Tantacrul is a YouTube channel whose focus is on video essays about music and visual design. Run by composer/UX designer Martin Keary, this channel is known for its combination of surreal humor and informative content on music.
Browse Tropes, Sibelius crashed:
- Brain Bleach: In his RWBY parody song video, when discussing his history with anime, he regrets seeing a morbid anime called Genocyber at the age of 11, and it contained content that he could only describe as "not romantic".
- Cult: In "Encouraging the Young to Die - The Most Toxic Site I've Ever Seen", he accuses the site in question of being one by pointing out three cult-like characteristics:
- A bizarre, decidedly non-mainstream philosophy that inverts morality—namely, that Talking Down the Suicidal is immoral because anyone on the forum must have crossed the Despair Event Horizon.
- Hostility to mainstream psychiatry, which he compares directly to Scientology's rhetoric on the field.
- Cutting forumgoers off from their support network through rhetoric that mental health professionals will lock them up if they admit being suicidal and that their parents brought them into this Crapsack World in the first place.
- Every Episode Ending: "If you like my diatribe, subscriiiiiibe!"
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Thoughty2 bases his ridiculous, Disco Dannish analysis of music as a whole on pop music, mispronounces timbre as "timber", and assumes that reduced timbre automatically means worse music when certain techniques, used by both pop and crucially non-pop artists, deliberately reduce timbre to get a desired soundnote , which doesn't even count as Stylistic Suck as such techniques are Older Than Radio.
- Sanity Slippage: In his Sibelius video, Tantacrul goes on bizarre tangents as he points out many of Sibelius's faults, ranging from referencing a Quinnsworth Star Wars commercial
to demanding clean pancakes from Lieutenant Uhura. It only gets worse from there.Open file, Sibelius crashed. Save file, Sibelius crashed. Copy notes, Sibelius crashed. Play score, Sibelius crashed. Quit Sibelius, Sibelius crashed. Open Sibelius, Sibelius crashed. Read email, Sibelius crashed. Grind to the gore, Sibelius crashed. - Sensory Abuse: Dorico Beep, the default soundfont in Dorico, is incredibly loud and distorted, to the point that it startled one of the people evaluating the software for the video on Dorico. Even worse on a Mac, where, for some inexplicable reason, Dorico maxes out the volume upon launching.
- Shameless Self-Promoter: At the end of his aleatoric music video, he creates a track using repeated loops of the lines "Subscribe" and "Ring the bell". When he tells the viewers to get involved in introducing an element of chance, he explains his reasoning as "democratizing the listening process" before having his credibility points drop from 2,222 to just 3.
- Small Reference Pools: The biggest flaw with Thoughty2's video on why music is supposedly getting worse, besides Arran coming off as a condescending Disco Dan with little understanding and no working knowledge of music theory, is that he based his impression of music on a study that used the Million Song Dataset, which uses the top 200 artists and songs that sound similar to songs by those artists. In other words, he's basing his claim that every modern musical artist is scientifically a Dreadful Musician because there's less "timber" in modern music not on music as a whole but pop music, an everchanging "big dumb lake" of marketable fluff that rarely survives the Nostalgia Filter, when there is and always has been an enormously larger chaotic stream of niche music that doesn't have to be radio-friendly.
- Suicide is Shameful: Keary condemns this attitude in "Encouraging the Young to Die - The Most Toxic Site I've Ever Seen", as it causes suicidal people to fear approaching good-faith actors and instead turn to sources like the site in question.
- Take That!: This happens a lot on this channel. From calling out guitar players for only using the most basic guitar chords to artists like Taylor Swift and Coldplay, because of course.Lyrics can be reified, especially in music by people like Taylor Swift, who use them to explain to the listener what they should be feeling, lest they turn their brains on to interpret meaning for more than five seconds.
- A Tankard of Moose Urine: In "Musical Elitism is Everywhere," he discusses how the imagery of classical music has become a shorthand for quality and refinement, regardless of the actual nature of a given product. The example of cheap liquors patterning their packaging after more expensive brands is used to demonstrate the point, and Keary describes a specific example, the discount Rachmaninoff vodka brand, as tasting "like you're drinking leakage from Rachmaninoff's decomposing corpse."
- Very Special Episode: "Encouraging the Young to Die - The Most Toxic Site I've Ever Seen" is far more serious than usual for the channel, as it discusses a certain forum that encourages users to commit suicide, which was brought to Keary's attention after discovering an active member of his audience had used the site and ended his own life. The video includes a Content Warning at the start, and Keary also tweeted a preemptive warning for the video before its release.
If you like my diatribe, subscriiiiiibe!
