Welcome to the era of the audio meme, a time when replicable units of sound are a cultural currency as strong as — if not stronger than — images and text. Though TikTok didn’t invent the audio meme, its effortless interface may have perfected it, and the platform, which recently ended Google’s 15-year-long run as the most visited website in the world, would be nothing without sound.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/17/magazine/tiktok-sounds-memes.html