If my only mission on earth is to entertain you in your living room, I have done my job with this post from The Couch Potatory - an ongoing series here at Homebody(ish) Magazine, where curiosity, commentary, and couch-level wisdom come together for the delightfully indoorsy.

The other night, I fell into the weirdest YouTube rabbit hole. The kind that starts innocently and ends hours later at midnight, when you’re mad that you picked up your phone “one more time” before bed.

I have done this waaaay too many times with Adam Lambert videos, dating back to his very first American Idol audition, all the way up to being Queen’s lead singer.

But this time, it weirdly started with my Samsung washing machine. 😐 I was Googling how the hell to turn off the annoying little song it plays.

If you own a Samsung washer or dryer, you already know the song. When the cycle finishes, instead of a polite little beep, the machine launches into a cheerful musical number like it just completed an orchestral Broadway run.

At first, it’s charming but by the fifth or sixth time you hear it, it begins to feel like theatrical overkill for a pile of damp towels. And I am here to drag you into rabbit hole hell with me in a minute.

But first, I recently learned something that made the whole Samsung jingle situation far more interesting.

Here’s a weird piece of trivia you never asked for:

Did you know that the little laundry jingle is a real piece of music? I HATE that I find this even remotely fascinating.

The melody comes from an 1817 composition by the Austrian composer, Franz Schubert, called Die Forelle, which translates to The Trout. Somewhere along the line, Samsung decided that every modern household needed a 200-year-old flailing fish song announcing that their laundry was complete.

Bold design choice, don’t you think?

Music that goes in annoying and comes out remarkably clean…

Naturally, once millions of people around the world started hearing the same song every day in their laundry rooms, the internet did what the internet does best.

People started remixing it. And I mean really remixing it.

Drummers. DJs. Pianists. Violinists. Acapella vocalists. People have taken the tiny washer jingle and turned it into full musical performances. I had absolutely no idea this was a thing until the other night, when I accidentally discovered a few of these videos and suddenly realized there were hundreds of them.

Apparently, people all over the world have looked at their washing machine and thought, “You know what this needs? A remix.”

And honestly, I respect that level of creativity. Because of these creative minds, the tune is now an incessant earworm living rent-free in my brain, and after you finish this post, good luck getting it out of your head. 😁

This is peak couch potato entertainment.

No concert tickets required. Heck, no pants required! Just you, your sofa, and the strange realization that somewhere out there, a bucket drummer wearing a horse head and sitting in a bathtub (WTF??) has produced an entire YouTube video around the melody from a Samsung washing machine.

I can’t lie…I died laughing the first (and second and third) time I watched that one.

I have gathered a few of my favorite finds from the rabbit hole below. Fair warning: once you start watching these, the YouTube algorithm will absolutely assume you are deeply passionate about appliance music.

You may not escape for a while and you certainly won’t look at laundry the same way again, because these are utterly FASCINATING! 😆😆 Like….who ARE these people and WHY are they doing this?

, that last one was for you, and this is me officially calling you out for a challenge! For those who don’t know, Karen is a professional piano player in Las Vegas, and I would love to see her Vegas version. 😁

The internet is a strange and wonderful place. I LOVE discovering ridiculously delightful things that I never imagined existed. This is exactly the kind of human-ing and creativity I support.

So now I’m curious….

What are your favorite YouTube rabbit holes?

Share them in the comments because clearly I am very susceptible to this kind of couch-based research.

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