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We’ve been talking a lot about things that sound like music; our brains filling in gaps where bass should be. This week? We’re putting our ears directly on the yoinky sploinky. A genre that might be more meme than music, but it’s less a joke and more engineering to the nth degree.

Let’s get goofy.

The thing about a lot of how we live and the language we use is that we’re picking up phrases from people we will never meet and using them every day. We’ve done it since the start of the internet, and everything feeds into it.

Internet clips, memes, gaming, adverts, random comments on videos that end up hitting millions of people all over the world.

Yoinky Sploinky is that from top to bottom. Except where other phrases failed to move beyond the comments, engineers took the description and ran with it. They built music out of sounds to capture what sploinky was, and their titles got the same treatment.

Way back in June 2021, security camera footage hit the internet and went viral. A man was running up the driveway, wobbly-knee danced for a few seconds, then carried on running. It was captioned as that yoinky sploinky. We managed to unearth the One Bad Gloop track by RiceBubs where yoinky became a thing.

So a stranger’s dance, and a stranger’s caption fed a huge run of ‘new’ music. Things like dubstep got their name from what they were made up of. Hardcore, bassline, jungle, garage… almost everything else was named before; this was named first and then created.

Producers took it and ran - exploring what the yoink and the sploink could be. Names like SUPA WOBBLY SHEDDA, SPONGEWOB, FREAKBOB, wobbly dolphin… it goes on. And they do, in fact, sound how you think they do.

Aside from the gimmicky start, there is a lot more merit to it than you might think.

Using bass for bass and keeping it as it is is easy (relatively) compared to turning a duck into bass, or making completely unique music shapes with other sounds. Say hello to the LFO. Low-frequency oscillator, modulating a filter. It is the LFO that creates the wub that is the spine of the track in most cases; it does it by opening and closing the filter over and over.

Maybe the coolest thing is you have never heard an LFO; you just hear what it produces. It just moves everything for a fat wub. Okay, but you can get a fake wub with a tremolo, and that is exactly where the difference is. Tremolo moves the volume up and down. The LFO moves the filter. You can hear that difference, even though you might not be able to describe it.

We’ve got the formant, which is one of the prominent bands of frequency, and that’s what decides the phonetic quality - so it is what makes an ah an ah and not an oo. If you have ever felt like the bass is speaking - or even close to this - then it is the formant in action.

So how do you make that happen? Well, you bitcrush after the filter (of course…)

A bitcrusher lowers the resolution of a sound: fewer bits and a lower sample rate, which is the crunch you know from old games - if you’re old enough to know them…

We’re chest deep in gobbledygook explaining the yoinky sploinky.

Doing that produces double-harmonic peaks in the spectrum; as the filter sweeps, the peaks move towards each other, cross over, and spread again. Where those peaks sit, and how many of them there are, is what a vowel is (the ah and oo we mentioned earlier). Wub.

A quack never needs to be from a duck, because the producers are highly skilled; they can build a quack. But maybe what makes this genre of music more interesting than the average is that they will most likely use a real quack.

Found noises have easily been a favorite for musicians across the board, but how yoinky producers build their tracks is incredible.

The intro for Money. Roger Waters pulled in coins, tearing paper, a till - it builds the beat. Bono and his bottle smashing for I Will Follow, while a producer is dragging a knife along a spinning bike wheel. Going further back, in 1948 a French radio engineer put on a concert of kitchen recordings and trains. Concert De Bruits.

Sampling, remixing, sound shaping and design all came from these early moments… combined with a well-timed moment of internet virality - giving us the yoinky sploinky.

A playlist? Of course.