Nightcore

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2001 · Nightcore, a Norwegian DJ duo; later YouTube, SoundCloud and TikTok · Also known as Sped up; Sped-up version; Sped-up remix; Nightcore edit

What it is

Nightcore is an existing song played about 35 per cent faster, which also pushes the pitch up, so singers sound younger and squeakier and the beat gets frantic. It's the same effect as playing a slow vinyl record at the faster speed. Online, a nightcore track nearly always came as a video with one still drawing of an anime character (a Japanese cartoon style) on screen for the whole song, and a title starting with the word Nightcore.

Where it came from

The name comes from Nightcore, a Norwegian DJ duo (Thomas S. Nilsen and Steffen Ojala Søderholm) who started it as a school project in 2001. They made albums of sped-up trance and dance songs, inspired by the fast, high-pitched happy hardcore scene. Their tracks reached file-sharing sites and then YouTube. From about 2008 fans worked out that anyone could make one with basic audio software. A sped-up version of Rockefeller Street, Estonia's 2011 Eurovision entry, spread widely, and the style moved on to pop and hip hop. In the early 2020s it came back on TikTok under the plainer name "sped up".

How people used it

Fans uploaded nightcore versions of songs to YouTube under titles like "Nightcore - [song name]", usually with an anime picture they hadn't drawn and often didn't credit. Commenters argued about whether the edit beat the original, and teenagers played it while gaming or doing homework. On TikTok, sped-up clips became the soundtrack to short videos, and people dancing and posting to them pushed the tracks up streaming charts. Record labels noticed and started putting out official sped-up versions next to the normal release, often alongside a "slowed + reverb" version that went the other way.

Why it mattered

It was the cheapest remix possible: one setting in a free audio program. That let teenagers with no musical training make and share their own versions of songs they loved. Some producers later named it as an influence, including A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle of PC Music, whose sound fed into hyperpop. Its return on TikTok mattered too: a fan habit dismissed as cringe for a decade ended up changing how labels release music, with a sped-up version treated as a normal part of a single.

The jokes around it

• "Nightcore - [song name]": the standard title, paired with an anime girl thumbnail that had nothing to do with the song.
• Comparisons to Alvin and the Chipmunks, the cartoon chipmunks whose voices were made by speeding up recordings.
• "Sped up is just nightcore with a new name": older fans complaining when TikTok users treated it as new.
• "Slowed + reverb": the opposite edit, songs slowed down with heavy reverb added, which spread on YouTube in the late 2010s.
• Rockefeller Street, the Estonian Eurovision song whose nightcore version became the scene's anthem.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People happily listened to songs they already knew with one slider moved, as long as it felt faster and more intense. A taste mocked for years as teenage bedroom music was taken up by the music industry once a short-video app showed how many people were playing it.

What noah is not sure of

The 35 per cent figure is a rough convention; the original duo reportedly used 25 to 30 per cent. Accounts of which early YouTube uploaders came first rely mostly on the uploaders' own recollections. The claim that Rockefeller Street was one of the first viral nightcore videos comes from Wikipedia and is hard to verify.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.