Via theferrett: Napoleon Dynamite dances to the Numa Numa song.

This, and the original Numa Numa geek, have to make it on my eventual vaporware disc of The Best of the Internet. I have this silly idea that the Internet is in fact a culture unto itself, based on how the people who do not live here look at me when I make casual references to the things that most LJ people have at least heard of in passing. The Best of the Internet would be a CD with some of the best and most central to the web culture things out there. There would be a lot of silly dancing: Yatta! might be on there, and of course Zero Wing and an essay explaining same, and perhaps some badgers. There would be collections of links to useful resources, along with explanations: free webmail, Wikipedia, Snopes, IMDB, Google. And you could hand a copy of this disk to your utterly net-clueless friend and either let them play around with it or point out your favorite things, without having to contend with their dial-up internet in order to download quite a few of those things...

Dragostea Din Tei, the song in question, is utterly addictive. It's poppy, perky, and I found myself trying to sing it in the shower. It took a few tries before I was satisfied that I was actually hitting the notes right, as it's a moderately difficult song.

I wouldn't say that I have perfect pitch. I'm functionally illiterate as far as music goes: I can follow along with music, I know the names of the pitch-notes, and I know the names of the symbol-notes and other musical symbols, but if you give me a sheet of music, I can't read it and hear the notes in my head the way I hear the words in my head when I read text. I have to sound it out with a piano or something, and my rhythm is utterly off. But when I know how something sounds, I can tell when something hits the pitch true or not.

I know there are music notation programs out there that will use synthesizer to play back to you what you've just written. I know there are programs out there that will take scanned-in music sheets and convert these to a score in the program. I know that a computer can generate a pitch; I know it is possible to see if something matches a pitch or not.

Vaporware: Rehearsal Studio. You can scan in your score that you're supposed to be practicing, confirm that the scan took, and correct any mistakes the scan-transcription may have made. (Added a dot, deleted a dot, misinterpreted something, etc.) The computer will play the song back to you as it's supposed to be sung or played. You plug in your microphone, do some practice pitches and timings to set the two of you on the same page. You set the program's metronome for a time you can keep up with for rehearsal, and start up. The computer compares your pitch to true, based on where you're supposed to be in the song. It may or may not play along with you, depending.

There may already be something like that out there, but that would be utterly useful if you've never heard what you're supposed to be singing, and can't hear it in your head like I can't, and don't have a tuning utility in your head like I actually do.