Voice Clip Song

Editing voice clips of someone famous into a full song (original or cover).

A common trait of Fanvids: it was not uncommon during the Turn of the Millennium to see a clip of a popular film or series remixed over a techno beat. In The New '10s, this was superseded by the trends of YTPMV^note which stands for YouTube Poop Music Video, though YTPMV quickly grew disconnected from YouTube Poop and 音MAD (oto MAD)^note 音 (oto) means "sound", and MAD stands for Musical Animated Dojinshi (MAD itself being another term for Fanvids). Has its own culture, but is essentially the Nico Nico Douga equivalent to YTPMV videos, which tend more towards covering chiptune and Game Music. A staple of these videos (especially for YTPMV) is to chop up voice clips into syllables and phonemes and turn them into instruments; in this sense, they can be compared to Everything Is an Instrument.

See also Sampling.

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Examples:

Fan Works

• Dru Boogie makes dance tracks out of Opie & Anthony Show clips on a regular basis.
• "Noise from the Dwarf": A Red Dwarf fanvid that makes lines from the show into rhyming lyrics that even make a bizarre sort of sense.
  Strike a light, it's Gordon.
  Small, off-duty, Czechoslovakian traffic warden!
• The Picard Song.
  • The TNG cast sing Call Me Maybe
    • Also, here it is by the The Original Series cast
  • The TNG cast sing Let it Snow
• Pokemon Masters Are Broke: It's a remix of quotes from a Game Theory episode regarding how much money you could make as a Pokemon trainer if you had realistic expenses. As it turns out, you would lose money even if you succeeded.
• RoyishGoodLooks made a song using clips from the famous "I have the high ground!" scene from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. He later put his own vocals on the song.
• THEY'RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD!. Now performed by the man himself.
• Young Scrolls: Most of their videos, such as "Star", which uses lines from the Adoring Fan in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
• Do "Mentally Dull (Think Tank Remix)" (South Park) and "Batdance" (Batman 1989) count? Two Tribes is an even earlier example.
• Lucky Star. Pick a character. Chances are someone made a techno remix song out of their dialogue from the show. Konata and Tsukasa are the two most famous examples.

Music

• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: A possible Ur-Example of the trope appears in the form of Brian Eno and David Byrne's album, which set sampled audio of radio DJs, preachers, politicians, and religious singers to avant-funk instrumentals. Unlike later examples, these clips aren't edited to fit certain melodies, but it still sets a precedent long before it became an identifiable trope.
• The arguable forerunner to the modern Voice Clip Song is The Firm's 1987 hit Star Trekkin'. It didn't actually use clips from Star Trek itself, instead having the band members sing each character's trademark phrase (even if some of them were, ironically, examples of Beam Me Up, Scotty!) along with the music.
• The most epic and heartwarming example of this is "Kidung Abadi" (Eternal Ballad); it was created by Erwin Gutawa for a concert honoring the 5th anniversary of the death of legendary Indonesian singer Chrisye (Gutawa had collaborated with him before, but never got to write a song for him). Erwin had his sister Gita write the lyrics, and then worked with a team to splice them together using vocals from Chrisye's master tracks. For the live performance, Jay Subiyakto also spliced together concert footage of the singer himself (to make him "sing" the new song) as a finishing touch. The result was three months definitely well spent.
• Kevin Moore's 'Memory Hole 1' is mostly based on this. Voices used range from US Presidents to more obscure advertisements. He also uses it frequently in other projects, such as OSI or Chroma Key.
• Cloud Cult's "The Princess Bride" is a song entirely based around clips of the movie of the same name. There's also "State Of The Union", which is based around quote mining of George W. Bush.
• Toby Fox created The Nic Cage Song.
• "Rocked by Rape," the Evolution Control Committee's remix of Dan Rather, set to a heavily edited version of AC/DC's "Back in Black".
• Bush seems to be a popular choice, Jonathan Coulton's "W's Duty" makes use of clips to make fun of the way W. pronounces the word "duty".
• "Deify" by Disturbed starts with clips of one pro-Bush source, one comment on a repressive government, then clips of Bush himself from his 9/11 speech.
• Most of Negativland's output falls under this category.
  • If you've ever played Kingdom of Loathing and wondered why using or buying eleven of an item gets you the message "That's ridiculous. It's not even funny", it's from the Negativland song "Time Zones". In turn, that was remixed by Negativland sound collage master Don Joyce from a talk radio show clip discussing the Soviet Union (which apparently had — and Russia still has — eleven time zones). Eleven.
• A YouTube user created a video of a double rainbow that slowly became memetic due to his over-the-top enthusiasm over his discovery. Of course remixes followed, including one courtesy of The Gregory Brothers and a different but also auto-tuned mix.
• Andrew Huang's "Do You Like The Smell Of Adventure?", a remix of an Old Spice commercial.
• Welcome to Paradise by Front 242 mixes voice clips from various televangelists.
• "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches.
• Artof Noise: "Instruments of Darkness" revolves around editing clips from speeches by pro-apartheid South African politicians and setting them to foreboding music, acting as a nonverbal means of protesting The Apartheid Era.
• Disclosure: "When a Fire Starts to Burn" is built around a sample from motivational speaker Eric Thomas.
• Shake Chain's "Mike" is based on a viral video in which a gate attendant acts as though a clearly stationary car is in danger of running her down, apparently in an attempt to fabricate a 911 call and get the car's occupant arrested. Rather than sampling the woman directly, vocalist Kate Mahony imitates the woman's anguished shrieks of "Mike!" and "He's running me over!".
• "Stylophonia" by Two Little Boys remixes voice clips from Rolf Harris's Stylophone demo records and his recording of the folk song "Two Little Boys"(hence the group name) to a stadium techno instrumentation.
• The Pet Shop Boys' "Absolutely Fabulous" samples dialogue from the British TV series of the same name.

