Everyone’s feeling a little salty this summer.

It’s often said that as technology gets faster and faster, our attention span shrinks in response. TikTok feeds condition millions of people to…

Hey, where are you going? OK, fine. I’ll get to the point.

Major Japanese karaoke service provider Joysound released their weekly ranking for the first week of July, and surprised everyone with the announcement that a 3-second jingle for a brand of table salt was the most sung track of all tracks in the entire country. Let’s take a listen.

About a month ago, we reported “Hakata no Shio” (Hakata Salt) reaching number four in the national ranking, which was already impressive in its own right. That achievement only seemed to have fueled interest in the sound logo, which is a very short melody announcing a company’s name or slogan. Sound logos are so short, they make the “Sometimes you feel like a nut” jingle sound like “Freebird.”

This marks the first time a sound logo has ever topped the charts in the thirty years since such records were kept. In our previous article, we mentioned several reasons that sound logos in general were growing in popularity, such as the timemaxxing trend.

But what is it about “Hakata no Shio” that makes it such a wildly popular sound logo among classics like “Sehhhhhh-gahhhhhh” or the haunting, “Onedan ijo, Nitori!” (More than just a nice price, Nitori!).

▼ Sega

▼ Nitori

The answer lies in its challenge. One of the many features most karaoke systems have is the ability to rank your performance in the sense of how closely it matches the original pitch and timing. Joysound can also keep track of national scores and found that the average for “Hakata no Shio” was 61.36 out of 100. It is said that even cracking 70 on this sound logo is extremely difficult.

Not all systems are created equal, but Joysound’s evaluation breaks down as follows: Pitch (40 points), Stability (30), Dynamics (15), Long Tones (10), and Technique (5). Right off the bat, it’s easy to see that there’s no way of sustaining a long tone without sacrificing your Pitch score, because that also judges your timing.

That leaves us with a ceiling of 90 points. Dynamics is the ability to go from soft to powerful in the same song, think Whitney Houston going Super Saiyan in the climax of “I Will Always Love You.” This could be possible in “Hakata no Shio,” but there isn’t much opportunity to even try, so a zero should be expected there. Technique is mainly the ability to add flourishes to notes by adding some vibrato to it or scooping up to it. Again, not a whole lot of real estate in this track to try something like that, so there will probably be a zero there too.

This whittles the most you can expect to get on this sound logo to 70. Even then, you got your work cut out for you. The real challenge of “Hakata no Shio” is that there is no intro at all. You just have to dive right into it without getting any sense of the first note or when you need to start.

To make matters worse, the entire track is only six notes: Ha-ka-ta-no-shi-o. When singing a standard song, you’ll likely be judged on hundreds of notes, so one mistake would only amount to a deduction less than one percent. But with this jingle, a single slip-up in Pitch will cost you about 7 points, and faltering or cracking on a single note will also lead to a 5-point deduction.

▼ This person got an impressive 73.38 (with the help of an 8-point AI judgment bonus). Her style was interesting in that she managed to work in some Technique and Dynamics to get high scores there, but got heavily dinged in Stability as a result.

So, it’s a rather punishing song for those looking to get high scores. But on the bright side, it’s also really short, which means you can just grind away at it and try to find a way to overcome its technical hurdles. And in doing that, its play count gets juiced right to the top of the charts. 

Its notorious difficulty also encourages people to share their high scores on social media for bragging rights, further spreading its popularity. Also, unlike “Sega,” which might only appeal to gamers, or Nitori’s sound logo that might only appeal to people who haven’t been driven crazy by hearing it on TV thousands of times, “Hakata no Shio” appeals to people from all generations and walks of life. 

After all, everyone loves a little salt.

Source: Oricon News, My Game News Flash, Music Planet, Joysound
Photos ©SoraNews24
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