Pencil Music

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About

Pencil Music refers to a series of videos in which a person manipulates a pencil to create music. This is generally done by either hitting specific points of the pencil to create different tones or by drawing with the pencil in the rhythm of another song. After a video of a person writing a math problem to the rhythm of the Cantina Theme from Star Wars went viral in January of 2018, many videos using the practice were posted to YouTube and a subreddit devoted to the practice swiftly grew to over 14,000 subscribers.

Origin

The practice of manipulating a pencil to create musical tones has appeared online for several years. One of the earliest known videos posted to YouTube in which a person creates music with a pencil was posted December 26th, 2007 by user moscati, who recreated the "William Tell Overture" by hitting a pencil in his mouth. The video gained over 1,400 views (shown below).

Spread

In the ensuing years, several other videos in which people manipulated pencils to create music appeared on YouTube. For example, one of the most popular videos using the practice, posted May 28th, 2015, showed a boy playing Darude's Sandstorm on pencil, gaining over 7.2 million views (shown below, left). On October 16th, 2017, YouTuber It's a small world uploaded a video of themselves drawing an image where each pencil stroke matched the rhythm of "All Star" by Smash Mouth, gaining over 450,000 views. This practice of writing in pencil to the rhythm of popular songs would go viral several months later.

/r/pencilmusic

On January 10th, 2018, YouTuber Dani Ochoa uploaded a video of herself writing a math problem, with each of her pencil strokes matching the rhythm to the Cantina Theme from Star Wars. The video gained over 5.3 million views (shown below). The same day, Ochoa uploaded a video of herself writing a math problem to the rhythm of The Imperial March from Star Wars, gaining over 2 million views (shown below).

The following day, a subreddit devoted to the practice, /r/pencilmusic,^[1] was created. In four days, the subreddit grew to over 14,000 subscribers. Ochoa, who on Reddit goes by /u/smallgoblin, is one of the moderators of the subreddit and has the title "Concept Creator." The subreddit was covered the following day by Motherboard.^[2] As of January 15th, 2018, the top posts in the subreddit besides Ochoa's works are the video of the boy playing "Sandstorm" gaining over 1,400 upvotes^[3] (shown below, left), and the "All Star" cover. Videos inspired by Ochoa's work include a drawing of Mario to the rhythm of the Mario Theme posted by Luis Ramirez (shown below, left) and writing to the Mii Channel Theme Music posted by SirMasCat (shown below, right).