Audio-Spliced Mash Up Songs

About

Audio-Spliced Mash Up Songs are audio and video clips spliced together to match the lyrics of a song. They are often painstakingly edited from large amounts of video footage and reconstructed in a particular order to mirror the song's lyrics and autotuned to fit the melody of the track.

Origin

On June 13th, 2006, YouTuber dan marks uploaded a video titled “Bush Sings U2”, which included edited clips of United States President George W. Bush singing the 1983 single “Sunday Bloody Sunday” by the Irish rock band U2. As of September 13th, 2012, the video has received over 1.6 million views and 4,900 comments.

Spread

On Jul 7th, 2006, the "Bush Sings U2" video was posted on the Democratic Underground Forums^[1] by member RPM. On August 22nd, 2006, YouTuber turbanhead uploaded a video titled "Bush Sings Imagine", which featured auto-tuned clips of George W. Bush singing the song "Imagine" by The Beatles (shown below, left). On August 9th, 2008, YouTuber Hugh Atkin uploaded a video titled "BarackRoll", which featured edited clips of United States President Barack Obama singing the song Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley (shown below, right). Within four years, the video accumulated over seven million views and 45,000 comments.

On January 4th, 2012, YouTuber baracksdubs uploaded a video featuring spliced clips of Obama singing the song "Drink to That" by Rihanna (shown below, left). On June 4th, baracksdubs uploaded a new spliced video of Obama singing the song "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen (shown below, right). The same day, the video was highlighted in an article on The Huffington Post.^[2] As of September 13th, 2012, it is the most popular baracksdubs video with over 26 million views and 39,000 comments.

On August 7th, YouTube Zyphorg uploaded a mashup video based on footage from the science fiction TV series Star Trek set to the tune of "Call Me Maybe" (shown below, left). On August 13th, YouTuber dondrapersayswhat uploaded a video featuring clips from 295 films spliced to match the lyrics of the song "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot (shown below, right). On the following day, the video was highlighted on The Huffington Post^[4] and the gaming blog IGN.^[3] Within one month, the video received over three million views and 4,000 comments.

Notable Examples

Perhaps influenced by Barackdubs's success with mash up songs featuring soundbites taken from political speeches, the audio-splicing technique went on to spawn a number of other mashups featuring the voices of prominent U.S. politicians, including Mitt Romney and Joe Biden among others.

External References