My first ever music-making experiences with a computer consisted of making "song remixes". Well, actually now that i'm thinking a bit deeper about it, i did have a chiptune duo with my younger brother when i was a 9 year old with a Mario Paint Music Maker rom running on a Compaq Presario. Let's bring this back to the "song remixes" though. To an 11-year-old Pete, a remix consisted of taking a song i liked, usually 80's hits a la Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", slowing them down or speeding them up by a very gentle, conservative amount, only enough to slightly change the pitch of the song, and apply either a very light delay or a reverb to the track. To me, that was a brand new song. I made something that felt different from the original, at least different enough for me to listen to it in a new way, relate to it differently. It evoked different feelings.
A couple weeks ago i randomly thought about those experiences, about those "remixes", and i realized how they might be categorized as eccojams or nightcore versions, if explained to a contemporary music friend. At first i laughed it off because it seemed too far off from what i was making, those remixes completely lacked any sort of recontextualization or repackaging into anything other than an mp3 i'd produce whenever i wanted a "new" song, but then i had a very, very intense realization. It felt sudden and extensive even if it was just one train of thought. There are just so, so many different musical genres that consist of simple pitch-shifting and not much else, if anything at all.
Like i said before, the first example that comes to mind when "pitch-shifting music genres" is brought up, is vaporwave. I grew up when vaporwave was becoming an important thing, when everyone had a small vaporwave bandcamp project and everyone was deep into it, exchanging label information and using the same sources sometimes. I wasn't necesarely too deep into vaporwave as a teenager but i certainly paid a small bit of attention to what was happening around the time in bandcamp. I took an early interest in Eco Virtual and when i realized that most of VIRTUAL大気中分析 consisted of Sade samples, i was blown away. I felt, in a way, seen by that album, by that way of recontextualizing music. It felt like a more refined and conceptually well put together version of what i was doing when i was 11. The song "Gradient Winds" made me realize that a song can consist of another song. I felt like what i was doing back when i was 11 somehow made sense, that it wasn't that off from what these people were doing many years later.
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Of course there's more to vaporwave than just slowing down music. I think most of you, beautiful readers of the Door gallery, know that by now. But i can't get over the fact that what made the genre big was that simple mindset of taking a song from the 80's (give or take), slowing it down and doing some very minimal layering and editing, if any. It feels almost reduntant to mention the works of Daniel Lopatin as Chuck Person, and Vektroid as Macintosh Plus at this point, but an article that brings up the birth and early days of vaporwave wouldn't be complete without those references, specially when what we're talking about is the core of the genre at the time: pitch-shifting.
Let's bring the conversation back to that then! pitch shifting. It feels universal, it feels like something every music producer has done at some point of their musical journey, not necesarely trying to imitate the scenes around them, but rather just out of curiosity, out of a human instinct almost. And we've kept doing it, having these rebirths of pitch-shifting based musical genres.
Another example i can think of, perhaps closer to mainstream culture in a way (i think), would be chopped and screwed. I won't pretend to know everything there is to know about the genre, but i do know that on its core, it has a similar technique to it than eccojams. Please don't take that out of context. It is, on its core, music that's slowed down (screwed) and re-arranged minimally (chopped). And similarly to vaporwave and eccojams, people take both of these techniques and make them vary vastly, some people really putting an emphasis on the slow, and some more on the chop. Again, i am no expert but you can't listen to Big Moe's "City of Syrup: Wreckchopped and Screwed" and not realize how similar it can sound to some vaporwave techniques.
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There are many, many layers of culture between these things, there's a very interesting world that goes deep into these two genres. Sub genres that grow off of sub genres, all depending on how slow you go, how much you chop, the vibe you try to give to your track, all of these things sound crazy to an outsider but it goes to show you how sensitive music producers (and music listeners) can be to these changes in sound.
Another example that i only recently became aware of is the cumbias rebajadas of Monterrey.
My younger brother recently gave me a movie recommendation, which is very rare of him, and i gave the movie he recommended a watch, which is even rarer of me. The movie was Ya No Estoy Aqui ("I'm No Longer Here"). I won't get too deep into the meat of the movie, but i will focus on the aspect most relevant to this article: the kolombias, the cumbias rebajadas.
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As the name implies, a cumbia rebajada is a slowed-down cumbia. And if you're not aware, cumbia is a great musical genre that has insanely unique regional variations all over latinamerica. Cumbia deserves an article of its own so i'll keep it short here. Well, i think i pretty much already described what cumbia rebajada is, it really is as simple as taking a colombian-style cumbia, slowing it down and by doing this, having a new "remixed" version that sounds endlessly more saucy and, to outsiders, straight up weird and bad, as seen in the movie when a colombian escort listens to a cumbia rebajada and thinks the guy's mp3 player is running out of battery. This again made me think about the fact that people everywhere are slowing down music. I heavily doubt the cholombianos of Monterrey were in contact with Ramona Xavier or Big Moe to make their slowed-down music happen. It is an universal feeling and practice all over the world.
