As the minutes rolled past, and then hours and eventually the entire afternoon, our APUSH test drew nearer and nearer. But rather than showing the photocopied pages of our history textbook, our computer screens displayed an incessant list of musical memes: “YMCA”; “Take Me Home, Country Road”; the Wii channel music — all in the glorious voice of the otamatone.
The otamatone “instrument,” which produces beautiful or horrifying nasal shrieks, depending on who you ask, was originally developed in 1998 by the Japanese toy company CUBE. Shaped like an eighth-note or a tadpole, again depending on who you ask, the “instrument” is powered by two AA batteries. Applying pressure to the neck of the electrical instrument creates its distinct sound while varying the the openness of its jaw regulates the dynamics and vibrato.
The sound is unmistakably nasal, almost duck-like and reminiscent of the classical oboe — or better yet a kazoo — with an astute YouTube commentator comparing its timbre to “a futuristic techno bagpipe” that was “[brought] back to the present day.”
Clearly, this angelic voice was a successor in the long line of meme-tastic music farces of instruments like the kazoo and melodica.
Given that it’s the destiny of every Asian boy and girl to master a musical instrument as a rite of passage, we decided that as failures of traditional musicians this was yet another chance to fulfill our destinies. Elaine quit cello, and Jeffrey plays viola (not violin, viola), but maybe with the otamatone we could finally become the musical prodigies our parents had once expected us to be.
Or maybe it was just the memes. Yeah OK, we were definitely inspired by the memes.
Dashing onto Amazon, we wasted $20 of our parents’ money to order one.
After about a week of impatiently waiting, the instrument arrived in its glorious Amazon packaging, which we promptly tore open. Even before the first note was played, it had already awed us: Batteries were included.
With guarantees that the lives of our graphing calculators and other AA battery-powered gadgets weren’t in jeopardy, we began to experiment. We basked in the musical euphony for five seconds before our utter lack of musicality caught up with us.
We had seen countless videos on YouTube of people effortlessly playing the otamatone (occasionally with too much seriousness that it became comical), but we just could not manage to get the notes out right.
Even the duck-soup “Hot Cross Buns” was beyond our combined skill of approximately 10 years of playing music. The fluctuating, out-of-tune quarter tones sounded more like a Yoko Ono scream performance than the comforting nursery rhyme we were intending to play.
After a taste of the “Burnt Cross Buns” we had desiccated musically, we took out the batteries and resigned ourselves to being otamatone washouts.