u/AprilE_Bunny

I decided that my original post was going to be longer than anything I would want to read myself, so I deleted it all to instead post this modified-not exactly-TL;DR version of ”I Finally Solved the Mystery of the Music of Ray Bay at Ripley’s Aquarium at Myrtle Beach from 2008“.

(I would have made my way to this sub to inquire anyhow, but now that I’m here, I wanted to say that I finally solved the mystery just minutes before my arrival.)

A quest that spanned 18 years has finally come to a successful end. With only a handful of clues and my own personal description of the music being very Jacques Cousteau-like, the rabbit hole I’d been digging seemed endless yet frustratingly shallow. But thanks to a tip from a search assistant tonight, I checked to see if there were any old videos of Ray Bay @ Myrtle uploaded to YouTube during a reasonably long enough time ago, and there it was: a 15-year old video of Ray Bay, originally posted in 2010, with THE SONG clearly playing. Sound Recognition listened and identified it as "On the Wing Again“ by John Fox from Nature Studies Vol. 3: Wildlife. AppleMusic confirmed it! I love looking for lost music and now I’m excited to hear this song again for the first time in nearly 20 years! You may wonder why it didn’t occur to me to check YouTube years ago, and obviously I should’ve used some common sense and done that instead of following leads along more difficult paths, but the search has been rewarding nonetheless.

(Hopefully this’ll now serve as an answer to someone else who might be here asking for this exact randomly specific piece of music.)