Prepare yourself The latest viral music hit has arrived. It s called The Fox a hilarious and maddeningly infectious song by Ylvis a pair of Norwegian variety show brothers. The video which involves people dressed up as animals dancing around in the woods while B rd and Vegard Ylvis ker croon dog goes woof/ cat goes meow/ bird goes tweet/ mouse goes squeak has acquired nearly 3 million hits on YouTube in three days. If you ve already seen The Fox it s probably left you with plenty of questions of your own. Like Why am I still hopelessly stuck on the insanely catchy clutches of a song about animal noises and Should I be reevaluating my own understanding of animal noises Do elephants really go toot And of course the most important question of all Wait seriously what sound does a fox make
The song proposes a number of different possible fox vocalizations
Gering ding ding ding ringerdingering Wa po po po po po pow Hatee hatee hatee ho Joff tchoff tchoffo tchoffo tchoff Chacha chacha chacha chow Fraka kaka kaka kaka kow A hee ahee ha hee A oo oo oo ooo
Yes they re funny spit take funny even especially when they drop right when you re expecting a big musical breakdown (and sung by a Santa type telling his grandson a bedtime story) but could they actually be accurate While Popular Science has already consulted with some experts we went digging and found some field recordings from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology an audio archive that contains over 9 000 different species which may definitively answer the question that burns at the heart of the Ylvis song (at least for a few varieties of fox).
While we were tragically unable find any evidence of foxes with the ability to funky scat like the CGI fox that appears at the finale of the song it turns out the The Fox may actually be more on point than its mindblowingly shrill breakdowns suggest.
Consider the red fox a.k.a. vulpes vulpes. This Ontario red fox recorded by William W. H. Gunn in 1966 is clearly employing a low key version of Chacha chacha chacha chow
The vocalizations by this pair of arctic foxes recorded by in 2008 by Gerrit Vyn sounds more than a little reminiscent of Wa po po po po po pow.
Finally James R. Howell III s common gray fox is our favorite here at WIRED because how could this majestic Californian s screams not be interpreted as a climactic A oo oo oo ooo
Clearly the Ylvis guys are onto something. (Regardless could someone just let them know that no animal on this planet especially not fish says glub )
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