The Sunday Read: “Why Do We Love TikTok Audio Memes? Call it ‘Brainfeel.’”

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

“Nobody’s gonna know. They’re gonna know.” If you’ve been on TikTok in the past year, you’re most likely familiar with these two sentences, first drolly uttered in a post by TikTok creator Chris Gleason in 2020. The post has become a hit and has been viewed more than 14 million times. But the sound is more famous than the video. When uploading a video to TikTok, the creator has the option to make that video’s audio a “sound” that other users can easily use in their own videos — lip-syncing to it, adding more noise on top of it or treating it like a soundtrack. Gleason’s sound has been used in at least 336,000 other videos, to humorous, dramatic and sometimes eerie effect. The journalist Charlotte Shane delves into the world of repurposed sounds, exploring how TikTok and other apps have enabled, as she writes in her recent article for The Times, “cross-user riffing and engagement, like quote-tweeting for audio.” She also considers “what makes a sound compelling beyond musical qualities or linguistic meaning.” While “brainfeel” may be an apt buzzword for the sensation audio memes elicit, Ms. Shane writes, it is more than a mere trend: We have entered the “era of the audio meme.”

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0:00.0	I was noticing on TikTok more than I ever had in my life.
0:06.0	How quickly a sound can get an emotional response out of me.
0:10.6	It's sort of like if you're attending a wedding and you're not that close to the people
0:15.2	who are getting married.
0:16.7	But one of them's crying while they're saying their vows and it's so moving to hear someone
0:22.6	else crying or even to hear their attempt not to cry in their voice.
0:27.0	And you tear up too.
0:30.6	I think that's clearly true of a lot of people using TikTok because when you look at the
0:33.2	comments people will write things like I've never cried so much in my life or I hope
0:40.1	this is what I hear when I get to heaven.
0:42.5	And they're saying this about clips that are sometimes less than 10 seconds long.
0:46.6	What is the best name?
0:48.0	My cat is called Juno and it suits her fine so let's have Juno as the best name.
0:52.5	What's the best name?
0:54.0	No it's not Juno.
0:56.9	So make me think why are we so affected by sounds on TikTok when those sounds aren't
1:02.1	inherently musical or don't have a lot of verbal information?
1:07.3	I'm Charlotte Shane.
1:08.7	I write for the New York Times magazine and for better or worse I'm a TikTok enthusiast.
1:15.8	When you upload a video on TikTok you can choose to make the audio for that video available
1:21.9	for people to reuse as many times as they want.
1:25.0	So you're essentially packaging it as a meme.
	...

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