🆕 Never Post! Burnt Toast Audio Says “Fuck Your Levels” [Archive Pull]

Hello, hello, producer Georgia here. In this month's archival episode, we're gonna bring back an especially fun segment made by me and guest producer, Luis Lopez. Luis is an audio producer, a very online person, and one of my close friends. And this episode was the product of weeks of conversations he and I had had in TikTok DMs about this one kind of really bad sounding audio we kept coming across. And I mean, the audio wasn't just bad. It was clipped completely, distorted beyond recovery, and so loud that you'd basically be completely screwed if you made the a foolish decision to scroll your feed while wearing headphones. Blowing out the microphone like this felt to us like this kind of mimetic language in and of itself, the sonic equivalent of a keyboard smash. Luis and I called this phenomenon "burnt toast audio." And in this episode, you'll hear us come to that term, define it, and explore why anyone would enjoy this kind of sonic affront in the first place. And I'm pleased to say that Burt Toast Audio is still very much out there. I hear it all the time. Honestly, I've been hearing a lot of new ways that people mess around with sound online. The latest thing I've noticed is that people will intentionally place themselves too far away from their microphone, like this, and start yelling to make up for that space. They're almost always doing this while talking about something that's a little scandalous or maybe ought to be whispered instead. And I usually interpret this as a way of underlining your point in like an exasperated way. I hear that distance in their voice and it feels like no matter what the person is saying, What they're really trying to tell me is, Jesus Christ, don't you get it already? And I can hear a clear line between that and burnt toast audio. This new trend plays with sound in, granted, a less sonically brutal way. But in the two years since Luis and I created the concept of burnt toast audio, The desire to break out of the system of perfectly normal sonic experiences hasn't changed. If anything, it's expanded because high quality sound remains something that is extremely reliably, even stubbornly available to us. If we wanted to, we could make perfectly acceptable sounding stuff with our iPhones. And many people do. But when so much of our visual experience online is digitally enhanced or smoothed or generated, sound still feels like the best way to add some grit and texture back in. To say, fuck your levels. And crucially, RIP to headphone users.

We've been thinking about crappy audio on the internet. Crappy as in mediocre or amateur, audio that's been poorly recorded or poorly reproduced. Being online, you get exposed to a lot of it.

People record themselves way too close to the mic, or in a noisy place, or outside when it's windy. Maybe they want to record something that's happening right now so they don't set up their levels. There's a thousand reasons for audio to be bad, and there are countless examples of bad audio online. Give me a lot of snow in Iowa!

Charge your tablets, get your papers out of the bag, get everything! This is not your paper job. Is Papa John a person or is he just like a character? Oh my gosh! Oh my God, it looks so much like this in the picture. Not my books! Apple is not a person! You're not trouble to close right now!

You hear it so much that it's easy for crappy audio to just become background noise. But as an audio producer, I'm thinking about audio all the time. If I hear a mic that's clipping, if the voice starts to distort and create noise, I immediately It's like a blurry picture. In fact, there is a case to be made that it's better when it sounds bad. It's doing something. Something that it wouldn't do if the recording was clean. There is a desire for audio to clump, distort, degrade, totally against the rules. But this rule-breaking communicates an essential aspect of internet culture. Bad is good. or at least certain flavors of bad are good. ♪ Put your head on my shoulder ♪

So, listen along with me. You're sitting on the couch and scrolling TikTok, sort of half paying attention. The sound is just playing out of your iPhone speakers into the room, so the quality is already okay-ish. And this video pops up by a woman named Tiara Skye.

Hello, hello, it's the beach with the massive camel toe.

Tiara's whole thing is running up to people on the street at night with a microphone and asking them unexpected questions to catch them off guard.

Are you gonna be at least being tonight? I might be. (laughing)

You watch a few and then you get to this one particular video.

Do you know who's the red black devil? Oh, sorry.

Tiara is in a long red dress with a white fur coat. It's night and she's just approached a woman on the street. The sound is already bad. Tiara is using this handheld corded microphone that seems to only pick up distorted rough sounding audio.

Can you say that to black people? Oh, sorry.

After being asked the question, the girl hesitates and laughs. She's definitely been put on the spot.

Sorry.

But then, Tiara decides to change the subject. How are you doing today? And that's when something really fabulous happens.

