The "TikTok chooses the sound" filter trend is still going hard and I have now done this twice. The first time I posted about it months ago and you all loved it. Round two happened last week and the algorithm assigned me something I was NOT prepared for, and then the comments section confirmed that yes, this was accurate, and I had to sit with some things. Let me explain.
The setup if you haven't seen it: you open a certain sound or filter effect, it randomizes, and whatever audio it lands on becomes your "assigned" sound, the vibe that supposedly matches your energy, your content, your whole deal. People do it for fun. It's basically a personality test administered by a machine that has watched everything you've ever posted. And honestly? That's kind of terrifying when you think about it for more than three seconds. This thing has data. It knows your patterns in a way that your therapist doesn't, because you haven't been lying to it every week about how you're "doing better with boundaries."
Round one, a while back, gave me something chaotic and loud and I said "yep, that tracks." Easy. Satisfying. The comment section cheered. This is how the trend is supposed to go.
Round two gave me something slower. Something with more weight to it. A sound that had this long, aching quality, not sad exactly, but the audio equivalent of sitting in a parking lot after something big just happened, not ready to go inside yet. And I was like. Hm. HMMM.
Why It Landed Different This Time
We're deep in the HEATHEN HYMNS rollout right now. The album is out. Songs are in people's ears. I've been doing press, doing fan stuff, watching reactions come in from people who found themselves in lyrics I wrote in a closet at 2am. That is a strange and beautiful and occasionally overwhelming thing to witness. You put something out that cost you a lot to make and then it's just out there. Living in other people without your permission. In the best possible way.
So when this sound filter assigned me something slow and heavy, the comment section immediately said things like "she's processing" and "this is post-album release energy" and "this is what happens when the record is finally out of your hands." And they were not wrong. They were SO not wrong that I had to put my phone down and look at Lazarus for a minute. (Lazarus the pothos. Still alive. Inexplicably thriving. Taking after his namesake.)
The algorithm, somehow, clocked it. This annoying machine that has never met me, that doesn't know my story, that processes me purely as a series of behavioral data points, it gave me the exact sound that matched where I am right now. Post-release, mid-rollout, trying to figure out who I am on the other side of finishing a record I spent the better part of a year making. That's petty. That is PETTY of it.
What the Algorithm Actually Knows
Here's what I think is actually happening, and I've spent some time turning this over. TikTok's recommendation engine isn't psychic. It's not reading my aura. It's doing something more mundane and arguably more interesting: reflecting patterns I've established in my own content and engagement over time.
When I'm in a heavy creative or emotional period, I engage differently with the platform. I slow down on posting. I watch more than I create. I linger on certain kinds of audio content longer. I interact with quieter, more introspective material. And the algorithm is trained to notice exactly those kinds of behavioral shifts. So when it "chose" a slow, weighty sound for me, it wasn't guessing. It was reading six months of behavioral data and serving back something that fit the pattern of who I am RIGHT NOW, not who I was six months ago when I was in the recording closet at 2am screaming into a microphone.
This is either a feature or a bug, depending on your perspective. On one hand it means the algorithm is surprisingly adaptive and can reflect your actual current state rather than just your historical average. On the other hand, do you want an app to know you that well? Do you want something to be able to characterize your emotional state based on passive behavioral data? I don't have a clean answer. I think it's both useful and a little unsettling and I've decided to just live with that tension the way I live with most uncomfortable truths, which is by writing about it.
The Larger Thing About Sound and Identity
The "chooses the sound" trend is interesting to me beyond the surface fun of it because of what it implies about how people relate to audio as identity. We've known forever that music is tied to who we are. Every generation claims certain bands as their whole personality, certain albums as the soundtrack to their most formative years. But TikTok sound culture has made that relationship even more granular. A specific audio clip, even just fifteen seconds of something, carries a whole vibe taxonomy. There are sounds for "chaotic person who makes their friends nervous," sounds for "actually has their life together and wants you to know it," sounds for "currently going through it but with good fashion choices."
The fact that this is so legible, that you and I and the algorithm can all look at a fifteen-second audio clip and have some rough consensus about what kind of person it belongs to, says something fascinating about how deeply we've developed a shared sonic language on this platform. It's its own dialect. And I say this as someone who has spent her whole adult life thinking about how sound communicates things that words can't. The record I made is built on that premise. Every production choice on HEATHEN HYMNS is a tonal argument. The distortion on certain tracks isn't decoration, it's meaning. The quiet on certain other tracks is the loudest thing in the room.
So yeah. I have thoughts about the sound filter trend. They go deep. I can't help it.
What I Actually Did With It
After the filter assigned me that slow, aching sound, I sat with it for a minute, in the video and off-camera, and then I ended up playing a little bit of Sunday, my old acoustic, over the top of it. Not performing. Just noodling. Just letting my hands do what they do when I'm not thinking too hard. And something clicked in that moment that I've been turning into a new piece of something. Don't know what it is yet. Demo stage. But it exists now because a TikTok filter dragged me somewhere I wasn't planning to go.
This is why I can't be fully cynical about the platform even when I have my criticisms of it. Yes, it's a behavioral data machine optimized for engagement and commerce. Yes, the Shop tab is a casino (I wrote an entire post about that, go read it). Yes, the algorithm has an agenda and that agenda is not your wellbeing. All of that is true.
And also: sometimes it hands you exactly the sound you needed to hear and you end up playing guitar in the middle of the afternoon for no reason and something new starts to exist. That happened to me last week. I'm keeping it.
Round Three Is Coming
I told the comment section I'd do a round three before the end of this rollout cycle and several hundred of you said you'd be watching. I'm going to wait until the energy shifts again, because I can feel another shift coming. The kind that happens after you've done enough press and enough promo and your brain starts to come back online with fresh ideas instead of just defending the work you already made. That's a different mode. That will produce a different sound. And I want to see what the algorithm says about who I am on the other side of this particular phase.
In the meantime, if you haven't done the sound filter thing yourself, I genuinely encourage it. Not because it's magic (it's not, it's a data model) but because sometimes being assigned a thing and then sitting with how you feel about the assignment is its own kind of information. You might discover you're fighting the assignment because it's wrong, or you might discover you're fighting it because it's right and you weren't ready to admit it. Both are useful.
The algorithm is petty. Use it against itself. I love you.
One last thing, and this is for my fellow musicians specifically. If you are making original music and you're terrified that the algorithm won't pick it up, won't understand it, will assign it the wrong context and bury it: I hear you. That fear is real and I've felt it hard during this whole HEATHEN HYMNS rollout. But I've come to think about it differently. The algorithm didn't pick my sound (I mean, it did, for the filter) but it also responded to the real emotional content over time. The music that means the most tends to find its people. Not always fast, not always viral, but the signal gets through eventually. You have to keep making the real thing and trust the connective tissue.
Okay. THAT is actually the last thing. Don't let the algorithm gaslight you into making something that isn't yours. Post your weird, specific, honest work. Let the filter occasionally drag you into insight. And keep your eyes on what you're actually building, not just what's trending this week. The trend is the door. You're the house. I love you.