Doug Anderson, amateur songwriter and President of the Chaos Computer Club at East High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, nervously waited in the rotunda of the Mall of America. He was about to coordinate the singing of one of his songs in the largest flash mob production he'd ever attempted. On the rotunda's performance stage, a polka band was setting up to do a Christmas concert, and their preliminary tune-ups were already drawing an audience of weary shoppers—an audience Doug hoped to take advantage of. On cue, Ingrid and Linnea Johansson started to sing the opening notes of Tra La La Hey Hey Hey, in their bold, lovely voices. They clearly enjoyed singing Doug's catchy harmonic progressions and syncopated rhythms, and their singing was effectively drawing in the polka lovers even as other shoppers stopped and stared.
Six weeks earlier, Doug had used a parallel computer that he'd constructed from discarded graphics cards to carry out a musical analysis of every hit popular song since 1964. Doug processed them through algorithms which scored them on sixty-four different metrics, and then subjected the scores to a huge statistical analysis in an attempt to identify the key factors associated with their success. Doug was pleased with the results: While he hadn't been completely successful in determining the reasons for the success of some songs (Paul Anka's You're Having My Baby was particularly mystifying), he had discovered an eigenvector that he called "Catchiness," with a set of weighted attributes that, while not intuitive, certainly seemed reasonable. And he couldn't argue with the results: Classic ear worms by ABBA, Adele—even It's a Small World After All—scored highly on his measure. Doug had decided to write a song to validate his findings.
He had worked on the melody for two weeks. He worked to maximize the catchiness attributes on a virtual synthesizer, making sure that none of them was under-represented. The higher the scores, the catchier the song sounded. But if the scores were unbalanced, and particularly if the scores weren't high enough on some of the attributes, the song became annoying, even irritating. It was difficult for Doug to get all the elements balanced, but he eventually managed to max out all of them except for Factor 7, which, try as he might, he could only get to 90%. It seemed to be enough, though—the resulting melody was quite pleasant.
Contrary to popular opinion, according to his analysis, the lyrics to songs didn't really matter much, provided the melody had the right hooks. Doug therefore kept the lyrics simple. He named the song, "Tra La La Hey Hey Hey," after the words in its chorus.
As Ingrid and Linnea reached the first chorus of Tra La La Hey Hey Hey, a dozen of their friends joined in. Shoppers on all three levels of the mall stopped and watched from the balconies as the music soared through the rotunda. Doug was pleased to see that the security guards just watched; they made no attempt to interfere. One of them was even swaying with the music. The sound of singing spread north and south from the rotunda along the east concourse; shoppers stopped what they were doing and strained to hear.
By the beginning of the second verse, the crowds had grown two deep on the balconies, and the floor of the rotunda was filled. The melody was easy to learn, and many of the shoppers started to hum along with the singers. When the second chorus began, the rest of the East High School Chorus joined in, and the members of the school's rhythmic dance troupe started their routine. When the "Tra la la hey hey hey" of the chorus started, shoppers started singing it, too.
As the East High singers went through the second chorus, Doug noticed that a lot more of the shoppers were singing. A surprisingly large number. Almost all of them, in fact. The words to the chorus were easy enough, but something else was going on. The many and varied voices added overtones to the melody that Doug hadn't tried—couldn't have tried—on his synthesizer. It was almost like a contagion: A wave of feverish singing, attracting more and more shoppers, growing louder and louder. Doug suddenly realized what was happening: The added voices had maximized Factor 7.
Perhaps because he was the one that wrote the song, Doug was mostly unaffected by the singing—he didn't feel the need to join in, at least—and was thus able to observe the effects on the crowd as the verses and the chorus of his song circled around the mall.
Everyone within earshot was now humming along with the verses, and singing the Tra La La Hey Hey Hey chorus. The volume grew louder and louder as more and more people stopped what they were doing, listened, and joined in. Their singing was heard by others farther down the shopping concourses, and they started to sing as well. Eventually, just like a crowd doing the wave at a football game, the song coursed all the way around the mall on all three levels and met at the atrium on the west side, delayed by half a verse. By the time the shoppers in the Rotunda were singing the final chorus, every man, woman, and child in the entire Mall was singing some part of the song.
When the song ended, the crowd in the rotunda cheered wildly. But before they could go back to their shopping, the sound of the chorus being sung in the far reaches of the mall reflected back to them, like ripples in a pool of humanity. The crowd in the rotunda started to sing the chorus all over again. Their singing in turn restarted the shoppers at the far side of the mall, and suddenly the shoppers on the west side and the shoppers on the east side were singing the chorus of Tra La La Hey Hey Hey to each other in self-reinforcing harmonic rounds.
It's like I've created a phase-locked loop out of human beings, Doug thought. How weird is that? It never occurred to him that imagining that 210,000 singing shoppers were an oscillator circuit was a bit weird, as well.
The problem was that it didn't seem to be ending. The mall was into its fourteenth round of Tra La La Hey Hey Hey, and no one was stopping. If anything, the phenomenon was growing stronger, with shoppers of all ages singing at the top of their lungs and dancing up and down the concourses.
By the fiftieth round, Doug was in a panic. Some elderly shoppers were dropping to the floor in exhaustion, singing "Tra La La Hey Hey Hey" and feebly waving their arms until they could sing no more. The children would be next, Doug realized, and even the fittest shoppers couldn't go on forever. Doug tried to drown out the song in his head as he frantically looked around the rotunda and tried to think of a solution.
His attention was drawn to the polka band, whose members were singing along with the rest of the crowd. But they weren't playing their instruments. That's it!, he thought. If incompatible instrumental accompaniment was added to Tra La La Hey Hey Hey, it would no longer be a catchy tune!
Doug made his way over to the musicians. He pretended to be singing lustily, and pointed to the instruments, pantomiming playing an accordion. The band members caught on right away, and soon they were adding accordion and concertina music to the swelling chorus of Tra La La Hey Hey Hey. To Doug's relief, the plan worked immediately: The sound of the polka instruments was so incompatible with the catchiness of his tune that the singing was immediately disrupted. Unfortunately, Doug had miscalculated how irritating his tune would be when combined with accordion music: The crowd not only stopped singing; they started fleeing.
Fortunately for Doug, the Mall's emergency exits were well-marked, and there were no serious injuries during what has since been called the quickest mass evacuation in the history of the United States. Unfortunately for Doug, some of the fleeing shoppers never actually heard the accordion music; they were just pushed outside by the evacuating crowd. Some of them were still humming when they reached the outside, and Tra La La Hey Hey Hey was every bit as catchy outdoors as inside. Tra La La Hey Hey Hey spread to both coasts within 48 hours.
It's been three months since Black Friday, and the nation is recovering from the Tra La La disaster. Firefighters still carry accordions on their rigs to disrupt spontaneous outbreaks of singing, although those are becoming less common now that justifiable homicide statutes have been amended to include an affirmative defense against humming and whistling.
As for Doug Anderson?
As soon as he got off probation, he got hired by an ad agency to conduct analyses of the factors that make TV commercials popular.