I'm feeling good because today is my birthday. Birthday! Wow.

Tiara's voice just totally overpowers the technology. It's like the mic just can't capture her full body exaltation about the fact that it's this girl's birthday.

The mic doesn't just fail. It gives up. And the video abandons its original premise completely and becomes a masterful failure in audio recording. Individual syllables struggle to burst through the saturation. And if you close your eyes and focus only on the video's sound, it's like time stops. We get freeze frames of an outburst that never could have happened if the recording had gone well.

Birthday! Happy birthday to you!

The clipping is what makes this video something. Just in case you need the numbers to prove it, this TikTok has been viewed 7.6 million times and has been liked 1.8 million times. And even the comments can't find the right way to express how that clipping makes them feel. So many of the comments on this video, and we're talking tens of thousands of comments, so many of them use emoji more than text. It's like the clipping has broken not only audio recording but also written speech, as if even that isn't sufficient to capture what's going on here. This video is an especially good display of overloaded audio, but pretty much all of Tiara's videos sound distorted. I don't know what kind of microphone she's using, but it's very good at recording bad audio. Even if she's just talking, her voice is raggedy at the edges, like the microphone could give up at any second. But when other people speak, it sounds fine. And that tells us that she's not doing this by accident. It's not the microphone, it's how she's using it. Tiara is holding the mic so close to herself that it has no other option but to blow out. She wants it to sound bad. We can assume that. So why? Well, because it means something to do that. And she's not the only person who intentionally distorts what could be quote unquote normal sounding audio to make it worse. It's a sound that's familiar to a lot of us on the internet.

>> Bruh. >> And his name is John Cena.

When we do get the decency of a warning before listening to anything like this, it'll usually go something like RIP headphone users. Audio like this is shocking and discomforting at best, and dangerous and potentially harmful to our hearing in the worst cases, if we listen to it too loudly of course. And yet people make it and share it, and people listen to it for fun.

And the joy comes, at least in part, because this is so far beyond the scope of what could be considered regular or acceptable audio. The entire point is to overwhelm you in the way that the audio equipment itself is being overwhelmed. It's too loud. It's too distorted. It's too much.

intentional over-cooking. We could compare it to deep-fried memes, these washed-out, grainy, and strangely colored images run through many filters and often accompanied by equally weird text, and they do have a lot in common. But we'd like to propose a different culinary term. Burnt Toast Audio. But why burnt toast? And why would anyone find that appealing? Well, when you burn your last piece of toast and you have no other choice, that's breakfast, I guess. It'll be wrong, and with every bite you'll be tasting how wrong it is, and no amount of butter or jam can remove that lingering char from your mouth. Now, imagine you're served burnt toast every day for breakfast. Eventually, you'd get used to it. You'd have to. the burnt taste will never leave. It's there to stay, like the burn marks on the sound waves that redlined for too long. And after getting a taste of it again and again in your daily doom scroll, you realize that it's not so bad. And you're starting to like it.

Then you start to seek it out. Burnt toast audio has a layer of intention to it. It's either made to sound bad on purpose, or it's shared, with purpose, because it sounds bad. The poor quality is what makes these clips funny, and it's what makes them meaningful.

That relationship to intention is the key to all of this, because there is an inherent contradiction between the internet and those of us who use it. The internet offers immediacy, quantity in addition to and often in place of quality. And people value authenticity, something that statistically few things on the internet will have. Although, of course, what counts as authentic is ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. In any case, here you are with the tools at hand to record a piece of content and you're able to share it right away. And what's going to happen? Will you create content that follows professional standards or content that defies them?

