CAMBRIDGE, MA—Music theorists and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have stumbled upon what may be the greatest mystery of the century to date after they found that The Wombats, an English indie rock band, has measured off the charts on all of their rockingness-related instruments.
Professor Emily Beards, 44, who leads the International Studies in Rocksomeness laboratory, explained the unprecedented discovery.
"We study several bands on multiple measures of rocktility, and these ratings fall into three categories broadly: First, there's general rockability, which is an assessment of a band's rhythms and paces to determine how well they align with the innate human rock instincts, as defined by Hoch and Binder in their 1997 study. Then, we examine a band's rockmosis, which of course has to do with their ability to blow the listener's mind with different styles of rock, including varying paces of dancing, headbanging, air guitaring, and so on. Third, and some would argue most importantly, we measure a band's effect on a human listener's rockgasm, or for the layman, we want to see just how difficult it is for an average human to listen to the band's music while holding still, from 'no detectable influence' to 'uncontrollable rocking out.' Well, based on all three of these dimensions, we found that the Wombats freaking blew the lid right off of our measures."
Beards related that their standard algorithms and thresholds for each area of rocksomeness were very quickly exceeded in tests using The Wombats' songs. "We first fed [the song] 'Greek Tragedy' into our computer, and that was probably a mistake," she said. "The whole system just couldn't handle how rocktastic that song is, and almost immediately shut down."
The team then attempted to measure [the song] "Turn" from the band's most recent album, but the instruments quickly started to melt under the rockingness the song was radiating.
"We wondered at first if it was an instrumentation problem, so we cautiously tried some backup instruments, but the same thing happened. It was almost like the machines were being exposed to a level of rock that was beyond their ability to comprehend. Some of us [in the lab] felt that the instruments were willfully ending their own existence so as to not be found unworthy of listening to such raw, pure, and unfiltered rock."
Beards added, "Frankly, it's amazing that the band members don't just physically explode from all of the sheer talent and musicality they carry with them at all times. It's an unimaginable burden, I can only imagine."
As for what these findings mean for the future of music and the Rocksomeness laboratory, Beards is generally optimistic. "We are still very puzzled over these findings, and we may never be able to explain just how much The Wombats rock. This certainly changes everything we thought we knew about rock music. But I'm looking forward to trying to piece together what's going on. Who knows? Maybe there are new dimensions of rocksomeness that we haven't even begun to understand. Maybe The Wombats are the key to unlocking all of that."
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