Nightcore is a word some are probably familiar with if they grew up with the internet, music, and anime. Nightcore is a term used for an edit of a music track that increases the pitch and speeds up its source material by roughly 35%.

Let’s take it back to 2001 though, Nightcore was first mentioned somewhere around 2001 as the name for a school project by a duo of two Norwegian DJs who went by Nightcore, as they’re the origin of the term itself with the term having the meaning. The duo, Thomas S. Nilsen and Steffen Ojala Søderholm, with the stage names of DJ TNT and DJ SOS, mentioned that their inspiration came from pitch-shifted vocals in German group Scooter’s hardcore songs “Nessaja” and “The Logical Song.” 

This inspiration allowed the duo to release five albums, with their 13-n-track debut album “Energized” which was released in 2002 in collaboration with eJay, that same summer they also released Summer Edition 2002, L’hiver, Sensación, and Caliente. However, after that, the duo only made their work top-secret, being released or sold to their friends or other DJs in their area. 

Nightcore over time developed to other terms such as Daycore, Day being the opposite of Night means that instead of songs being sped up, they would be slowed down for Daycore, also if the music had lyrics they would be edited so it doesn’t sound like youtube on playback speed of 0.25. Today, the genre is still incredibly popular among social media, but it doesn’t go by the term “Nightcore” as much as before. Instead, it goes by “sped-up” music, but it’s still the same. With the help of edit accounts, brands have used the sped-up music hype as a way to advertise old songs. Due to that lot of people have been divided on the popularization of sped music, for the fact some believe it has ruined their favorite songs. However, a lot of artists have released sped up or slowed down versions of their songs themselves on the fact of how popular this genre is now and pretty much helps their music perform better having multiple versions to fit everyone likes.

 However you may wonder why this version of music is so popular in the first place. Simple answer is just that it scratches a good spot in the brain for some people, or otherwise the enjoyment lies in loud, brash, low-brow fun, a heart-pounding blunderbuss of gooey sugar-coated songs. 

You may ask why anime is associated with Nightcore in the first place, and it’s due to Nightcore’s usual high-pitched vibes, resembling the voice of an anime character preferably female. Usually any old-school Nightcore music or playlist will have a cover of anime character(s). Also Nightcore songs have been particularly popular in the rhythm-based video game osu! Otherwise no one truly knows why Nightcore would be associated with anime. Lastly the duo gave the term Nightcore the meaning that “we are the core of the night, so you’ll dance all night long” so dance all night long!