Dictionaraoke

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Dictionaraoke is a Fair Use musical form which first appeared online sometime around the year 2000. In it, an instrumental version of a song -- usually MIDI rendition or a track created for use in Karaoke machines -- is combined with a "performance" of its lyrics created by cutting and pasting together pronunciation guide audio clips from various online dictionary sites. The result can be banal, bizarre or fantastic depending on the artist and his choice of clips, but regardless, it can't be mistaken for anything but what it is -- a sometimes hilariously mechanical performance of classic pop and rock.

Some tracks so created have appeared on the Dr. Demento show over the years.

There was once a centralized site where aficionados of the form could discuss and share examples of their work, but it has long since fallen into the hands of website squatter/spammers. Fortunately, its collection of music has been archived in several places on the web.

Examples of Dictionaraoke include:

• Stark Effect, one of the early pioneers of the form, who also appeared on NPR to discuss Dictionaraoke circa 2002. His track "We Like Repartee" is both a great example and self-referential wink-and-nod to the form.
• The Wayback Machine archive for dictionaraoke.mirrors.gweep.net, which holds over a hundred Dictionaraoke covers ranging from Fred Astaire to AC/DC. Amazingly, the Wayback Machine didn't skip over the MP3s, and as of this writing most or all of them are still downloadable.
• A YouTube search on the term will turn up examples ranging all the way back to the beginning of the century.
• CD/Vinyl/MP3 recording info site Discogs.com has flagged a couple examples in its database of tracks.
• M-sli©k da ninjA has been involved with "illegal" sampled music since the middle 1990s, and tried his hand at Dictionaraoke in 2012. The result was one of the odder examples available -- Britney Spears' "Oops... I Did It Again" (embedded above). He also did a version of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On". Both appear on his "album" Aphorisms on Aphonia and Aphasia: Your Cure For Aphagia.