Berit Glanz on Lip-Syncing  Singing With Other People’s Voices

What do silent films and TikTok clips have in common? Why are lip-synced videos mini documents of practiced multilingualism? Berit Glanz knows the answers – and delights in the playful playback memes appearing in her feed.

It’s no coincidence that lip-synced videos and related memes keep popping up on TikTok. Between 2014 and 2018, when the app was still known as Musical.ly, lip-syncing to songs was its core content. The very young user base at that time created short clips of themselves moving their lips to preselected songs – filtered or unfiltered, in normal or accelerated speed. A format that was especially popular among young girls, who often spot new trends especially early.

As Physical as Silent Movies

Looking back at the early phase of a social media platform can reveal a lot about the underlying ideas of interaction and communication on which it was built. These foundations usually still shape the platform today. Twitter focused initially on the written word, Facebook on social networks and maintaining contacts, Instagram on sharing snapshots from everyday life. TikTok, on the other hand, began with playful, visually appealing video content – people lip-syncing and dancing to popular songs.

The striking similarities between the early years of TikTok and early silent film – in their tools, visual techniques and aesthetic interests – have been widely documented. In particular, enforced brevity and limited camera perspectives initially led both to emphasise physicality, dance, slapstick humour and surprising visual effects. What I loved about these early years was seeing stylistic devices and techniques on TikTok that I was already familiar with through my interest in silent film.

A Catchy Tune – Reinterpreted a Hundred Times Over

Unlike silent films, however, TikTok trends are inherently collaborative. They are a key part of the Kultur der Digitalität – the culture of digital media – described by media scholar Felix Stalder in 2016. This communality of social media – where trends never emerge in isolation but become viral memes through repetition and mutual referencing – gives lip-sync videos, in particular, the sense of a choral voice speaking across time.

For example, in recent months, the theme tune Golden from the Netflix film K-Pop Demon Hunters went viral. On TikTok, the song was used over and over again – for dances, lip-sync videos and creative reinterpretations in a wide variety of styles. These clips are remarkable not necessarily for their originality, but because they play on an already established earworm. And like with many K-pop hits, the mix of Korean and English lyrics posed no obstacle. On the contrary: many videos showed how effortlessly content creators could switch between the languages – or even navigate two foreign languages.

Practiced Multilingualism

But it’s not just songs that people collectively sing along or lip-sync to. Viral sounds also inspire new videos where users perform to audio clips from other TikToks or Hollywood films, or mimic them phonetically. Across all these playback scenarios, there is a shared, playful, practice-like effect. Each time, creators speak with someone else’s voice or move their lips – sometimes in a foreign language, sometimes in a different tone or rhythm.

I see these viral trends as a kind of finger exercise in different ways of speaking and in practiced multilingualism, even if it’s just thirty seconds of engagement with a meme. On social media, languages constantly blend, and people from the most diverse backgrounds regularly come together to lip-sync the same song for a viral moment.

October 2025