And we don't have to talk only about slowed music, that's only one side of the slider. Sped up music has had as much of an impact in contemporary music as slowed down music. And the earliest example i can think of is Alvin and The Chipmunks, or "Alvin and The Rat Bastards" as i like to call them.
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Needless to say these guys have been at it for a long time, pitch-shifting long before the internet was a thing. And while it is very interesting to think about the mass appeal their weird little voices had on the music market, what's crazier to me is how they spawned a short-lived but still big sub-culture of "alvin and the chipmunks versions" on youtube, bringing this era of high-pitched squirrel vocals to a new generation after the new movie became a thing. You can look up any late 2000's to early 2010 song and add "alvin and the chipmunks version" to it and you're guaranteed to find at least one result that's exactly what you were looking for, if not several. As a kid i remember my mom showing me a "remix" of Rihanna's Umbrella she got forwarded via email. These Alvin versions made big numbers on youtube back then, there was a market for this and people just kept pumping out these high-pitch songs because there was a demand for them, people loved them.
And i'm sure that if you weren't a chipmunk kid, you were a nightcore kid.
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I absolutely love nightcore, i love what it stands for, i love the era of internet culture it represents and i love the fact that it has refused to die ever since it became a popular thing on youtube years ago. Nightcore is, if you're not aware, sped up music. I love how easy nightcore is to explain. It is quite simply sped up music. Some people may take it to another level by chopping, layering and recontextualizing (which i would (unironically) call post-nightcore), but at its absolute core, it is music, usually electro-pop and rave adjacent, that is sped up. Not much more to it than maybe an anime girl slideshow thrown on its youtube upload. Or if you were like me back in the day, gay furry raver slideshows.
I don't mean to undersell nightcore, or make fun of it. I mean to do the absolute opposite. You know how most chefs, when asked what their favorite meal is, they'll say buttered toast, because it's the epithomy of "simple perfection"? i feel similarly with nightcore. I wouldn't call it my favorite genre, but it is the only one i am so willing to defend whenever people make fun of it. Nightcore is the hill i will die on. It is the most amazing, simplest thing ever and i love it because anyone can make it. Anyone can open up any audio editing software, make an mp3 go faster, export, and call it a day. And through this simple exercise, anyone can understand how beautiful it feels to make music. I believe nightcore remixes to be fully realized songs, different from the originals even when they're not recontextualized into an "interesting" "album". They just feel different. They awaken in me the same feeling i had when i was 11 years old, taking random 80's hits and making them go a bit faster, or slower. It's an universal simplicity.
And that's the main thing. Pitch-shifting really is universal. Vaporwave pioneers, mexican cholombianos, the kings of chopped and screwed, the queens of nightcore and of course the multi-generational rat bastards, they weren't all hanging out one day years ago and decided to make slow and/or sped up music happen as a cultural movement. These were people hundreds of kilometers appart, and of course years appart, that just felt creatively fulfilled when they showed the pitch slider some love, and that to me speaks to something greater than just music, it speaks to a human connection that spans across different cultures, age groups, nationalities and languages. It speaks to the beauty of being human, and i don't mean it to sound as cheesy as it sounds but i do mean it when i say that pitch-shifted music is an incredible example of organic human connection through music. It's an example of how we all felt the need at some point to make a song have a different sound to it, whether that is by opening Audacity, using old batteries on your walkman, putting your finger down on your turntable or running your fingers on its plate to make it go faster. It feels like a connection we all have in common, and i think this beauty should be taken more seriously, both my music producers and music listeners.
That's another reason why i felt the need to make this article. Even i have been guilty of describing pitch-shifted music as lazy, and while it is incredibly simple when it comes to the technical aspects of it all, it wakes up something in all of us, even if we're not fully ready to embrace it. It feels like an off memory, like a deja vu that we desperately try to make sense of before deciding to melt into it, letting the slightly-off sound carry us somewhere new. And if this deja vu takes the shape of a nightcore track or a slow southern hip hop song, or a lightly layered Sade song, it doesn't matter. What matters is the fact that we're human enough to recognize how beautiful it can sound. That's the beauty behind simplicity i see in these genres, and all i can hope for is that the new generations of musicians to come will understand how important it is to go back to these practices. Pitch-shifting can be the most human touch you can give to any old mp3 you may have lying on your computer.
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