User:Wykypydya/edits/Soundboard (computer program)

A soundboard is a computer program, Web application, or device, traditionally created in and for Adobe Flash, that catalogues and plays many short soundbites and audio clips. Traditionally, builders take sound clips said by celebrities and combine them into one Flash creation. They are most often used in prank calls, when the caller uses the soundboard to imitate a celebrity or other well-known person. The individual on the other end of the call is usually deceived into thinking that they are actually talking to a real person. In some cases, the victim associated with the prank call has no idea who the person from the soundboard is. Some users even record the calls and post them on the Internet. Soundboard prank-calling is often done with caller ID spoofing or masking, to provide a high level of anonymity and/or impersonation. The goal is often to hoax, vex, and/or confuse the victim, as well as to test how long the victim will remain on the phone.

When a soundboard is created of a person, the person is considered to be "turned into" a soundboard. The class of people who make prank calls with soundboards, who make the soundboards, or who are "in on" the joke and follow the calls posted on the Internet, is collectively known as the Soundboard Prank Call Community (SPCC).

In recent years the soundboard has been given a new stage on many mobile platforms, specifically in relation to the iPhone Appstore and Android market place. With numerous soundboards to choose from there is no shortage of entertaining prank sounds, but some feel that the sheer volume of boards available and the number of them that specifically tailored to rude body sounds (e.g. iFart on iPhone appstore, BodyBoard on Android Market Place) has gone too far and many are calling for restrictions on this type of content.

Victim soundboards
Some users create "victim soundboards" from recordings of prank call victims themselves -- often those who were prank-called with a soundboard to begin with and had humorous responses -- in order to impersonate them, and, in turn, people prank-call others with these second-tier soundboards, and so on. This creates second-degree and third-degree victims, etc. This has evolved into a technological form of art if not a science. Often, the targets for repeated prank soundboard calls, and for the eventual creation of victim soundboards, are people who cuss out the prankster or otherwise argue with the soundboard. Each new prank call adds more potential recorded lines of speech to the Soundboard Prank Call Community's library with which to harass people. Although many pranksters create victim soundboards of prank calls they created themselves, it is also often possible for third-party users to create victim soundboards from existing prank call recordings that have been posted online, but the effectiveness of this is directly affected by how much the original prankster decides to post; for example, some pranksters protect their victims' privacy by bleeping out the victims' self-identifying information that they say (i.e. their names and locations) from the recordings, which will consequently also prevent any third-party-created soundboards from having these self-identifying lines of speech. Victim soundboards are usually named according to how much information is available about the victim; for example, if the person's name is not known, then a nickname will be devised, i.e. the "Epic Crazy Lady". Also, victims (and their soundboards) are often depicted with images of people -- often celebrities -- who are thought to depict the voice (unless a real image of the victim is actually available). Sometimes victims' names and/or photographic likenesses are discovered after the victims have already been given monikers/depictions by the SPCC, after which the monikers retroactively become sobriquets and the original depiction tends to stick.

A typical victim-soundboard prank call to another victim who is a "good" target, will typically be a pointless, heated argument and tirade between the victim and the soundboard over who called whom; the calls are highly self-referential. The soundboard of the past victim will accuse the current victim of prank-calling and harassing them, potentially including severe profanity, and the current victim will respond in the same way denying that they made the prank call (which is true until they get turned into a soundboard themselves), and often cussing out in response. It is the naïvete and gullibility of the prank call victims in responding in the way the caller wants and taking the calls seriously, that not only makes them good continued targets, but enables the vicious cycle of creating more and more victim soundboards. Some victim soundboards are created of police officers who answer prank calls in dealing with a recurrent victim's case, as often the pranksters are bold enough to prank them with the soundboards as well, due to prankster's confidence in masking the origin of the call, and/or because the prankster is in another country and believes they cannot or will not be arrested/prosecuted. (See "jurisdiction".) Using these soundboards amounts to impersonating an officer. Often, the goal when calling victims is to create confusion, such as when an ordinary victim soundboard is used followed by a police-officer soundboard that talks to the victim about prank calls being made, or when multiple soundboards about a certain topic (i.e. alcoholism and AA) are used on a victim.



In the Soundboard Prank Call Community, users gain more notoriety and perceived merit from turning victims into victim soundboards. The best way that prank call victims can avoid having their voices posted to the Internet and reused in soundboards, is to simply hang up the telephone and not provide a "juicy" response, until the prankster gives up trying to elicit one. Some individual victims in the United States have gained particular notoriety for the long, ongoing, and well-publicized record of prank calls against them, the extent of the soundboard(s) of them, and the volume of prank calls made from their soundboard(s); they are often referred to as "legends". Many of such targets that become "legends" are small-business owners, because many of them are the only ones to answer their business phone line and do so very reliably (due to the need to conduct business), and they habitually engage the pranksters.

Sometimes, pranksters will use the soundboard of a victim against that person themselves, and the victim often does not recognize their own recorded voice and continues arguing with it and/or will relate to it. In at least one case, a prank call victim ironically attempted to explain the concept of soundboards without realizing he was conversing with a soundboard of himself, and kept relating to the recorded lines about how many prank calls he received.

Fox News aired a story about a series of egregious victim-soundboard prank calls (called "A Nightmare on Burton Street", taken from the name of the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street) made to a particular street in a town in Missouri, which unbenknownst to the reporters, occurred because the victim soundboard had lines making violent references to an address on that street. In a subsequent year, a Houston, Texas police responder was pranked with suspectedly the same soundboard, which was taken as a threat against the police department and resulted in another Fox News story, and an ongoing investigation.

The late Oklahoma small-businessman Frank Garrett is considered by many people in the Soundboard Prank Call Community and around the world, to be the most famous prank-call victim of all time. He always engaged the pranksters in a quick-witted and profane manner, leading to soundboards of him used to harass hundreds if not thousands of people. Unfortunately, the pranksters kept harassing Mr. Garrett until his death in the summer of 2011. Mr. Garrett sufferred from cancer in the latter years of his life.

Victim-soundboard prank calling often becomes quite creative. For example, in one series of calls, a prankster got a woman to reveal her husband's cell phone number, after which the prankster called each spouse alternatingly with a soundboard of the other spouse that was incrementally built with each call. As another example, sometimes a victim's soundboard will be used to segue into a conference call prank with another victim, in which the real victim (subject of the soundboard) is then connected with that person.

Vent harassment
Oftentimes, trolls and hackers who infiltrate unprotected Ventrilo (Vent) server chatrooms use soundboards to harass, confuse, or gaslight the users of the chatroom. A wide variety of soundboards are used for this purpose, and sometimes the troll records the users and quickly creates a victim soundboard (see above) of them, then uses the soundboard against the users, often with humorous results. The victims usually attempt to ban the troll from the chatroom -- to which the troll usually responds by logging back in with different usernames -- or to mute the troll so as not to be disturbed by the harassment. Sometimes, the victims attempt to protect the server with a password, but are often helpless to do this or to ban the user, because the administrator of the server is not present, or because they do not know how, or because they are too busy playing multiplayer online video games about which they are chatting. Also, muting the troll does not stop the troll from recording their conversation and subsequently posting it on the Web. Some trolls share, distribute, or publish lists of servers that have been found to be open and vulnerable.

Other
The soundboard is also used to facilitate humor, highlighting some of celebrities' more unusual utterances, or allowing for juxtaposition or even "composition" of quotes and sounds that would otherwise not go together.

Yet, while traditionally a device for pranksters, the soundboard has also been used as a promotional tool for films, television shows, radio, products and more.