North Korea bans singing in harmony

In his 2017 New Year message to the nation, North Korea’s president Kim Jong-Il has announced a ban on singing in harmony and listening to harmonious songs, ignoring a millennium-old Korean tradition of singers accompanying each other to enhance the depth and tone of its vernacular music. The paranoid government has asserted that harmonies are being used for spy communications. The national radio broadcaster already jams numerous incoming radio transmissions on shortwave and has become increasingly concerned that foreign coded messages are being deciphered by sophisticated audio equipment which unpacks the resonances of human voices combined at certain pitches. Enya, the Irish singer, who does all her own harmonies, has criticised the ban as ridiculous. ‘Nothing could be further from my mind than secret coding when I combine my various voices on each song. It’s a tragedy: I have a loyal North Korean fan base which will now be deprived of my music.’ However, the North Korean secret service has long suspected Enya of being used by foreign spy agencies to transmit revolutionary messages to Korea. Jim McLeod, a retired CIA audio specialist says: ‘It’s well known that when you reach a certain pitch singing in the bathroom, for instance, something special can happen which amplifies your voice well beyond its normal range. Then, when voices are combined in the bathroom in harmony, the interplay of sounds can reach another level entirely. The North Koreans suspect that advanced techniques using these principles are being adapted to send coded messages over the airwaves.’ Worse still, the North Koreans are taking this further by banning harmonies at live concerts. North Korean scientists have convinced the president (or maybe the other way around) that, at certain frequencies, live harmonised voices can mess with your brain and body and induce non-orthodox behaviour. Non-orthodoxy of any kind is regarded as a dire threat to national security. The ruling states that singers who want to perform in groups must either all sing the same notes in the same key or vocalise their individual parts separately, forcing the audience to process the components themselves rather than have the whole, insidious package transmitted to them.