Here is some background information on the contest taken from the FMA website:

WFMU and the Free Music Archive are challenging songwriters everywhere to unseat “Happy Birthday to You” from it’s cultural throne by composing possible replacements. The Birthday Song Contest seeks a few new Happy Birthday songs that are simple and catchy, with great earworm potential that can be sung in restaurants, bowling alleys, and even in TV shows and movies – free of charge.

The song “Happy Birthday To You” is the most recognizable song in the English language, but it can cost independent filmmakers an estimated $10,000 to clear the song for their films, and it will remain under copyright protection in the United States until 2030. This is a major stumbling block hindering the creation of new works of art. It’s time to shake (or at least unsettle) “Happy Birthday” from it’s fortified cultural throne, and replace it with a melody that the children can sing without fear of being served.

Update: The contest is over, my song did not make it, but congratulations to the winners !

• 1.5 frozen bananas
• 2 tea spoons of raw chocolate powder
• 2 tea spoons of Xylit
• some almonds (optional)
• 1 table spoon of Goji berries (=extra does of antioxidants)

For a first try, it was really tasty! I think the next time I’ll add some coconut cream to add some (raw) fats and which will make the taste come out smoother and which will also render the texture more creamy.

• Stevia
• Marple syrup
• Agave syrup
• Xylitol
• Molasses

For the experiment, we were three people to judge the quality of the sweetener between 0 (awful) and 10 (awesome). The outcome is interesting. Marple syrup and agave syrup seem to be the best, closely followed by Xylitol. Stevia is ok (here I used dried and grinded Stevia), however, its sweetnes does not seem to get a full and round taste. Its taste is rather sharp and if used too much, it can be disturbing. Maybe it would be better with fresh stevia? Molasses has not been judged well, as it comes a long with a very strong taste and not so much sweetness.

For my last chocolate preparations I was using Xylitol (with a bit of stevia) as it seems to be healthywise (especially for the teath) the most advantageous sweetener. One downside during the experiments was that its crystals did not melt in the chocolate. Blending chocolate and Xylitol together at a high speed before pouring them into the molds has proven to be helpful. I like the final outcome .

Here is the final result of the average score along with standard deviation indicated by the error bars:

You can find my slide at slideshare.net.

My PhD jury (from left to right): Ivan Laptev, Martial Hebert, François Brémond, James Crowley, Alexander Kläser, Cordelia Schmid

For people who are interested in my research work on automated human action recognition in realistic video sequences, I invite you to visit my homepage at the LEAR research group.

After about 3 years and 8 months of doctoral studies + 8 months for my master studies, approximately 15,000 km of cycling, many ups and downs , a lot of new things that I learned, a deep dive into the French culture, many wonderful people that I met, a great shared flat in Grenoble downtown (!), many wonderful musicians that I was able to play with (thanks, light motif!), and a wonderful stay in a really nice city, my time in Grenoble has finally come to an end. Thanks to everybody that I was able to meet and to share a part of my path that led my through Grenoble!

I was thinking about how to play ‘Happy Birthday’ with a jazz feel and with typical jazz harmonies. I found it at first really difficult to put the standard I-IV-V chords into a more open form with IIm7-V7 progressions. I kept on thinking about and trying different things. Finally I a found a form which sounds jazz-like, yet still natural to me. I sat down and recorded a version this weekend .. sorry, I sang again (of course you need vocals for ‘Happy Birthday’!). The solo instrument is the great Guitalele from Yamaha (illustrated on the image to the left). It is very small, however, since it has six strings, it can be seen as a hybrid between a normal guitar and a Ukulele (which only has four strings). The song also features me on the samba egg.

And by the way, have you thought about this? You know somebody who has birthday? Here is the great idea: Make him happy and send him a link on this post !

I was contacted by Artem Galitsyn who arranged a big-band style Jazz version with a great femal singer and lyrics in Russian ! He kindly allowed me to put his version here online:

For people who are interested in the chords:


|| Gmaj7 Am7 | Bm7 Bb13 | Am7 | D9 |
| Am7 | D9 | Gmaj7 C#dim | Gmaj7 |
| Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 | F9(#11) |
| Em7 A7 | Am7 D7 | Gmaj7 Bbmaj7 | Ebmaj7 Abmaj7 ||


Lead sheet online @ wikifonia: I put this Happy Birthday jazz version also online to the website wikifonia which is a collection a lot of publicly available leadsheets. This is a great website. There you are able to download a nicely layouted pdf version of the leadsheet, you can also transpose it automatically, and download the music file itself!

Lead sheet 2: Thanks to Roger (see his comment below)! He send me a lead sheet for Happy Birthday in jazz that you can download !