Adriano Celentano - Prisencolinensinainciusol on HackerTube: recommended by 6 Hacker News commenters across 6 separate months, 2016–2024.
music · evergreen
A 1972 song by Adriano Celentano whose lyrics are nonsense syllables designed to sound like American English to non-English speakers. It is a rock and rap-flavored novelty track with a video.
It comes up whenever threads touch on fake languages, accents, or gibberish that sounds plausible, and commenters like sharing it with people who haven't heard it.
“For anyone who hasn't seen it before, here's a song by an Italian composer made to sound like American English”
17 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Speaking of gibberish english: I know this has been on YouTube for 10 years, but there are always newcomers who haven't had their brain melted by it: ▶ this video
in “Fakelish – Fake English word generator” · View on HN
I call your mis-understood English song, and raise you one song purposefully written to use fake-English sounding 'words': > The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, however the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right".[8][9] Andrew Khan, writing in The Guardian, later described the sound as reminiscent of Bob Dylan's output from the 1980s.[9] > Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers. The intent was to demonstrate how English sounds to people who do not understand the language proficiently. "Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything."[6] * [link] * Audio-only: [link] * M/V: ▶ this video Quite catchy.
in “Fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music (2022)” · View on HN
I love foreign fantasy representations of America. My favorite is the Italian music video of a high school class where they sing in made up English. ▶ this video
in “How Wes Anderson Turned The New Yorker Into “The French Dispatch”” · View on HN
For anyone who hasn't seen it before, here's a song by an Italian composer made to sound like American English, but since it only uses nonsense even English speakers can get a bit of a feel for what we sound like to others: ▶ this video
in “Walmart pulls children's toy that swears and sings in Polish about doing cocaine” · View on HN
The song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" has a similar effect: it's meant to sound exactly like American English to non-native speakers, but is actually just gibberish. Works amazingly well. ▶ this video
in “Name one thing in this photo” · View on HN
There's a fantastic English-sounding song by an italian singer ▶ this video Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano. It hurts my brain when I try to pick out meaning from the phenomes.
in “How to Master an Accent” · View on HN
This is largest juxtaposition between familiarity and nostalgia against an outright alien uncanny facade of fiction. A dissociative, delirious, memory. Orthogonal to our current experience, but barely. These two songs are the closest I could find in an analogous auditory form. ▶ this video [link]
in “Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough” · View on HN
Using generative Natural Intelligence, an italian wrote a top 40 song that sounded to 1970s non-english speakers as if it had had english lyrics: ▶ this video (compare "abstract comics", "asemic writing")
in “Cellar Door: a quest to find the most beautiful word in English” · View on HN
Well, no. This is a reasonable guess turned strangely confidently wrong and opinionated. Voice acting is quite literally done a sentence or at most a paragraph at a time. Often the recording order is completely different from the script. An actor may very well record his final scene on the first day of a project, after the whole character arc has transpired. But you know, acting. They get fed a line with stage direction and do a bunch of takes and somehow it works. Heck you might be a full blown Italian who can't say a word in English but with the right kind of jacket it comes out a banger: ▶ this video You mention Eleven labs being ahead, check out Suno. There is no LLM-scale anything involved there. The voice in this context is a musical instrument and there are lots of viable ways to tackle this problem domain.
in “ChatTTS-Best open source TTS Model” · View on HN
Only if it was trained on a corpus of existing translations. Just training on existing sounds might give us a whale sound generator. But it would be the equivalent of Prisencolinensinainciusol: ▶ this video
in “Scientists Have Reported a Breakthrough in Understanding Whale Language” · View on HN
> I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. So there's this [link] and more interestingly ▶ this video
in “Cantonese Font with Pronunciation” · View on HN
Reminds me of the Italian song made up of English sounding gibberish (although some real words do sneak in, like "alright") ▶ this video
in “Fakelish – Fake English word generator” · View on HN
Reminds me of a song from 1972 by an Italian comedian. The song is called "Prisencolinensinainciusol" which means...well, nothing. It's gibberish. In fact, the entire song is nonsense lyrics made to sound like English. ▶ this video
in “Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese” · View on HN
Despite the title, there's not much commentary on how Chinese sounds to Korea and Japan. I was hoping for something like Prisencolinensinainciusol's supposed American-English-to-Italians: [link] ▶ this video
in “What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)” · View on HN
Hot damn, technology is catching up with humans' manual creations. Your video is reminiscent of Adriano Celentano's song "Prisencolinensinainciusol"[1]–whereby he created a song to represent what English sounds like to non-native speakers[2]. [1] ▶ this video [2] [link]
in “AC/DC Song Made with a Markov Chain” · View on HN
Well, now I know what's going on if the real world starts looking like that. And I bet it will sound like this: ▶ this video
in “Name one thing in this photo” · View on HN
An english gibberish song: ▶ this video . I could not find the original that I heard, but this is most of it. Hilarious.
in “How to Master an Accent” · View on HN