware of its sequence
3. As Martin starts downstairs, only encountering the fiddle is coincidental. Listening to the recording and knowing its sequence, once instrument is in hand, choice of music is subconsciously preordained.

It's no different from playing or singing along with a tape or disk you know. As one song stops, your mind automatically inserts a pause of about the right length and then starts (correctly) the next song.

[irishduffy]

chuck people are trying to have fun forget the logic.

[avanutria]

2. Martin has listened to the disk often enough that he is, at least subconsciously, deeply aware of its sequence

Not true - he only just found the disk this morning, and hadn't listened to it since it had been first recorded. It was being played for the first time in two years.

Martin, if you write a tune called 27 Months or something, you could make it one of those multi-parters that can all be played simultaneously, like The Butterfly or Kit White's 2

Edited to add:

3. As Martin starts downstairs, only encountering the fiddle is coincidental.

Actually, knowing Martin and his collection I'd say that's the only part that is not coincidental!

[Azalin]

2. Martin has listened to the disk often enough that he is, at least subconsciously, deeply aware of its sequence

Not true - he only just found the disk this morning, and hadn't listened to it since it had been first recorded. It was being played for the first time in two years.

Yeah, here's what Martin wrote:

Also I haven't played that MD in two years since that trip.

Martin, how many tunes can you play on your fiddle? If the answer is "5", and if most of the tunes you know on fiddle you also once played on whistle, then chances arent that slim after all

PS: Beth, can you stop editing your message? I'm trying to quote you and I think your messages changed 3 times in the process

[avanutria]

Heehee, well I must have finished before you posted because otherwise it would say that I edited it. Serves you right for trying to quote the message immediately above yours

[Nanohedron]

What Martin told us happens to me now and again, usually when I'm going to sessions and I've got a particular tune going on in my head. Sometimes it's new and I'm trying to reinforce it, and sometimes it's an oldie and I'm just enjoying it, or working out variations for my fingers to tackle if I can remember what I've come up with. Anyway, there's a fiddler in particular who'll spontaneously launch into that same tune after I sit down, and a piper who'll do this too. Weird. Sometimes the whole group'll be cranking away at the very tune as I walk through the door. This isn't quite as remakable to me when the basic local session fare are being played, but I do wonder what the odds for such synchronicity are. It's when the lesser-heard tunes that I'm thinking about get played that it gets spookiest.

Don't know how many times they've heard me exclaim, "Man, I was just now thinking about that one!!"

[The Weekenders]

I was practicing Siege of Ennis one night. I stopped playing and channel surfed to Bravo. They were playing an Irish movie and there was a dance scene in the village and the ceilidh band started playing, you guessed it, Siege of Ennis. Semi-spooky.

[Martin Milner]

Martin, how many tunes can you play on your fiddle? If the answer is "5", and if most of the tunes you know on fiddle you also once played on whistle, then chances arent that slim after all

Fair question. I know about 30-50 tunes on the fiddle I'd guess. Haste is definitely one tune I specifically transferred from memory because it's a great jig. I have tunes I used to play on Mandolin that transferred easy onto fiddle. There's maybe 4-5 tunes I can play on both fiddle & whistle. That cuts the odds a bit.

The spooky thing was, this MD is mostly chat, with maybe a tune or tune set every 20 mins. I wasn't very good on the whistle (still aren't), and mostly played slow airs. Most of the time I was unable to just whip out a whistle and play, because of people nearby, so I only played in my B&B in the evenings, or occasionally when nobody was around. This tune came after about 5 minutes of chat, all by itself.

I just had a 3 hour house session/practise with some friends, including a pipe/flute/whistle player off this board. He started a hornpipe and I joined in, but then he finished and told me the name, I'd never heard it before.

Think I'll go get that lottery ticket now.

[IDAwHOa]

What is REALLY spooky is needing to make a phone call to someone, picking up the handset, not hearing a dial tone, saying "Hello" and having the person you were just going to call be on the other side saying "Hello" back to you. I think that has only happened to me twice, maybe three times.

Kinda funny once you get over the shock of it all.

[Monster]

Well let's see, one time back in the day of vinyl I was listening to an LP of Tchaikovsky's 4th symphony. ( the one where the fourh movement goes like this, Da Da Da Da Dum, Da Da Dum Dum ). So anyway the lp finishes up and I flip on the tuner to FM and Tchaik 4 fourth movement comes rumbling out. Momentarily I was confused as I looked at the lp, which was no longer rotating, it slowly dawned on me that the FM station could be playing their own recording of Tchaik 4.

It was sort of freaky at the time.