I hope they paid the royalties...

Rose Cuizon Villazor is a law professor at SMU. She also maintains a blog, called Property Prof Blog. There she admits that she uses singing as a tool to help her students learn future interests.

My students at SMU told me later that I helped decrease the stress (a little bit anyway) of learning life estates. When I taught Kelo v. City of New London, I circulated the words to the "Kelo Song," which was written by a student member of the Harvard Law School Federalist Society.

In comments some other law professors offered "YMCA," "Whiter Shade of Pale," and "Memorandaville." See, even lawyers need to learn about music.

My best friend used to compose songs that illustrated various partwriting rules and techniques. His best was "The Voice Exchange Song." I need to get a copy of that. Anyone else out there with songs used for pedagogical purposes?

[via]

It's not over 'till the fat lady has acid reflux

News has gotten around the media, even if not prevalent in the blogosphere yet, that opera singers are prone to reflux. The more you sing, the more you "wet burp" as the Guardian charmingly calls it. The research, conducted by Giovanni Cammarota et al from Catholic University of Rome, was published in Gastroenterology. The theory is that the breath control causes greater internal pressures, but that would suggest that oboists, trumpeters, and other wind players would have similar issues. And the only stomach problems I've heard about have been audition butterflies.