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otomad

Otomad

Japan · 2000s
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Description

Otomad (音MAD) is a Japanese internet-born remix style centered on building musical pieces from tightly edited speech, sound bites, and short audio "materials" (素材) taken from anime, TV, video games, commercials, and memes. Creators slice, pitch-shift, and time-stretch these micro-samples to perform melodies and rhythms, often reconstructing familiar songs or composing original tunes with a comic, frenetic edge.

It emerged on Nico Nico Douga in the late 2000s as a sibling to Western YTPMV, but with its own techniques, humor, and source pools. Typical Otomad tracks emphasize rhythmic chopping, precise pitch-correction, and memorable catchphrases used as hooks, producing a dense, sample-collage sound that is both musical and referential. The style is community-driven and largely authored by pseudonymous uploaders, and it frequently pairs audio with fast-cut visual editing for maximum meme impact.

History
Origins (late 2000s)

Otomad took shape on Japan’s Nico Nico Douga video platform during the late 2000s, as users began repurposing short audio "materials" (素材) from anime, variety shows, commercials, video games, and net memes to build rhythmic, tuneful collage pieces. The practice drew on earlier sample-based traditions (plunderphonics, mashups) and paralleled the Western YTPMV scene, but it coalesced with distinct Japanese meme sources and editing aesthetics.

Techniques and Aesthetics

Creators refine micro-samples with surgical precision: chopping syllables to a rhythmic grid, pitch-correcting lines into melodies, and time-stretching to lock grooves. Hallmark moves include turning catchphrases into hooks, recreating popular melodies from speech, and layering call-and-response between different characters or sources. While humor, surprise, and referentiality drive the appeal, the musicality—tight timing, clear harmonies, and memorable drops—keeps pieces replayable beyond the joke.

Community and Cross‑Pollination

The scene is highly community-driven and pseudonymous. Nico Nico Douga tags and playlists helped codify conventions and shared "素材" packs. There was early, ongoing cross-pollination with YTPMV on YouTube; both communities traded techniques, memes, and workflows. As Otomad matured, it also intersected with doujin culture and Vocaloid circles, expanding the pool of source material and audiences.

Present Day

Otomad persists as a living meme music practice: trends shift with each new anime season, viral commercial, or game release. While rooted in platform culture, its techniques—speech-to-melody mapping, micro-sample percussion, and comedic callouts—have influenced broader meme-music forms and informed later SoundClown-style edits in the 2010s.

