The chipmunk-ification of music: why sped-up songs are everywhere right now

14:47The chipmunk-ification of music: why sped-up songs are seemingly everywhere

If it feels like life is moving really fast right now, it might have something to do with the current speed of popular music.

From Tik-Tok trends to official releases, sped-up songs seem to be everywhere these days. While this production effect has been around for decades, these chipmunk-like tunes seem to be dominating the charts today in a whole new way thanks to their popularity for filming TikToks, Instagram Reels and other short viral videos.

Now, this quirky sound is actually becoming standard music industry practice — with everyone from Madonna to Michael Bublé releasing sped-up versions of their tracks. 

Music industry experts DJ 4Korners and Reanna Cruz join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to explain what exactly is fuelling this need for speed.

We've included some highlights from the transcript below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Reanna, let me start with you. You wrote a piece for Vulture where you unpack this history of the sped-up song. In your telling, you chose [Witch Doctor by David Seville] as the starting point of this trend, but then there's this long history of club DJs taking up songs and jacking up the tempo on them. How did we get to this moment — this current explosion of sped-up songs?

Reanna: The current moment we're at now is sort of a post-pandemic sped-up renaissance. It's coming from, I think, the proliferation of TikTok in our daily lives. TikTok is the premier app of choice right now, and because the clips on the app are so short, I think things are sped up to fit into those boxes — the 15 seconds, the one minute — and you can fit more songs in a shorter time frame, right? So it fits the attention-deficit kind of attitude that these apps proliferate. I think currently in 2023, there's more sped-up songs than there's really ever been before. And, it's different than a remix. It's just a song taken up the BPM, and maybe the pitch.

Elamin: That's a good thing to point out, because a remix is when you take a song and you rearrange some of it; this is just dropping the song into some kind of software and saying, "Play this but faster." 4Korners, you've been playing in clubs for decades now. Let's talk about the excitement that people have for this kind of sound. What do you make of it?

DJ 4Korners: Well, here's the thing: as a DJ, I've always played songs just a little bit faster than they were recorded to add some energy to it. This has taken it all the way though — all the way back to the chipmunks. And, this is not a new thing in any way. There's that in the 60s, there are the sped-up soul samples of the 90s and 2000s where rappers are rapping on top of a chipmunk-sounding old song. But now, because of technology, we're here with TikTok and things are just moving fast. It doesn't cost anybody anything to do this; you don't need to hire a separate producer or anything, you just speed up the song. Record labels have caught on and said, "Oh, this is trending, let's sell it." And now, they're selling it.

Elamin: Reanna, the idea of playing around with the speed of a song, obviously, is something that has been around for a while… but then we get to this moment and it seems like it's been kind of dubbed a Gen Z phenomenon. Is that accurate, would you say? 

Reanna: I think that it's not solely Gen Z because so many songs that have sped-up remixes are on the Hot 100, and I don't think that's solely a Gen Z affair, right? Because the radios have to buy in… I think it speaks to the Gen Z ethos of, "everything's super fast all the time." But I don't know, I think it's a very universal experience that people like sped-up songs — like, radio even speeds up songs without us even realizing it to fit more on the air.

Elamin: I think that's something that most of us are not aware of. 4Korners, how has this sped-up trend impacted your world as a DJ, would you say? 

DJ 4Korners: You know what? Not at all.

Elamin: Do you play sped-up songs a lot? 

DJ 4Korners: I do not, nor has anyone ever asked me—

Elamin: No one's banging on the glass being like, "Sir?"

DJ 4Korners: Not once, not even online. When I saw it starting to happen I thought [someone would] at least at the Raptors games, because I get requests. Not once. Not once have I had a request for a sped-up song.

Elamin: Do you play sped-up versions of songs yourself, or is that just not your personal inclination?

DJ 4Korners: No, not really, to be perfectly honest. I play the regular song. As I said, I generally play everything a little bit sped up, but not double the speed.

Elamin: Not sort of chipmunk-speed.

DJ 4Korners: No.

Elamin: Reanna, all over Spotify you'll find all of these [sped-up] versions linked to accounts with names like "Speed Radio" or "Sped-up Nightcore." I'm so sorry to do the thing where I ask you to be like, "Hey, could you explain this to me?" But like, what is going on here? What's Nightcore? Help, please. 

Reanna: That's a very online question. Nightcore is an online subgenre that emerged in the early 2000s that essentially speeds up songs but with a sort of electronic and dubstep-y edge to it. There's also an anime aesthetic to it, it's very YouTube … Nightcore is also synonymous with just speeding something up. On YouTube, similar to the slowed and reverb trend, a Nightcore edit can just be speeding it up a bunch of BPM, pitching it higher so that it's good for, I don't know, ravers and very online people.

Elamin: What does [the popularity of these songs] tell you about the relationship between this particular trend and the traditional music industry?  

Reanna: There is a very clear correlation between the music industry and these songs that are getting big because, you know, I'm a Little Monster, and there's no way that I would have ever predicted that Bloody Mary would be on the charts in 2020. These are things that are manifesting because of this sped-up trend, and they're having real life implications.  

Elamin: I think one example that illustrates this is Nelly Furtado's huge hit Say It Right because it was a big song when it came out way back in 2006. 4Korners, it's a spacious song, right? Like, she doesn't take up the whole beat with her singing very deliberately. There's something very magical about the way that she sings that song. In the sped-up version, all of that magic, to me, is kind of squished out. But also, maybe people who are listening to this are not necessarily looking for that; they're looking for an entirely different experience. What do you think they get out of this better version of the song?

DJ 4Korners: I think the main thing with the sped-up versions is people discovering music for the first time. The people that are really loving this, for example, are not the people that were there when the original came out.

Elamin: You calling me old right now? 

DJ 4Korners: Yes. Me too. Me too. But this is not that much different than any trend on TikTok where an old song becomes popular again, like Fleetwood Mac or ABBA, that had a viral moment that will introduce this song to a whole new generation of people, or several. And now everybody's gone to stream that song. It's the same thing, but it's just that the record companies have caught on and now are offering a different way to listen to it to lead you back to the real thing.

Elamin: I am glad that no one on this panel is doing the thing where they go, "And the youth are not experiencing the proper experience of this thing!"

DJ 4Korners: Nah, it's not that at all. I don't believe that at all. I'm a DJ, I'm a producer; I've always manipulated music. I think it's cool that things are happening, and also I think it's very cool that people are discovering music that's been out — like, a 2000s song to become a hit and be on the Billboard charts now? It's incredible.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.