The inane sprit behind some of YouTube’s earliest and most bizarre viral videos (i.e. Youtube Poop) is still very much alive. Don’t take our word for it, though — we’ve got the SpongeBob receipts to prove it.
Ian Bennett, the mind behind TheFactory, a YouTube channel that mixes and matches popular songs with other artists’ work, has been spitting out SpongeBob rap parodies based on the success of a video featuring our favorite sea-dwelling sponge rapping the Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar standout, “Range Brothers”.
“The audio is made mainly using Uberduck.ai, which is essentially a speech generator using an AI model called Tacotron 2, [and] manually trained to recreate a bunch of voices. Using reference tracks, I give it the lyrics and it spits out vocal files that I drag into a DAW and mix and master over an instrumental that I either recreate myself or split using other AI like lalal.ai, phonicmind, and music rebalance.”
While Bennett is currently one of the only people making videos in this vein, channels like SpongeDubs are also making parody raps based on the iconic cartoon. SpongeDubs’ process differs slightly — taking clips of SpongeBob speaking from the actual show and stringing them together, adjusting the pitch, and then stretching the clips by hand.
If you want to see more of SpongeBob spitting fire, I’d recommend starting with this video, before moving on to here. Watch out though, because once you hear these in voice of a Bikini Bottom dweller, there’s no going back.