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 In The New '10s, this was superseded by the trends of YTPMVnote and 音MAD (oto MAD)note videos, which tend more towards covering chiptune and Game Music.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. Compare Recorded Spliced Conversation, which is when a fictional character edits voice clips without music to trick someone.
Examples:
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Advertising
- The advertisement for Freeform's "25 Days of Christmas Song" was redone as of 2022 to largely consist of various voice clips from the movies aired on that channel during the Christmas season spliced together to form the lyrics.
- DJ Steve Porter's "Life Alert Remix
", which also mixes in clips of Wilford Brimley's diabetes PSAs and Hoveround adverts.
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
- Also, here it is by the The Original Series cast
- The TNG cast sing Let it Snow
- The TNG cast sing Call Me Maybe
- Shatner of the Mount: A humorous remix made with William Shatner's quotes from the BTS interview from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
- 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.
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.
- Jurassic Park (1993): keatonkeaton999 would like to let you know that we've got Dodgson here!
- Mortal Kombat (1995): The Immortals' "Techno Syndrome" is an Orchestra Hit Techno Battle remix of voice and sound effect clips from the 1992 video game, along with the Title Scream sampled from an advertisement. "Theme From Mortal Kombat (Encounter The Ultimate)" from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation does likewise with Mortal Kombat 3 clips.
- 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!"
- 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.
- The refrain of 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny" combines the Vietnamese prostitute's lines from Full Metal Jacket with orgasmic voice clips from the Richard Pryor film Which Way Is Up?.
- Project Pitchfork's "The Swamp of Secrecy" is built on voice clips from UFO documentaries.
- Skinny Puppy's "Sleeping Beast" has a bridge section remixing Dr. Helen Caldicott's "There will be millions of corpses" speech from the nuclear war documentary If You Love This Planet.
Live-Action TV
- The Pet Shop Boys' "Absolutely Fabulous" remixes dialogue from the British TV series of the same name.
- Game of Thrones: "A Song Of Vanilla Ice and Fire" is a cover of "Ice Ice Baby" comprised of show voice clips.
- Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Two In-Universe examples:
- In the first episode, when Kimmy and the other women get pulled out of the bunker, a news station interviews one of their neighbors. The interview gets remixed as an upbeat song that goes viral. Out-of-universe, it's the show's Theme Song.
- Titus' failed interview in the episode "Kimmy Goes to Court!" gets turned into this kind of song, and it goes viral in "Kimmy Makes Waffles!"
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.
- 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
- 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 - there's a lot of samples from various records and movies, but one of the most prominent is the Wayne and Shuster sketch of the same title.
- Art of 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 video 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.
- Vicetone's "Hope" samples Barack Obama's 2012 inauguration speech.
- Bakermat's "Vandaag" samples Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech "I have a dream".
- Steampianist's "The Great Trump Wall" is based on a 2016 speech by Donald Trump about the border wall.
Video Games
- An In-Universe example from Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, in which Handsome Jack takes the deceased Merriff's final ECHO log, in which he despairs over the fact that the Big Bad extorted him into betraying his allies, to a pair of familiar-looking DJs, who turn it into this trope: "I'm the biggest arse on the moon!".
- 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.
- Halo 2's OST has the voice clip techno remix "Never Surrender" by Nile Rodgers & Nataraj.
- Hitman: Blood Money: In the tutorial mission; "Death of a Showdown", the room with the two card playing gangsters has a boombox playing a song which is quite literally comprised of quotes from the level over a trap beat.
- 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: One song released for the game on April Fools 2015 made by one of the games' composers, Carl Noren, was "Donacdum", a Memetic Mutation of Houston's infamous "Don't act dumb," line. It also features a few of the other heister lines too ("On the goddamn ground", "Get the fuck up!" and "Fuck!" by Chains, Bains' "Whoa!" from Rats, Clovers's "Hey you, get on your feet!", and Hoxtons' "Don't answer back, you twat!" and "Okay" lines), but "Don't act dumb" accompanies the majority of the song.
Web Animation
- Homestar Runner: The Strong Bad Rickroll and What Is Love videos.
Webcomics
- Square Root of Minus Garfield: Lehrerfield creates possibly the first non-audio version of this trope, using words (and sometimes not even the whole word) from Garfield panels to make the lyrics of Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park".
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.
- The channel is all about this, as well as various BSides, such as Barack Obama singing about kicking ass
- 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.
- 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 .
- "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:
- 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
- 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 Jacksepticeye and Markiplier to create songs for their channels using voice clips 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
- BöpGil, based entirely on jan Misali’s Vötgil episode of Conlang Critic, and which he used to use as an outro for the series.
- Hacker T. Dog from CBBC gets his own dance remix telling us "We're just normal men."
- SpongeDubs takes Video Clips from various different SpongeBob SquarePants episodes and cuts them up to make him sing various popular songs, Such as "Take on Me", "Never Gonna Give You Up" and "Bad Guy".
- the Youtuber Qwistoff YT Ps loves this. look at what songs he has made;
- Evil Anvil is known for making these sorts of songs, especially about the Life SMP.
Western Animation
- Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! has "Scooby's Mystery Mix" by Craig DeGraff & E.J. Dick, released as a bonus track on the 1998 soundtrack album Scooby Doo's Snack Tracks: The Ultimate Collection.
- The Secret Show had "Changed Daily" get this treatment by alien spies who compiled some of his codenames into this.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- Perhaps the series' most famous example, "Avast Fluttershy's Ass" by WoodenToaster remixes Fluttershy samples to the tune of Kitsune^2's "Avast Your Ass".
- "Night of Pony" is a collage of show clips set to the Touhou Project remix "Night of Nights".
- Perhaps the series' most famous example, "Avast Fluttershy's Ass
- Some episodes of Hey Arnold! end with such a song playing during the closing credits, featuring dialogue clips from the episode that just finished being edited to the beat of the music.
