On August 16, 2010, Nick Pittsinger, a Florida-based musician and producer who went by the alias Shamantis, posted a link to Reddit's r/music subreddit4. The link led to a SoundCloud track titled "U Smile 800 Percent Slower," a manipulated version of Justin Bieber's hit stretched from its original 3:17 runtime to over 35 minutes1.

Pittsinger created the track using PaulStretch, a free open-source program built by Romanian programmer Paul Nasca1. The software works by chopping audio into tiny segments, stretching each one, then overlapping them to create a continuous, cohesive body of sound. When NPR tracked down Nasca to explain the process, he described the technique as creating "smeared chunks" that, when placed next to each other, elongate the track in tiny increments rather than stretching the whole song at once1.

NPR covered the trend across multiple programs, with both *All Songs Considered* and *All Things Considered* running segments on the slowed Bieber track1. The coverage was notable because it treated internet music manipulation as a legitimate form of creative expression, with NPR suggesting that PaulStretch creator Paul Nasca deserved more artistic credit than either Bieber or Pittsinger1.

Bear in Heaven's 400,000% album stream attracted coverage from major music publications including Pitchfork and Paste Magazine, and HuffPost called it "gimmicky but ingenious"5. The project drew comparisons to John Cage's "As Slow As Possible," an organ performance in a German church designed to last 639 years5.

The trend also connected to broader conversations about the nature of recorded music. By demonstrating that a three-minute pop song contained 35 minutes of hidden sonic texture, time-stretching challenged assumptions about what "counts" as music and raised questions about authorship when software does the creative heavy lifting1.

The idea of radically slowing down audio didn't start with Pittsinger, but his Bieber track was the breakthrough moment that brought the concept to a mass audience. YouTube Poop creators and MAD video editors had been manipulating playback speeds for years before 2010, often slowing down clips of children's TV shows to create deep, distorted voices for comedic effect4. What Pittsinger did differently was apply sophisticated pitch-preserving software to pop music, producing something that sounded genuinely beautiful rather than just weird.

The technology behind it dates back decades. Audio timescale-pitch modification, the formal name for the technique, uses methods like phase vocoders and overlap-add algorithms to change a signal's duration without altering its pitch6. These tools were originally developed for practical purposes like fitting radio commercials into exact time slots or conforming audio to broadcast windows6. PaulStretch took that industrial technology and made it accessible to anyone with a laptop.

One of the more interesting cultural offshoots was the discovery that film composer Hans Zimmer had used a similar approach when scoring Christopher Nolan's *Inception* (2010). A YouTube analysis revealed that Zimmer had slowed down Edith Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" to create the film's iconic brass motifs4. The Piaf song plays a plot role in the film, and the revelation that the entire score was essentially a time-stretched version of it added a layer of meta-commentary that delighted both film and music nerds.

The trend hit its most ambitious expression in December 2011, when Brooklyn-based rock band Bear in Heaven took the concept to an extreme for an album promotion stunt. Rather than simply slowing a single track, they streamed their entire upcoming album *I Love You, It's Cool* on their website, stretched by 400,000%3. The 44-minute record was drawn out to last over 2,700 hours, timed precisely to play through exactly once between the announcement and the album's April 2012 release date3.

Bear in Heaven framed the project as both art and commentary. "It's a lesson in patience, as much for us as for our audience and critics," the band told NPR3. They positioned it as a reaction to the content-hungry music industry cycle: "You want content? Sure, here's our entire album 4 months in advance, oh, but it's slowed down 400,000%"3. The stunt drew coverage from NPR, HuffPost, Pitchfork, and Paste Magazine5.

The band cited drone music pioneers as influences, mentioning La Monte Young's Dream House installation, Leif Inge's *9 Beet Stretch* (Beethoven's Ninth Symphony stretched to 24 hours), and experimental musician Tony Conrad3. Their project connected the internet's goofy "let's slow down Bieber" trend to a lineage of serious avant-garde composition.

As a meme format, the 800% Slower trend gradually folded into the broader "slowed + reverb" aesthetic that dominated YouTube and SoundCloud throughout the mid-2010s and into the 2020s. While slowed + reverb tracks typically use more modest speed reductions (often 10-30%), the extreme time-stretching approach established the idea that radically altering a song's temporality could reveal hidden beauty in even the most disposable pop music.