ABSTRACT
In 2019, the independent videogame developer House House released Untitled Goose Game and viral playing, sharing, and waddling ensued. This form of play began generating musicking viral media that responded to its idiosyncratic animal gameplay, environmental sound design, amongst composer Dan Golding’s procedural remixing of Debussy. This chapter examines Internet musicking, theorized by musicologist Paula Harper as a distinctly twenty-first century musical practice, through the lens of animal memes. It focuses on video memes that repurpose pre-existing popular music to create new networks of musical meaning and connect with the domesticated nonhuman animals in our lives. The chapter illustrates the musicality of pet memes by examining the Internet musicality of one such case study, the participatory “Sometimes I Think About You” trend where past and present photos or videos of a user-creator’s pet is scored to “Heat Waves” by Glass Animals.
