Brandie Cherelle 🌞😵‍💫🤟🏻

ABBOTT ELEMENTARY

This meme is mainly an audio-based meme.

The meme involves songs that are edited or manipulated in such a manner so as to sound as if it is playing from another room. The end product typically has a subdued and muffled quality.

This trend has its origins in an audio post published on 20 November 2016 by Tumblr user @largecat. The audio featured was titled ‘mariah carey’s “all i want for christmas is you” except it’s being played in a different room’.

Although the “All I Want for Christmas Is You” post was popular, accumulating more than 100,000 notes, other users on Tumblr did not start making their own “playing from another room” posts until months later.

Helping in popularising the trend is the Tumblr blog @fromanotherroom​, a blog dedicated to posting songs manipulated to sound like they’re playing from another room. The blog made its first post on 3 March 2017.

The blog’s description notes that the the “from another room” effect “can have one or multiple contexts, depending on the listener (examples: wandering through an apartment building, being upstairs from a party, or getting murdered behind a club)”.

Popular posts from the Tumblr include “Africa playing from another room”, “Mr. Brightside playing from another room”, and “La Bamba playing from another room”.

EDIT (26 June 2017): It has been brought to our attention by Tumblr user @shanetherockjohnson that a possible precursor to this meme involved manipulating songs so that they sound as if they are coming from other (unusual) locations. For example, an audio post from 23 September 2016 has a track titled “[Smash Mouth Plays From The Depths Of Hell As You Traverse A Deep, Rat-Infested Cave]”.

 Here’s a repost of my preset/tutorial for the “from another room” effect. The program I use is Adobe Audition. The full range of effects you will need to use are: parametric equalizer, reverb, echo, and hard limiter.

Parametric equalizer:

The heart of this effect and many others I use. Parametric EQ is a tool to enhance the levels of specific sound ranges. Taking down those high frequencies eliminates the “fine details” of the song, and is the starting point for any sort of effect that requires distance and limitation. Here, only low frequencies are allowed to pass through. This mimics the effect of being in another room because, typically, lower tones are stronger than higher ones and can still be heard through walls - at least, if the sound system in the other room is decent.

Settings:

Reverb: 

This helps the sound feel less like just a 8kbps version, or like you’re hearing it underwater. Reverb is a good atmospheric effect overall because it can imitate additional feedback of sound bouncing off of walls.

Settings:

Chorus: Not necessary, just helps it sound a little better. ;)

Settings:

Hard limiter: This may not seem too important, but it stops the low frequency from becoming too heavy (I also have faulty headphones and I can tell when frequencies peak because my right ear channel will make a rattling noise). It’s also sort of your own preference: some people like overly powerful bass, some don’t. If you don’t want the bass to completely drown the rest of the song, use this.

Settings:

(Mine is a little low here, but you can set Max Amplitude up to -1dB)