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Chapter 1: What is the origin of the music piece 'Frolic'?
You know this piece of music, right? You know from where it originates? Except I'm 99.999% sure you don't. It's called Frolic, and it's composed by Luciano Michelini. Luciano wrote Frolic in the 1970s for an Italian film called La Bellissima Estate, or The Beautiful Summer. From there, it was added to various music libraries and ended up being used in lots of commercials here in the U.S.
One day, Larry David saw one such commercial for a bank. He liked the music, filed it away, and when it came time to pick a theme song for his HBO comedy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, he chose Frolic. And from there, it became the soundtrack to a million memes, shorthand for walking yourself into an especially awkward or embarrassing situation.
Frolic might be the most famous piece of what is sometimes called library music, background music, sync music, or just sync.
Chapter 2: How did 'Frolic' become popular in the U.S.?
And on Today Explained, we are living in peak sync. Recommendations can be great. Maybe someone recommended this podcast, and here you are. But home projects are a little different. If the podcast isn't your thing, you might lose a few minutes from your day. But if you hire your cousin's neighbor to mount your TV, you might end up with a lopsided screen and wall damage.
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Hire the right pro today. My name is Ryan Francis Bradley. I am a writer, mostly for the New York Times Magazine, mostly these days about music.
And you recently went on a little journey with a branch of music called Sync Music. Where did it begin?
Right. So it began, as things do, with my wife and I watching Love Island. Tonight... There was this song that came on that sounded like a pop song. It was a pop song. But it was very weirdly specific to the moment in Love Island. And I was like, what is this song? As one does, I pulled out Shazam on my iPhone and tried to Shazam it and nothing came up and I was like, that's strange.
And I did a little digging around various streaming services and tried to search the lyrics and couldn't find it. Found a Reddit thread about other people asking about this song.
What the song that starts to play when they call up the ladies and Austin gets the first text.
Shazam, Google, and ChatGPT fail me.
I was like, what is this song? And then I just started calling people and asking them about what this was. And then I found this whole world of sync music. Did you ever find out what the song was? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a song called Loves of War.
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Chapter 3: What is sync music and how does it function?
I think you can get depressed about where music is today and how it's starting to sound the same. I feel on the other hand, I'm kind of like music has always reflected where a culture is and music has always tried to, musicians have always tried to craft songs that are going to be wildly popular and get heard. And if this is the way to do it, then so be it.
I will say after reporting this, look, I'm a middle-aged music snob, and a lot of this stuff I was a little snooty about going into the reporting. And then, No surprise, you get into it and you talk to the people behind these tracks and you see that they're coming at it with real intent and real interest and the real human thing that makes music interesting to other humans.
And it became a lot more interesting to me. And it made me understand pop music that I was a little dismissive of a little bit better and appreciate it a little bit more. Oh my gosh, we didn't do the thing. The elephant in the room. There is a major elephant in the room, a thing you cannot pay.
But it's like, no, I'm here and I'm here to stay and I'm here to F your S up. And that elephant, of course, is artificial intelligence. Of course, of course. The elephant, when today explained, returns.
Thank you.
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