Tantacrul

Martin Keary — Tantacrul — has produced the most purely funny video essays on YouTube about a subject that has no right to be funny. Music software design should not be entertaining. It should be the thing you endure before making the music. Instead, Keary has made the design of music software into a vehicle for comedy writing of a very specific and high quality: the comedy of righteous exasperation, of someone who understands a system deeply enough to see exactly why it is terrible, and is furious about it in the most articulate possible way.

His video on Sibelius — the notation software — is a document about how legacy software accumulates design decisions the way a Victorian house accumulates insulation, each layer made by people who could not see the full structure and could not afford to tear it down. This is, technically, a video about a music notation program. It is also, in practice, a philosophical essay about institutional inertia, about sunk cost, about how the people closest to a system develop a learned blindness to its absurdities. The music angle is almost incidental. The comedy is not incidental at all.

His video “Music Theory and White Supremacy” — a genuinely confrontational title, deployed with full awareness of what it would generate in terms of defensive reactions — argues that much of what music conservatories teach as universal theory is not universal but culturally specific, and that the specificity has been obscured to serve a particular tradition at the expense of others. This is the same argument Nina Simone makes in Issue #010’s Time Capsule. That a video essay by an Irish software designer arrives at the same conclusion as one of the great African American musicians of the twentieth century is either evidence that the argument is correct, or evidence that they’ve both read the same source material. Either way, the argument is worth engaging with, and Tantacrul makes you engage with it by being funny about it first.

Consistency is the one category that demands a reckoning. Tantacrul uploads infrequently. Not rarely-but-prolifically the way Clickspring does, where each video is a complete masterwork that justifies a three-month wait. More in the manner of someone who has a full creative process and a low tolerance for rushing it. This is respectable and also means that subscribers spend long periods staring at a channel page that hasn’t changed. The algorithm punishes this. The audience forgives it. The magazine takes it into account.

The X-Factor score here is the important one. Tantacrul has a genuinely distinctive comic sensibility — dry, patient, escalating from reasonable premise to absurd conclusion via completely logical steps — that has no equivalent elsewhere on the platform. The closest comparison is Vsauce in terms of tone, but where Vsauce deploys wonder as its primary affect, Tantacrul deploys contempt. Well-researched, affectionate contempt, the contempt of someone who has used Sibelius for twenty years and knows exactly which menu you shouldn’t have to navigate to find a basic function. This is a specific niche. It is a brilliant one.

The community around the channel is appropriately self-selecting: people who know enough about both music and software to understand the grievances, and who are disproportionately likely to have their own. Comment sections on the notation software videos in particular function as collective therapy for anyone who has spent time in Sibelius or Finale. This is community-building by shared suffering, which is a valid and underrated model.

What the Top 50 ranking at #30 reflects — and what a raw average would obscure — is the weighting. Content Quality and X-Factor carry more than Consistency and Community in this rubric, by design, because a channel can be transformatively good at what it does without uploading on schedule. Tantacrul’s 91 on Content Quality and 94 on X-Factor are not accidental. They are what happens when someone with deep domain expertise, a genuine comic sensibility, and no interest in pandering makes exactly the videos they want to make, on no schedule that suits anyone but themselves.

That is either a creative integrity statement or an upload strategy. With Tantacrul, it is both, and it is indistinguishable from the outside, and it does not matter. The videos are there. They are excellent. They will be excellent on rewatch in five years. The magazine reviewed them in Issue #010 and stands by the number.