For example, it's difficult to imagine something more immediate than live streaming. And gamers who stream on Twitch have their own relationship to this burnt toast type of audio. Sure, they have a headset mic or whatever, but when they totally freak out when they die in the game...

it is again. A pristine high quality recording of this scream might be funny, but it wouldn't have this burnt toast flavor to it. It wouldn't be of the internet. And we know audio distortion is nothing new. Whole music genres exist because of how much we love distorting guitars. Voices on the phone have gone from a nostalgic "leave your message" band pass filter to an uncanny warrable while the person on the other end finds better Wi-Fi. But that's not burnt toast audio. Because burnt toast audio is audio that is bad not only because the person who creates it knows it's bad or doesn't care, but because they expect the listener to understand the badness as a choice. ♪ Pineapple upside down ya ♪ ♪ In the toilet I make a brown ya ♪

♪ At my wedding I won't wear a gown ya ♪ ♪ I would rather wear a lady gaga mattress ♪ ♪ Let's go ♪

The point of a live stream is to grant access, to record yourself gaming for other people to watch you in real time. And as a viewer, it feels like that level of access should come with a lack of artifice. (screaming) Even if someone streams professionally as their real job, it's still possible that they'll blow out their mic in a moment of game-induced fury. And when that happens, it's a tell, like a reminder that this is a real person, a real emotion. It's letting you as the viewer in. As the audience, we want that bad audio because, in a way, it feels more real than other kinds of media.

Please, Ed. No! No! I can't, I hate this. You see the day, see the day, why are you walking back, you have to roll with steel! (laughing) You're finally too slow. (mumbling)

But what's desirable online would be seen as an absolute failure in other more traditional kinds of media. Like, if a microphone blew out during the news broadcast, That would be unprofessional. It would be a mistake.

And in this internet code, we crave mistakes. We don't care that clipping may sound unprofessional because what we're looking at is not professional, at least not in the same way. A gamer on Twitch could be a millionaire, but they're using the tools of the internet to do their job. It's of the internet in a way that a news broadcast is not, which means that in a certain way, this media prioritizes accessibility over this more standard sheen of professionalism. It's not hyper-produced, and moreover, it can't seem to be hyper-produced. Even if streamers have the best, most expensive equipment, They can still give that DIY feel to their content. They make it look and sound like any of their followers could do the same thing with whatever tools they have at hand. Not only does it contradict the rulebook, it exists for that very contradiction.

And that rejection isn't just a bratty response to pre-approved audio standards. It comes with a very interesting weight to it. In the essay "Rough Music, Futurism, and Post-Punk Industrial Noise Bands" by Mary Russo and Daniel Warner, they talk about this idea of challenging the dominant code with something harsher. In that context, it was replacing sound, something people want to hear, with noise, something people don't want to hear. (crickets chirping) It might be a bit much to say that blowing out a microphone by screaming, "Oh my God, happy birthday!" is some deliberate punk act of rejection of the status quo. But it is intentionally refusing the option of better sounding audio. And there is joy to be found in basically saying, "Fuck your levels." There's a desire to hear what we don't want to hear. There's this paradox. But in the essay, Russo and Warner mention a really interesting idea of aestheticizing the tumultuous activities of modern life. In other words, interpreting the chaotic nature of living in the world through a look, a vibe, or in this case, a sound. Brutto's audio is its own aestheticization of this very online internet forward feeling. A lot of the sounds we've used here serve as these emotional shortcuts. ♪ Birthday ♪ These short form bite-sized memes that can be used in place of writing out, this is how I feel when I see this.

♪ Happy birthday ♪

There's a sort of real ones no situation here. Not everyone will get it. It's a kind of lexicon, an internet slang, so to speak. And beyond that, it takes the communication in our everyday online lives- the voice notes, the TikToks, the threads- and throws them into the fire, scorching them to a crisp. It's exaggeration to the point of destruction. It's beyond aesthetics. Like the comments on Tiara's video, It's something that's hard to put into words. It's almost anti-aesthetics. It's fucked your aesthetics, aesthetics.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, June 18th. The 4th of July is coming up and to celebrate our nation's glorious 250th birthday, about which we are deeply ambivalent, we are running a promotion for a limited time only and in celebration of the 4th of July, you can become a never post member for only $4 a month. Get in here while supplies last. Supplies are unlimited. Now this deal is in effect. This is our normal membership price act fast. Summer deals summer steals neverpo.st become a member today for four bucks a month. Neverpost's producers are Audrey Evans at Georgia Hampton and the mysterious Dr. First name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer and the show's host. That's me is Mike Ragnetta. Think of a moment when, far from the land, molested by a mile a minute wind, the ocean starts to roll, then rear, then roar over itself, in rank on rank of waves. Excerpt of War Music by Christopher Loge. Post is a production of Charts and Leisure, and it's distributed by Radio Topia.