This piano tune drowning out a car alarm is the perfect quarantine soundtrack

When life gives you an annoying car alarm, make music.
 By 
Jess Joho
 on 

Quarantine is a time for creativity (supposedly). Just ask everyone who can't stop pointing out that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine.

Well step aside, Will, because writer and critic Andrea Long Chu has given us a coronavirus anthem: Car Alarm Improv. Putting her (genuinely) formidable piano skills to use, Chu turned an annoying car alarm that wouldn't stop going off into glorious music.

"Car alarm kept going off so i improvised," Chu wrote in the video caption on Twitter.


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And sure enough, the resulting piano riff is appropriately anxious, pressing, and yearning to be heard, a reflection of how we all feel as we stay home because of the coronavirus outbreak. It makes you want to know the story behind said annoying car alarm: Is its owner stuck at home too? Has its owner abandoned their apartment to go spend quarantine somewhere else, leaving the poor car alarm to scream into the day uselessly? Because same, car alarm. Same.

We may never know. But we will always have the music we made along the way.

The post went viral, garnering almost 50,000 likes in less than 24 hours. "So it’s come to this. posting my body for faves," Chu wrote in a follow-up tweet.

Chu also came back later to ask Twitter if people might enjoy her live-streaming herself playing piano on Twitch. I think I speak for all of us when I say: Yes. Please, god, yes.

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Jess Joho

Jess is an LA-based culture critic who covers intimacy in the digital age, from sex and relationship to weed and all media (tv, games, film, the web). Previously associate editor at Kill Screen, you can also find her words on Vice, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vox, and others. She is a Brazilian-Swiss American immigrant with a love for all things weird and magical.

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