[SamAdams76]

I remember hearing this song on the radio back in the early 1970s as a child. At the time, it was an astonishing display of high technology. I wondered for years just how they could get dogs to sing like that. They may have landed men on the moon during this same time frame but in my opinion, The Singing Dogs ranks right up there with that achievement. One small bark for a dog but one giant step for canines.

Listen to them sing on YouTube

[Diana in Wisconsin]

[JoeProBono]

[SamAdams76]

In order to appreciate the magnitude of this musical achievement, one must realize that this was a lot harder to do before computers were widely available. Just for this one song, they had to record HUNDREDS of hours of barking dogs, then they had to run each bark through a variable-speed oscillator to identify the proper pitch so that they could edit the sounds into a song that fits in rhythm with the backing track.

The same white-coated men who ran the IBM mainframes for the Apollo program were no doubt contracted out to work on this magnus opus. In fact, I do not think I exaggerate when I state that The Singing Dogs was as important to music as the Manhattan Project was to the atomic bomb.

[rawcatslyentist]

Thanks to South Park, I can’t listen to O Holy Night without giggling.

[raccoonradio]

Later there was the Jingle Cats.

An early episode of Monty Python had a guy (Terry Jones I think) named Arthur Lemmings who had “musical mice”. He puts mice in a box and prepares to...hit them with mallets (don’t worry, it’s all fake). “Now, I have arranged 23 white mice...mice that have been arranged in a specific order. Now, this one is E sharp, and this one is G. Now I will have them squeak ‘The Bells of St Mary’. On the mouse organ. ‘The Bells of St Mary’...”
He starts and soon gets dragged off by security...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9nGyPz9uT0

[smalltownslick]

I remember the first time I heard it on the radio. I was working at a small radio station in NH, but heard this on some other station. It cracked me up. Went lookig for it, but we hadn’t received a copy. Somehow I found this original 1955 release with the other songs on it, in the basement somewhere, I don’t really remember where. (But this one didn’t have the songs separated, it was just a medley) That whole Christmas season, I manipulated that thing to be able to play just the Jingle Bells part. But it was instructive - just the other day my sister and I were talking about it, and I told her it had originally come out in 1955 - she was surprised. Just think that all those dogs were probably dead before they achieved “fame.”

I appreciated the article with pictures of the actual dogs.

[dangus]

Actually, I believe Dr Demento is using a pitch bender, much later technology.

[Revolting cat!]

Ah, the classics of Rock'n'Roll.

(And you can be sure the dogs got screwed out of the royalties due them just like Richie Valens and all the other great artistes!)

[Revolting cat!]

It brought tears to my eyes hearing them last Friday evening while waiting at the checkout line in my local discount grocery store. The black woman behind me cursed the poor dogs while I was grooving along glad the line moved slowly so I could hear the symphony to the end.