Ratatousical and the Unintuitive Unintuitiveness of TikTok Musical Production

On the microvideo platform TikTok, music and sound are central to its noisy viral circuitry; videos are linked through use of shared audio, and the microsoundtrack thus functions as portal to potentially-viral archives. This structure encourages a particular default creative mode: users iterating novel visual parameters for pre-existing musical tracks.

In this paper, however, I analyze instances of novel musical creation on the platform, focusing particularly on the 2020 phenomenon of Ratatouille: The Musical - a loose viral constellation of collaborative amateur production based on the Disney/Pixar film. TikTok users created myriad posts that efficiently pastiched contemporary musical theater genres - from dynamic introductory “I Want” songs and their melancholic reprises, to relationship-establishing tangos and grandiose polyphonic finales. Within and across these numbers, creators and collaborators used both intuitive and unorthodox strategies to assert connection to the "Ratatousical" phenomenon. These included using the app’s own “Duet” function, as well as caption hashtags (rather than TikTok’s default linkage via audio file). The posts were also linked and promoted outside of TikTok on platforms with more transparent archival functionalities, such as Twitter threads and YouTube compilations.

The viral project resulted in massive attention and a Broadway-produced streaming concert in January 2021. Nevertheless, this analysis demonstrates how, despite the centrality of music to TikTok’s viral and social functioning, amateur musical creators are frequently obliged to invent or adopt ad hoc strategies of networking and collaboration - both social and software - to render themselves and their works audible.

Dr. Paula Clare Harper is a musicologist who studies music, sound, and the internet. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches classes on popular music, music video, and listening in digital culture. She is currently at work on a book project entitled Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms.