On Tumblr, a user named Formeldeharv fed Mariah Carey’s holiday classic through a MIDI converter, turning it into a piano track, and then turned that back into an MP3. It is fascinating and sounds like a piano falling down an escalator for eternity. I love it, and I am afraid of it.
Precisely why you can almost hear the elusive chanteuse’s vocals on the track is unclear. If you want to get technical, Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic theorizes:
I think it’s because the MIDI converter perfectly transcribed the formant of each vowel to piano. That is: Every vowel sound produced by a human mouth doesn’t just contain one main tone, but many tones above and below it. Different vowels don’t sound the same in part because the shape of a speaker’s mouth naturally accentuates different overtones and undertones.
Sounds plausible. I believe it.