How to make a track in this genre
Source and Concept
•   Pick a tightly scoped concept (e.g., one character, a specific TV segment, or a single commercial) and assemble a clean "素材" folder: isolated words, syllables, exclamations, percussion-like consonants, and any musical stingers. •   Aim for sources with clear diction and minimal background noise; capture a few sustained vowels for melodic use and percussive consonants (t/k/p/s/ch) for drums.
Rhythm and Groove
•   Quantize micro-samples to a grid; common feels include 4-on-the-floor, breakbeat, or halftime. Start at 120–160 BPM, then adjust to fit your source pacing. •   Build drum kits from the source: consonants for hats/snare, breath/noise hits for impacts. Layer with subtle synthetic drums if the source lacks low-end.
Melody and Harmony
•   Map key vowels and steady syllables to a scale (use pitch-correction or granular tools) to sing your melody. Melodyne, NewTone, or per-note pitch in a DAW piano roll works well. •   Keep harmonies simple (I–V–vi–IV or ii–V–I) so the intelligibility of the speech remains clear. Double parts in thirds or sixths for choruses.
Editing and Sound Design
•   Use short fades and tight crossfades to avoid clicks. Gate background noise and de‑ess aggressively; EQ out room resonances. •   Employ time-stretching for rhythmic lock, pitch-shifting for melody, and formant control to keep voices natural enough to read as the original character. •   Add ear-candy: stutter edits, reverse fills, tape stops, and meme callouts timed to scene cuts.
Structure and Pacing
•   Open with a recognizable catchphrase hook, escalate to a chorus where multiple sources "sing" together, and insert a breakdown featuring a new gag or source. •   Keep arrangements concise (1–2 minutes). High-density sections benefit from occasional negative space for punchlines to land.
Tools and Workflow
•   DAW: FL Studio, Ableton Live, or Reaper; audio editor: Audacity; pitch tools: Melodyne/NewTone; transient detection and slicers for fast chopping. •   Work iteratively: extract素材 → sort by function (vowel, consonant, FX) → build beat → lay melody → harmonize → mix → sync final video cuts.
Visuals and Delivery
•   Cut visuals to accent punchlines and transients. On-screen lyrics/captions help listeners parse syllabic melodies. •   Respect platform norms and fair-use boundaries; credit sources where possible and tag consistently for community discovery.
Top albums
Soupcurry Anniversary
Soupcurry Valentine
Soupcurry Anniversary 2
MAD JUNKIES
Soupcurry Newcomers 2
Soupcurry Legends
Main artists
Influenced by
Mashup
Mashup is a genre and production technique in which two or more pre‑existing recordings are combined to form a new track, most commonly by placing the vocal (a cappella) from one song over the instrumental of another. It relies on beatmatching, harmonic mixing, and careful editing to create the illusion that disparate sources naturally fit together. Unlike a traditional remix (which typically reworks stems from a single song) or a medley (which plays songs sequentially), a mashup emphasizes simultaneous overlay and interplay between multiple songs, often highlighting humor, contrast, or surprising continuity. The style rose to prominence in the early 2000s UK “bastard pop” scene and spread via file‑sharing, blogs, and video platforms; it remains popular in DJ culture, pop culture countdowns, and internet meme communities, while inhabiting a legal gray area due to copyright.
Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics is a sample-based music practice in which new compositions are made entirely or predominantly from pre‑existing recordings. Rather than using short, unrecognizable snippets as texture, plunderphonic works foreground recognizable materials—pop hits, classical excerpts, commercials, voice-overs—and transform them through juxtaposition, layering, pitch-shifting, time-stretching, and collage. Coined by Canadian composer John Oswald in the mid‑1980s, the term names both a technique and a critical stance that questions authorship, originality, and ownership in the age of reproducible media. Plunderphonics often functions as cultural commentary or satire, drawing attention to how meaning changes when familiar sounds are recontextualized. Stylistically, it ranges from dense cut‑up cacophony to groove-oriented rearrangements that remain danceable and accessible.
Ytpmv
YTPMV (YouTube Poop Music Video) is an online remix microgenre in which creators transform spoken or non-musical source material into rhythmic, pitched music through heavy sampling, pitch-correction, chopping, and time-stretching. It typically pairs hyperactive video editing with tightly quantized, melody-focused audio made from syllables, phonemes, sound effects, and short instrumental fragments pulled from TV shows, games, commercials, and internet ephemera. The result sits between plunderphonics, sound collage, and breakcore, but with a distinct meme-native sense of humor and visual pacing. While rooted in YouTube Poop’s sentence-mixing culture, YTPMV emphasizes musicality: samples are tuned to scales, mapped to MIDI, arranged into chord progressions, and driven by energetic drums. Parallel Japanese communities (MAD/OTOMAD on Nico Nico Douga) cross-pollinated techniques and aesthetics, giving YTPMV its hallmark blend of frantic edits, catchy motifs, and pop-culture nostalgia.
Anime
Anime (often called "anisong" for vocal themes) is the umbrella term for songs and scores created for Japanese animation, including opening/ending themes and background music. It blends contemporary J‑pop/J‑rock songwriting with dramatic orchestral scoring and modern electronic production, aiming for instantly memorable hooks and emotionally charged climaxes tailored to a show's narrative and characters. Stylistic hallmarks include high-register, expressive vocals; tight, hook-forward structures (especially 90-second “TV size” versions); bright, polished production; and frequent late-song key changes. Arrangements often hybridize rock bands, strings, brass, and EDM textures to deliver cinematic impact, while lyrics favor aspirational, metaphor-rich imagery that mirrors the series’ themes.
