Turn Your Favorite Song into Perfect Hand-Washing Music!

Now that COVID-19 has taken hold across the globe, doctors, scientists, and government officials everywhere have been hammering home hand washing as a critical habit. But washing for the right amount of time is as important as using soap, which is why Wash Your Lyrics is such a lovely little widget: It allows you to take your favorite song lyrics and (almost) instantly turn them into hummable hand-cleaning music.

Wash Your Lyrics is a handy tool—the pun was right there—created by a young programmer in the U.K. who goes by @neoncloth, or just “William,” online. William, a 17-year-old who’s currently in college, studying computing, said on Twitter that Wash Your Lyrics took just 24 hours to create, and utilizes Genius to generate the custom songs.

While it’s unclear exactly how William made Wash Your Lyrics, it seems like it’d be a pretty straightforward programming project: Nothing like say, the GPT-2-enabled text generator, Talk To Transformer, which utilizes the latest advancements in machine learning. Still though, for a tool built by a college student in 24 hours, Wash Your Lyrics is finding a surprisingly large user base.

As far as using Wash Your Lyrics, it’s as easy as—nay, even easier than!—washing your hands. All you need to do is plug in a song title and the associated musician and bang, you have yourself a little pretty ditty for washing your hands when they’re shamefully dirty.

While washing your hands is certainly paramount in regards to preventing the spread of COVID-19, there are other things that are good to know as you navigate through this current landscape of misinformation and trepidation. There are ways to make your own hand sanitizer, for example, which should help to quell any fears you may have about the on-the-go hand cleaner selling out online. You can even play a free online video game that could potentially aid in the discovery of a COVID-19 vaccine. Or even just watch this John Oliver segment to help keep you grounded.

National Health Service

William hasn’t written about any plans to develop more COVID-19-related online tools, but according to his website, he is working on an open source platform for sharing content akin to Rabb.it. If you haven’t heard of Rabb.it, it was a video streaming site that allowed people to gather in online chatrooms where people could view media together and remotely browse the internet simultaneously. You know, exactly the kind of tool everybody is going to need, should there be some reason we all need to work from home for the foreseeable future….

What do you think about this tool for taking your favorite song and turning it into perfectly timed hand-washing music? Do you plan on using Wash Your Lyrics to come up with a track you’re going to use day in and day out for the rest of your life, or do you have some other way of making sure your hand-washing habits remain intact? Give us your thoughts in the comments!

Header Images: National Health Service via William Gibson