Music theorist Megan Megan Lavengood recently took to Twitter to try and identify all of the songs on a Baby Einstein toy.
It’s a particularly fun read, and I had an especially good time with it since we have this toy and our 1.5 year old has played with it off and on since birth.
Click the link below to read the entire thing. It comes complete with audio examples of the toy and a Spotify playlist of all the pieces of music they are based on.
What actually are all these songs on the Baby Einstein Take Along Tunes toy? – Megan L. Lavengood:
For the uninitiated, the Take Along Tunes toy plays a series of excerpts from Classical- and Baroque-era (mostly) orchestral works while flashing colored lights; its purpose is to distract and occupy your baby while you’re forcing them to do something they don’t particularly enjoy (in our case, diaper changes). As musical toys go, it’s really not annoying, because the tunes are pleasant and the excerpts are long enough not to drive you up the wall with repetitiveness.
While there are some obvious, Greatest-Hits-of-the-Classical-Era-type selections (William Tell, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik), some other excerpts stumped me.