"Ice cream truck" music

[SoundOff]

Well, this isn't really a "warning" device with reguards to emergency but it still relates to outdoor and vehicular signaling.

Anyway, does one know how the songs on an ice cream truck are generated and played ? I've heard a lot of different tunes in my neighborhood while growing up myself. Some I can remember were "Pop goes the Wesel" and "Do your ears hang low" http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LB/0510/Pink_ ... wesome.mp3 in the early days.

Currently, I hear some "chime" tune that I can't identify right now and just two or three summers ago, I heard a truck playing a song that sounds like a cross between "She'll be Comming Around the Mountain" and another song I heard at Jr. camp once that I can't remember the name of; along with a female voice saying "HELLO!" at the beginning of every cycle.

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LB/Hello.mp3


What ice cream truck songs are played in your area ?

[SirenMadness]

We use to have an unknown tune about two years ago, now switched to the "Do Your Ears Hang Low?" tune.

[Jim_Ferer]

The guy who wrote the Mister Softee theme is in the Witness Protection Program, because his life wouldn't be worth five cents if he became known. Actually, he's probably a very old man by now, 'cuz I remember the thing from the *early* '60s.

I think some of the very earliest audio things like this had a sort of a fixed record in them, like a 78rpm or 45rpm. Some of the chime-like ones had a punched disk like a music box and a transducer.

[AllSafe]

There are still a lot of systems like that which use a looped 1/2" tape with four tracks, each one for a different tune. If you wanted different tunes than what came with the system, you had to crack the whole tone box open and wind new tape on the reels.

[StonedChipmunk]

Ice cream trucks were outlawed in my city around 5 years ago. Since I go to boarding school, the town I'm in now rarely has an ice cream truck go through.

[Jim_Ferer]

There are still a lot of systems like that which use a looped 1/2" tape with four tracks, each one for a different tune. If you wanted different tunes than what came with the system, you had to crack the whole tone box open and wind new tape on the reels.

I've seen the mechanical ones but no the tape ones. Obviously if you were doing it now digital would be child's play.

[JasonC]

Those Wolo play-toy sirens have "ice cream truck music" but its mainly just jingles. Back when I first got my license, I had several noisemakes including the Wolo unit hooked up through the radio rebroadcast of my PA300. Me and my friend would drive up and down the beach road at night and screw with people. One time in particular I had the ice cream music playing, and intermittently I would say over the mic "ice cream, ice cream" or something like that. Anyway, I passed a cop doing that. I had a scanner in my truck as well, and overheard the cop telling another unit to pull me over because "I was yelling obscene profanities over a PA system. It was funny, at the time, and of course i evaded them. And btw, dont install sirens on your vehicles, very bad idea from several points of view, I did this many years ago in my dumb days, haha.

[SoundOff]

Jason; my friend also had one of those Wolo "Animal House" horns with the "Chime Music" function. We used to fool kids in the neighborhood by playing the music while driving down our street like that.