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The nutshack theme nutshacked

Made by ssidique, Ruihao Ye and Frank Liao

Working on devolving the nutshack theme into its true ironic essence.

Created: September 26th, 2016

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Layer #1 (Opening)

Motivation:


As a recent meme, the first audio track that came to mind for doing meme tennis was the “It’s The Nutshack” theme, mostly because the song itself contained a repeating portion which was commonly used for editing for memes, specifically the lyric “nutshack.” Also, I had heard of the meme fairly recently, and was the first audio track which came to mind when creating the project.

Process:

The first edit was to double each of the words “nut” and “shack”, changing the lyric into “It’s the nutnutshackshack.” However, once I finished doubling the words, I discovered that there is a slight pause between nut and shack in each original lyric which was added between shack and shack. So to make it fit well, I removed that space, and for good measure, doubled the tempo of the nutnutshackshack. Surprisingly, it actually maintained the audio track length.

- Ray

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Layer #2

I received the shot from Ray.

I was returned a remix of the Nutshack theme song. The Nutshack theme is something new to me, but is evidently a very prominent meme from its popularity on YouTube. The remix I received was simplistic in idea, yet very ironic in form. I decided to take the mix further, by using an A vs. B style approach for the next remix. Most songs are remixed in this way where you have the instrumentals of one song vs. the vocals of another. I decided an appropriate partner for the remix would be audio from another meme: Nyan Cat. I took the audio from Nyan Cat, then upped the tempo to the Double Nutshack theme and moved around sound clips in order match up the rhythms. The final product was a short A vs B. style clip of the two audio files.

- Shot by Frank

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Layer #3

I received the song to hear the mix of nyan cat and the nutshack from Frank, with the unintelligible rap from the original taken out. Perfect. Also recently, I was listening to a few themes from shows pitch shifted to G major, something a friend had showed me, and I wanted to do something similar. So after the first nutshack, I pitch shifted each section by a major, going from A major to G major. However, that did not cover all of them, so I decided to reverse it for the last four, leaving the last four blank. Initially I shifted the rest of the end to G major, but then turning it back created incomprehensible static. Therefore, I left the last four blank, the previous four shifted from the original track. As a final fun twist, I halved the speed (without pitch adjustment) the last “it's the nutshack”, which to my surprise gave the final nyan cat two notes a creepy sendoff. Fun.

- Ray

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Layer #4

Sohail Sidique (ssidique)

I figured that the current composition handed to me had added on too many things. So, I focused on subtracting out noise instead of adding. I ended up removing every "nutshack" from the nutshack theme and adding it to the end. This process of shifting doesn't give the track a new texture, but instead recombines and recontextualizes the current track without adding any extra noise.

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Layer #5

I received the return shot from Sohail.

I received a remix of my original A vs. B style mix. Sohail cut out all the "Nutshacks" from the original mix and Ray had made a bunch of tempo changes. I decided to further these ideas into the mix. Sohail's edit was a perfect setup for a more developed mash-up remix. I decided to take audio from many different memes and insert them into openings, creating areas of "It's the [Insert any audio meme here]". I kept negative tempo changes on the original "It's the Nutshack" clips to give precedence and focus to the extra mashed areas.

- Shot by Frank

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Layer #6 (Closing)

Sohail Sidique (ssidique)


I decided to take a step back and look at the roots of the original meme. Typical videos are "The nutshack theme but every nutshack is replaced with X". So i decided to use the original joke of the meme and add another layer of irony on top of it. Given an audio file, I thought that it would be pretty true to the roots of the original media to take the original nutshack theme and replace every nutshack with Layer 5. In the end, I decided to make this final volley a throwback to the original meme, even after all the mutations we have made.

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Approach/Process

As we first started doing research into memes, we came across the Nutshack Theme. We decided to use this for meme tennis due to its remixability. We approached our project in context of the original meme. The original nutshack theme often gets remixed by modifying every occurrence of the word "nutshack".  Since the original meme's humor depends on being nonsensical, we tried to play our composition off in the same essence. First by remixing the original words, then by adding other tracks.

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Reflection

After going through Meme Tennis, we gained a greater insight into the process of how ideas mutate. In particular, with the majority of spreadable media, the final products often make little sense without knowledge of *how* they were changed. And in the end, spreadable media turns into a game of telephone, where remixes are remixed. In particular, we looked back at our final product and realized how, using our original source material, we would never reach the final conclusion without the steps in the middle.

In the end, we would say that we should have had a bit more structure with out original volley's. In the end, that would have made our final project easier to understand. However, we did enjoy the nonsensicalness of the project, and we felt like it captured the essence of the original media well.

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2 comments · Latest by Daragh Byrne

The choice of audio is great here and gives you a lot to work with. It’s a good choice of meme because it can be reworked in so many ways.

As it evolves I think you found more opportunities in playing with the words more so than the audio itself. And this was definitely the right direction. The call and response aspect found in Layer 5 is a great way of reworking phrases into a more interesting outcome. And Sohail’s final response is a clever return to the original meme.

However, without explanation this isn’t obvious from the audio itself. If you were to take this further how do you think you could make it clear from the audio alone what you’ve done?

I also think the starting track might have been too long to remix well in the responses. It might have helped to really cut this down. The mixes get a little messy and busy but you recognize this and cut it down during the match which was a great decision. From a technical perspective, pay attention to audio levels when mixing tracks - make sure both samples match up other wise they clash.

Your reflection at the end is great btw.

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Working on devolving the nutshack theme into its true ironic essence.