Justin Bieber’s U Smile, Slowed Down 800% – And Then Sped Up 800%! WTF?

Remember that ambient version of Justin Bieber’s U Smile, slowed down from the original by 800%, that went viral a few weeks ago?

A lot of people thought the ambient version was bogus, because extreme time-stretching makes it hard for most listeners to recognize the original source material.

Brooklyn DJ Jace Clayton decided to try speeding up the slowed down version. He upped the tempo of the ambient version by 800% and returned the track to its original tempo.

The result, above, is recognizably Justin Bieber’s U Smile, proving that the pop song is really the source material for the ambient space music version. But the result also has an interesting “blurry” quality, a result of the interpolation used with extreme time-stretching.

Here’s the original, for comparison:

According to Clayton, the blurred result of double stretching (full on) is “a poignant reminder than nothing can ever be fully undone.”

Especially poignant when you realize that you’ll never get back that three minutes you spent listening to a Justin Bieber song.

via CarlosAngelMusic:

A viral track going around is the 35:29 long ambient song made by supposedly taking the original song “U Smile” by Justin Bieber and stretching it, slowing it down, by 800%. Many see the track as a fake, because of its general sound sounds too inconsistent with the original “U Smile” and because of the shock value that such a masterpiece of a song was originally a Justin Bieber song (no discredit to him).

What I have done is sped up the track to its original playback speed, so that what you should hear is the Justin Bieber song in it’s original form.

However, this is not completely the case. It is the song “U Smile,” but it is a heavily edited version of it. This is because the program used to do this, PaulStretch, smooths out the track so that it does not sound choppy when it is stretched. Regardless, the song “U Smile” can clearly be heard, disproving rumors that the ambient track is a fake.

You can explore extreme time stretching with Pauls’s Extreme Sound Stretch.

10 thoughts on “Justin Bieber’s U Smile, Slowed Down 800% – And Then Sped Up 800%! WTF?

  1. it's totally artifacts of paulstretch everything gets all hazy and reverbed out

    it's cool at first but gets annoying in that it makes EVERY sound come out this way

  2. Who carrrrrrrrrres.

    I don't understand why a dude spending 30 seconds setting parameters on a 10 year old program showed up in all my audio RSS subscriptions, or why this is showing up everywhere now.

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