Japanese Vgm
Japanese VGM (video game music) refers to music created for Japanese video games, spanning arcade cabinets, home consoles, handhelds, PCs, and modern platforms. It is melody-forward, loop-friendly, and highly thematic, often built on short motifs and clear leitmotifs for characters, locations, and events. Early sound palettes centered on PSG and FM synthesis; later generations added PCM sampling, CD audio, and full orchestral/hybrid production. Stylistically it blends electronic programming with influences from classical orchestration, jazz fusion, kayōkyoku/J‑Pop hooks, and progressive rock, while sometimes coloring harmony or melody with Japanese scales. Its catchy writing, memorable hooks, and tight arrangements have made it globally influential well beyond games.
Vocaloid
Vocaloid is a music genre and production culture centered on songs performed by synthesized singing voices, most famously the virtual singer Hatsune Miku. Producers compose and arrange tracks, then program lyrics and melodies into voicebanks to create lead vocals that sound like human singers. While the repertoire spans many styles, Vocaloid is strongly associated with Japanese pop, rock, and electronic dance music aesthetics. Songs are often released online with striking illustrated artwork and animated "PV" videos, and they are disseminated through platforms such as Nico Nico Douga and YouTube by independent creators and labels. The genre’s hallmark is the combination of catchy, hyper-bright melodies, energetic rhythm sections, and expressive vocal programming (tuning) that leverages timbral artifacts unique to synthesized voices. A vibrant fan community drives remixes, covers, live concerts with virtual avatars, and continual evolution of stylistic norms.
Hip Hop
Hip hop is a cultural and musical movement that emerged from Black, Latino, and Caribbean communities, centering around rapping (MCing), DJing/turntablism, sampling-based production, and rhythmic speech over beats. It prioritizes groove, wordplay, and storytelling, often reflecting the social realities of urban life. Musically, hip hop is built on drum-centric rhythms (from breakbeats to 808 patterns), looped samples, and bass-forward mixes. Lyrically, it ranges from party anthems and braggadocio to political commentary and intricate poetic forms, with flow, cadence, and rhyme density as core expressive tools. Beyond music, hip hop encompasses a broader culture, historically intertwined with graffiti, b-boying/b-girling (breakdance), fashion, and street entrepreneurship, making it both an art form and a global social language.
Electronic
Electronic is a broad umbrella genre defined by the primary use of electronically generated or electronically processed sound. It encompasses music made with synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, computers, and studio/tape techniques, as well as electroacoustic manipulation of recorded or synthetic sources. The genre ranges from academic and experimental traditions to popular and dance-oriented forms. While its sonic palette is rooted in electricity and circuitry, its aesthetics span minimal and textural explorations, structured song forms, and beat-driven club permutations. Electronic emphasizes sound design, timbre, and studio-as-instrument practices as much as melody and harmony.
Sound Collage
Sound collage is a practice and genre that assembles disparate recorded sounds—speech, field recordings, musical fragments, noise, and media detritus—into a new, cohesive work. It treats recorded sound as raw material to be cut, layered, looped, juxtaposed, and transformed, often privileging texture, timbre, and context over conventional melody and harmony. Emerging from mid‑century tape and electroacoustic experiments, sound collage spans avant‑garde, popular, and club contexts, ranging from radical tape splices to sample‑dense pop and hip‑hop. Because it recontextualizes existing audio, it can be narrative, political, archival, or purely abstract—oscillating between documentary and dreamlike mosaic.
Glitch
Glitch is an experimental electronic music genre that foregrounds the sounds of technological error—digital clicks, pops, clipping, buffer underruns, CD skipping, software crashes, and bit‑reduction. Rather than hiding artifacts, producers use them as primary musical material, often arranged through extreme micro‑editing and non‑linear sequencing. Texturally, glitch spans austere minimalism to warm, hazy ambience. Rhythms tend to be fragmented and asymmetrical, with sudden cuts, stutters, and silences that create tension and negative space. The palette commonly includes sine‑tone grains, granular clouds, filtered noise, and hyper‑detailed percussive fragments, sometimes sitting over subdued drones or dub‑inflected low end. The style emerged in the late 1990s around labels such as Mille Plateaux, influenced by IDM, minimal techno, and the aesthetics of failure in digital media. It later permeated pop and beat‑driven styles through sound‑design techniques that evoke imperfection and transience.
Has influenced
Ytpmv
YTPMV (YouTube Poop Music Video) is an online remix microgenre in which creators transform spoken or non-musical source material into rhythmic, pitched music through heavy sampling, pitch-correction, chopping, and time-stretching. It typically pairs hyperactive video editing with tightly quantized, melody-focused audio made from syllables, phonemes, sound effects, and short instrumental fragments pulled from TV shows, games, commercials, and internet ephemera. The result sits between plunderphonics, sound collage, and breakcore, but with a distinct meme-native sense of humor and visual pacing. While rooted in YouTube Poop’s sentence-mixing culture, YTPMV emphasizes musicality: samples are tuned to scales, mapped to MIDI, arranged into chord progressions, and driven by energetic drums. Parallel Japanese communities (MAD/OTOMAD on Nico Nico Douga) cross-pollinated techniques and aesthetics, giving YTPMV its hallmark blend of frantic edits, catchy motifs, and pop-culture nostalgia.
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