Films — Live-Action

• Baby Driver: The main character likes to record snippets from conversations and remix them into songs. This causes him some problems later in the movie, considering how he's involved in crime: his cohorts catch him in the act of recording them and immediately jump to the logical conclusion that he's wearing a wire for the police, though he manages to defuse this by playing one of his songs to prove that he does remix them.
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles: The song "I Can Take Anything" remixes dialogue from Steve Martin and John Candy's characters.
  "You're messing with the wrong guy!"

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: The Strong Bad Rickroll and What Is Love videos.

Web Videos

• Finnish rap artist A-Tyyppi has mixed phrases from sports commentator Antero Mertaranta into a truly hysterical dance song. It's still regularly played whenever Finland manages to kick ass at ice hockey.
• Auto-Tune the News
  • The channel is all about this, as well as various BSides, such as Barack Obama singing about kicking ass.
  • And his State of the Union addresses.
• Even Bill Cosby is in on it.
• Formula One has one of them as well, coming from Rubens Barrichello leashing out on his team after losing out in the German Grand Prix
• The Golden Age of Video. Full stop.
• MC Hammer can't touch Mormon Jesus.
• Paul Hardcastle: One early example would be his 1985 single "19". There are some professional backing vocalists singing a few lines, but the vocals are mainly clips from a documentary about The Vietnam War.
• I Don't Like It is a mix of various statements uttered by controversial Australian politician Pauline Hanson (the video features performer/mix artist "Pauline Pantsdown" lip-synching the performance)
• Jon Stewart is God. Stephen Colbert thinks so.
• Several Barack Obama quotes, including the audiobook of "The Audacity of Hope", give us this gem.^note At a few points, the book quotes an old friend of Obama who regularly used vulgarity and slang - since Obama read the audiobook himself it was easy to take these passages out of context.
• "GOMIKASU -Original Mix-" by Japanese musician/DJ ChibaNyan is based on remixing clips from Era Otogibara. ChibaNyan later did another one called "Ancient GIBARA ~The Return of the King~".
• PBS commissioned the artist of the aforementioned Symphony of Science to make these as tributes for old and well-loved shows and personalities that are no longer with us. To date, we have:
  • Mister Rogers: "Garden of Your Mind"
  • Bob Ross: "Happy Little Clouds"
  • Julia Child: "Keep On Cooking"
  • Reading Rainbow: "In your Imagination
• placeboing is a YouTube channel that specializes in these sorts of videos, with songs made from voice lines taken from everything from Seinfeld, to Intergalactic, to Team Fortress Classic. Some of his older videos instead remix the lines of real people, such as Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Alex Jones — the last one being responsible for his most successful video, Gay Frogs.
• Charlie Sheen I have one gear, Go! Epic winning!"^note Whoa, that's Harsher in Hindsight
• Sweet Brown - Ain't Nobody Got Time for That (Autotune Remix) Put together from a woman's description of what happened when she realized her apartment complex was on fire.
• The Gregory Brothers were commissioned by YouTubers Web Video/jacksepticeye and Web Video/Markiplier to create songs for their channels using voiceclips from their various videos; All The Way and What Is My Life for Jack, and Space Is Cool and Fly Like A Butterfly for Mark. These aren't the only Youtubers to enlist The Gregory Brothers' help, but they are the most famous ones.
• The YouTube Poop Music Videos "Tomorrow I'll", "It's From The Show", and "Robotnik's Tea Party", featuring Dr. Ivo "Pingas" Robotnik. Dr. Ivo "Pingas" Robotnik is a magnet of this. This This and This were all made by the same user.
• The Tourettes Guy has inspired countless curse-filled techno mixes.
• Wax Audio's brilliant mix of George W. Bush, set to John Lennon's Imagine

Video Games

• Command & Conquer: This was part of Frank Klepacki's Signature Style when he composed music for the franchise and it was especially prevalent in the CD soundtrack to Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, the in-game tracks omitted most of the voice clips so they didn't distract the player or drown out EVA's announcements. "Got a Present for Ya!" from Renegade brings this full circle by using voice clips from... Himself, as he voiced the Commando in Tiberian Dawn and he would record new samples for the Tiberian Sons version played at Super MAGFest 2019 which was re-recorded for the Remastered Collection.
• Deltarune: A good majority of Spamton G. Spamton's themes are like this, mostly consisting of the singular phrase "NOW'S YOUR CHANCE TO BE A BIG SHOT!", the character's signature catchphrase, repeated in various glitched-out ways. Special mention goes to "BIG SHOT", which incorporates even more lyrics if you're keen enough to hear them.
• Need for Speed: Eiarly entries with in-house composers were also fond of this, particularly in High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed with songs like "I Am Electro" by The Funk Lab, which uses the voice of Elektro the Robot, or "The Cost of Freedom" by The Experiment (also featured in Motorstorm) which samples John F. Kennedy's "The cost of freedom is always high!".
• PAYDAY 2: It features "Donacdum", a Memetic Mutation of Houston's famous "Don't act dumb," line. It features a few other of the heisters and even Bain, but Houston's Donacdum accompanies a majority of the song.

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