Spicks and Specks ... with CIs

It’s Wednesday! Spicks and Specks night! I still love this musical quiz show, even though playing along is so much harder than when I had natural hearing. But rather than feel frustrated about that, I try to make this show my ‘musical training’ instead. This is especially useful because the piano has been out of tune for months, and I barely have time to get on Sound and Way Beyond these days. So this show is about all I can muster in terms of training at the moment.

Why do I consider it training? Because parts of this show involve manipulating well-known music in order to make it recognisable.

My favourite segment is “Substitute”, where contestants sing a song, a cappella, by, er, substituting the real lyrics with text from a hideously distracting book of some sort. (Last week, for example, Anthony Warlow replaced the lyrics of MacArthur Park with words from a called ‘Be Bold with Bananas’.) For those unfamiliar with the segment, the contestant’s teammates have to rack their brains to figure out what song it is.

That means completely ignoring the words and focusing on the tune instead. Very distracting when the words are providing the comedy and you can’t help listening along. For people with CIs, this segment on the show is especially difficult, or even impossible for some. We use all sorts of musical cues to alert us to what song we’re listening to. The biggest one, for a lot of us, is to latch on to familiar lyrics and go from there – that’s because speech is rendered so well with CIs. But when familiar lyrics have been removed and replaced with some ridiculously inappropriate words, the only thing we’ve got to go on is the melody or tune. Hence why I consider this task to be ‘pitch training’ of some sort. (I’ve gotten the songs correct on rare occasions, whilst wearing CIs, but I’m practising so I can get a lot more of them!)

There’s also another segment called “Look what they’ve done to my song” where a band performs a well-known track in a completely different musical style. For example, a pop song might be played in a blues style. Or as an opera piece. This task is also very tricky for somebody who wears CIs, because the familiarity of a piece is not so obvious.

What can I say … I do love a challenge!