The Attraction of Vocal Attraction

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In a video by Caitlin Riley that mocks and sippet wedding vows delivered with maximum vocal fry, commenters tried to capture the timing of the speech. In part because we like predictability and familiarity, there's an attentional draw to voices that are atypical to us. We might want to hear a little bit of modulation and pronunciation because it helps keep our attention. The tension between predictability and novelty comes up a lot with sound.

“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.”

This story was written by Charlotte Shane and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.