Not sure if this is the right forum… not even sure how to ask this. There’s a kind of noise people sometimes make (usually in party mode) in a falsetto voice that sounds sort of like a seal. What are its origins?
Any chance you could give a link to a video or sound clip illustrating this? I, personally, have no clue what you might mean.
Possibly a regional thing? Where are you located?
I think it’s to imitate the kind of fill-in sound you hear at a rave. You know, the sort of sound effect that gets dubbed into the 12" super extended dance remix of whatever the current pop songs are. I know Bloodhound Gang used it in their song "Firewater Burn" during the wholly ironic “Come on party people” bit towards the end.
Am I interpreting you right?
Is it like in the Blur song, “Song 2”?
If that’s the sound, then it’s probably because it’s FUN! (Because it’s done in such an apathetic way. Woo. Woo.)
But yeah, I don’t really get where it came from. I only know that ‘Woo!’ (and its variant, woot*!) have been accepted exclamations of happiness/success/approval in online text since … yikes, easily the early 90’s. Did it start there and move out, or did it start outside and move in? I don’t know, but now I suddenly want to know.
I’d generally assume it was external first and then moved to in-game - but then again, text was tortured in strange ways to achieve ‘real’ communication back in ye olde MUD days. Although I kind of miss those days, because at least it was usually being tortured by people who knew how to write in complete sentences, with maybe one or two weird (Woo!) words thrown in.
These days <insert grumbling old woman ‘get these kids off my lawn!’ voice**> it’s being tortured by teens who think ‘it’s too much effort to talk clearly’.
- O/T: I’m really not buying the explanation that it’s short for We Owned the Other Team. This expression was prevalent in any number of 100% PVE games for years before online pvp had sufficient market share to make it reasonable to assume the word was seeding across genres. I personally think the dictionary definition was ‘best guess’ rather than based on any real facts.
It’s like ‘opps’. How many people write that? (Too many, is the answer.) It clearly should be ‘oops’, but people are writing it ‘opps’ like that’s how it SHOULD be. (Drives me nuts, but then, what doesn’t?) 10 years from now it’ll probably end up in the dictionary with an explanation like acronym for ‘occasional problems persist (in) staying’
** perhaps I should change my username to Gums When Provoked
I know what you mean, but I don’t know where it came from.
Not to be confused with the whistles, which go “whoo whoo”.
Something similar to it was from the disco years, e.g.:
Michale Zager’s “Let’s All Chant” and “Get Off” by Foxy
Yup, that’s the kind! I tried to think of examples but forgot about that song (although in the song it’s a kind of sardonic whoo-whoo).