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Adriano Celentano - Prisencolinensinainciusol

Le Pietre Rotolanti
Music
YouTube
6 HN users recommended this music video6 months2016–2024 score 6.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

It comes up whenever threads touch on fake languages, accents, or gibberish that sounds plausible, and commenters like sharing it with people who haven't heard it.

A 1972 song by Adriano Celentano whose lyrics are nonsense syllables designed to sound like American English to non-English speakers. It is a rock and rap-flavored novelty track with a video.

“For anyone who hasn't seen it before, here's a song by an Italian composer made to sound like American English” (HN, 2021)

1 strong recommendations · 5 recommendations · 9 citations · 2 jokes · Music

17 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@sangnoir Nov 2016 Recommends
on HN thread How to Master an Accent
There's a fantastic English-sounding song by an italian singer [this video] Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano. It hurts my brain when I try to pick out meaning from the phenomes.
@Andrex Apr 2019 Recommends
on HN thread Name one thing in this photo
The song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" has a similar effect: it's meant to sound exactly like American English to non-native speakers, but is actually just gibberish. Works amazingly well. [this video]
Gibberish song imitating American English
@throw0101c Mar 2024 Recommends
on HN thread Fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music (2022)
Read more
I call your mis-understood English song, and raise you one song purposefully written to use fake-English sounding 'words': > The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, however the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right".[8][9] Andrew Khan, writing in The Guardian, later described the sound as reminiscent of Bob Dylan's output from the 1980s.[9] > Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers. The intent was to demonstrate how English sounds to people who do not understand the language proficiently. "Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything."[6] * [link] * Audio-only: [link] * M/V: [this video] Quite catchy.
Song about the inability to communicate, in fake English

Citations, criticism and jokes

@developer2 May 2020 Cites it
on HN thread AC/DC Song Made with a Markov Chain
Hot damn, technology is catching up with humans' manual creations. Your video is reminiscent of Adriano Celentano's song "Prisencolinensinainciusol"[1]–whereby he created a song to represent what English sounds like to non-native speakers[2]. [1] [this video] [2] [link]
Song designed to sound like English to non-natives
@vimy Dec 2020 Cites it
on HN thread Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese
Reminds me of a song from 1972 by an Italian comedian. The song is called "Prisencolinensinainciusol" which means...well, nothing. It's gibberish. In fact, the entire song is nonsense lyrics made to sound like English. [this video]
1972 song with nonsense lyrics made to sound like English
@dumbotron May 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
> I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. So there's this [link] and more interestingly [this video]
Example of music not needing to be understood
@verticalscaler May 2024 Cites it
on HN thread ChatTTS-Best open source TTS Model
Read more
Well, no. This is a reasonable guess turned strangely confidently wrong and opinionated. Voice acting is quite literally done a sentence or at most a paragraph at a time. Often the recording order is completely different from the script. An actor may very well record his final scene on the first day of a project, after the whole character arc has transpired. But you know, acting. They get fed a line with stage direction and do a bunch of takes and somehow it works. Heck you might be a full blown Italian who can't say a word in English but with the right kind of jacket it comes out a banger: [this video] You mention Eleven labs being ahead, check out Suno. There is no LLM-scale anything involved there. The voice in this context is a musical instrument and there are lots of viable ways to tackle this problem domain.
@sethammons Nov 2016 Makes a joke
on HN thread How to Master an Accent
An english gibberish song: [this video] . I could not find the original that I heard, but this is most of it. Hilarious.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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