Melodigging name

soundclown

Soundclown

United States · 2010s

Happy Dancing Sentimental Intense

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Description

Soundclown is an internet-born remix and mashup style that thrives on comedic juxtaposition, bait‑and‑switch reveals, and hyper-referential sample collage. It blends pop hits, game and cartoon music, ad jingles, meme sounds, and viral speech into quick-cut audio gags.

The genre developed across YouTube and SoundCloud, favoring shock humor, nostalgia, and absurdity over traditional song form. Hallmarks include sudden key/tempo whiplash, exaggerated pitch-shifts, ear‑rending “earrape” peaks, and punchline drops that transform a familiar source into something hilariously incongruent.

Because it is fundamentally platform-native, soundclown is as much a memetic editing culture as a musical style. Its tracks often function like sonic shitposts: fast, punchy, and built for instant recognition and shareability.

History

How to make a track in this genre

Top albums

Musical Transients

Musical Transients

Mouth Dreams

Social Justice Whatever

Social Justice Whatever

I CREATED PISSCORE

I CREATED PISSCORE

Yeezer

Musical Tangents

Musical Tangents

Main artists

Influenced by

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 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 (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.

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.

Vaporwave is an internet-born microgenre and visual aesthetic that repurposes late‑20th‑century commercial sound—mu zak, smooth jazz, soft rock, synth‑pop, city pop, and corporate training tapes—into hazy, slowed, and looped collages. Its sound foregrounds pitched‑down samples, heavy reverb, tape hiss, vinyl crackle, and dreamy pads to evoke a mood between satire and sincere nostalgia. Beyond music, vaporwave is inseparable from its graphic language: Greco‑Roman busts, Japanese text, retro operating systems, chrome logos, palm trees, neon gradients, and “mall culture” architecture. The result feels like a haunted shopping mall: part critique of consumer capitalism, part wistful memory of media and retail spaces from the 1980s–2000s. Tempos are typically slow (roughly 60–90 BPM), harmonies tend toward lush seventh and extended chords, and rhythms range from barely perceptible loops to minimal, gated drum programming. Many tracks are short, vignette‑like studies in texture and mood.

Breakcore is a high-intensity electronic music genre built around hyper-edited breakbeats, extreme dynamics, and a deliberately transgressive, collage-like approach to sampling. It prioritizes rhythmic complexity, abrupt structural shifts, and heavy sound design over smooth continuity. Typical tempos range from 160 to 220 BPM (and beyond), with the Amen break, Think break, and other classic breakbeats chopped into micro-fragments, re-sequenced, and processed with distortion, compression, and glitch edits. The palette freely fuses elements from jungle and drum and bass with gabber kicks, industrial noise, classical or choral snippets, ragga vocals, metal guitar samples, and odd-meter patterns. More than a single “sound,” breakcore is a methodology: confrontational energy, maximalist editing, and anti-formalist structures that often subvert dance-music expectations. It thrives in DIY scenes, warehouse parties, and netlabel cultures, where forward-pushing experimentation and boundary-blurring sampling are central values.

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 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.

Noh (Nō) is a classical Japanese musical drama that fuses stylized dance, poetic chant (utai), and a spare instrumental ensemble (hayashi) into slow-moving, symbol-rich performance. It is defined by the aesthetic of yūgen (mysterious profundity) and by the dramaturgical pacing principle jo–ha–kyū (introduction–development–rapid finale). Musically, Noh centers on yokyoku (chant) delivered by the principal actor (shite) and an 8-person chorus (jiutai), supported by the nohkan transverse flute and three drums (kotsuzumi shoulder drum, ōtsuzumi hip drum, and ō-daiko stick drum). Rhythmic cycles and shouted drum calls (kakegoe) articulate time, while the nohkan’s penetrating, intentionally “detuned” timbre weaves ornamental lines around the vocal. The result is at once austere and expressive, relying on minimal gesture, codified kata, and masks to evoke gods, warriors, women, madpersons, and demons.

Comedy rap is a branch of hip hop that foregrounds humor, satire, and parody while using the rhythmic delivery, production aesthetics, and song structures of rap. Artists deploy punchlines, skits, meta-jokes, and exaggerated personas to poke fun at pop culture, social norms, and the genre itself. Musically it borrows from the full spectrum of hip hop production—from old‑school electro and boom‑bap to modern trap and pop‑rap—while lyrically prioritizing wit over menace or earnestness. Delivery can range from deadpan storytelling to theatrical character voices, and hooks often lean on catchy, singable choruses to heighten comedic payoff.

Has influenced

Dariacore is a hyperactive, sample-forward microgenre that emerged on SoundCloud in the early 2020s. It is characterized by frenetic cut‑ups of recognizable pop hooks, TV/anime snippets, and internet ephemera, smashed together at high tempos with breakbeats, club triplets, and hard sidechain compression. Aesthetically, it sits between hyperpop/digicore maximalism and plunderphonics/mashcore collage. Producers frequently pitch up (nightcore-style), hard-clip, and brickwall-limit the mix, embrace abrupt key/tempo shifts, and use meme-y drops or fake-outs for shock value. Tracks are usually short (often 1–2 minutes), hook-dense, and deliberately chaotic, with tongue-in-cheek 90s/00s net-culture visuals (the name references MTV’s Daria).

Hyperpop is an internet-native pop movement known for its maximalist sound design, pitch-shifted vocals, and frenetic genre collisions. It exaggerates pop tropes—ultra-bright synths, hard-clipping drums, sugary hooks—then smashes them together with elements of club music, trap, and experimental electronica. The style favors hyper-synthetic timbres, extreme processing (auto‑tune, formant shifting, heavy sidechaining, distortion), and abrupt structural left turns. Lyrically, it swings between irreverent internet humor and disarmingly sincere confessions, often reflecting online identity, queerness, and hyper-modern life. Although diverse, the common thread is a playful, self-aware push of pop to surreal, high-saturation extremes.

Spamwave is a microgenre of vaporwave and sample-based collage that centers on the sounds, aesthetics, and affect of early-2000s internet clutter: spam emails, robocalls, pop‑up ads, infomercials, and adware/OS notifications. Producers loop, time‑stretch, and detune these commercial and computational artifacts into hypnotic, uncanny textures that feel both nostalgic and slightly menacing. Musically, spamwave favors slow to mid‑tempo loops, heavy reverb, pitch shifting, and granular edits. It blends corporate muzak, hold music, TTS voices, dial tones, and UI sounds with vaporwave’s dreamy pads and tape‑hiss patina. The result is a haunted-office ambience—equal parts retro tech nostalgia and digital detritus.

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