So we have a Japanese toy at home that plays a tune. Actually, it plays three tunes, including this one that I particularly like. I even made some verses to go with the song, so that I could sing it to my kid. I had no idea where it was taken from, but then the other day we were at a park and there was this boat. Once the kid goes inside the boat, there’s a big red button that, when pressed, makes the boat rock and play some songs, like It’s a Small World After All, Bingo, If You’re Happy and You Know It… and that same song that the Japanese toy plays. I thought to myself, “cool, now I will look up the lyrics and find out which song is that!”

(That boat is weird, though. For one, when the button is pressed, a female voice says, with a very good (to my ears) English accent: “Children, welcome you! Please note begin, sitting comfortably.” It really sounds like a regular human being speaking. It’s as if some company had the money to pay for someone to record the line, but had no money to pay for a translator. After a few minutes, the boat stops and says: “Children, play again next time.”)

Now the song itself… I think they’re singing “come, come, come”, and then they go on about “spring” and “flowers”, but it’s very hard to understand. I searched online for a while, but couldn’t find anything remotely compatible with what I was hearing. Here’s a sample I recorded. Shazam, of course, was of no use; neither was SoundHound.

Then I found Musipedia. You can enter notes and it will search for existing music! I did my best to put some notes there, but I’m just not good enough with it; it found lots of stuff, but not what I was looking for. Then I tried “contour search”, which is a simple idea, but something I had never thought about; again, lots of stuff, but I couldn’t find anything close to the song. But then I tried “rhythm search” — also a simple idea that I had never thought about — and it worked!

It turns out there’s a children’s song known as Summ, summ, summ which is exactly what I was looking for. The lyrics were originally written in German by Hoffmann von Fallersleben and the melody was composed by Ernst Richter. They published it in a book with another 49 songs for children, appropriately called Fünfzig Kinderlieder, which is available in the Internet Archive. It’s number 43 in the book, and it’s called Biene there, because it’s a song about about bees. It has a page in the German Wikipedia and in the Russian Wikipedia, but not in the English edition.

Now, the Russian Wikipedia (but not the German Wikipedia) says that “in Japan the song became known as Bumm, bumm, bumm” and that it was translated into Japanese by Murano Shirō. I can’t read Japanese at all, but his page in the Japanese Wikipedia has a link that says “Biene (Kinderlied)”, followed by something that Google Translate says mean “Bun Bun no yu song”.

You can easily find many videos with the song in YouTube, both in German by searching for “summ, summ, summ” and in Japanese by searching for “ぶんぶんぶんの元歌”.

Having said all this, I still can’t find the lyrics to the song played by the boat.