As a child who spent way too much time listening to sped up cassette tapes, it is always interesting how very simple effects can change how music sounds. Apparently, I'm not the only one, because on the internet, these sorts of things can crystalize into entire "genres":
And one kind that caught my attention this weekend:
So in the old days of CDs and MP3s, the physical players of these would not only let you skip to the next song, but you could usually fast forward or rewind the audio itself. Unlike a tape, this didn't speed up the audio, instead it would play at normal speed, while the player would "skip" a few 10s of milliseconds as long as you held down the button.
Somehow, somebody thought of lining up these "skips" with the beat of the song, creating something that seems sped up but also not really. They also pitched down the initial audio...
...and the result is now something the internet has named "Slurmcore". No relation to Futurama, at least I don't think so.
There seemed to be some confusion about how this effect was achieved, but someone found out how to do it in Ableton Live using a built-in feature. But if you listen closely, you can tell what's going on; it's basically this:
If you don't have or know how to use Abelton Live (which I don't), how can I do this?
Looking at the image above, it doesn't look that complicated, but getting the beat exactly right isn't trivial. Since I don't have any better idea, I'm going to have to one-shot it using a fixed rate beat at the beginning of the song. So you need to know the BPM of the song exactly. If a song is between 123 and 124 beats per minute, you will be able to tell it is losing sync within 10 or so seconds.
WRITING IN PROGRESS - MORE TO COME