The Musical South Pacific

The BBC has an interesting page allowing you to find your city's "musical twin. " Here's the premise: someone's analyzed the information from Shazam, the music recognition app. Specifically, they've found which songs are most commonly accessed in each city. Then they've gone through all the cities, trying to find city's that look up the same songs. So now you can look up your city, and find another city somewhere else in the world that seems to have the same taste in music as your home.

So I looked up Kitchener, and I was surprised to find that out musical twin is Muar, Malaysia. It's a similarly sized city, about halfway between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. So there's an interesting but useless but of trivia. Just to compare, I looked up other cities around southern Ontario. Toronto got Beer Sheva, Israel. But then London, Ontario got Sandakan, Malaysia. It's at the other end of Malaysia, but still, that's weird. So I looked up other cities nearby that were in the database.  Windsor, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, NY, and Detroit were all paired with Johor Bahru, Malaysia, which is near Muar. Erie, PA was partnered with Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.

So what's going on? I was beginning to suspect that this study was a fraud, and they just put in a bunch of random cities from Malaysia because that would sound exotic and impressive. I tried cities from other parts of the U.S. and Canada, and there were still lots of Malaysian results, though not as completely as in this part of the world. And I tried some British cities, but they were mostly trying with New Zealand.

So I have no idea what to make of this. Apparently we have a strange musical connection with people on the other side of the world. I'm sure you could come up with some impressive pseudoscience to explain it, involving the magnetic field of the earth's core to transmit or thoughts. And after you've explained that, try explaining why people all over the world need an app to recognize Adele's "Hello." Seriously, it was number one everywhere, probably even Malaysia.