Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s sensonarrative power

Or, how Italian Brainrot became Indonesian.

At the end of 2025, Gabriele de Seta sent me a picture of a Chinese-manufactured pack of Italian Brainrot trading cards he had received as a Christmas present from a relative. The booster pack is branded with the name of one of the most popular Italian Brainrot characters, Tung Tung Tung Sahur; on the back of the pack, alongside the usual choking hazard symbol, barcode, and flashy marketing tags, a small text box appears in the lower left corner, containing an ominously existential description that I would expect to encounter in a semiotic treatise rather than in yet another iteration of century-old consumer products:

“Shan Hai Jing [‘Classic of Mountains and Seas’, the Chinese name of Italian Brainrot] and brain decay creatures [another translation of the same term] have swept across the Internet. AI-generated absurd creatures blend surrealism and folk horror. From Tung Tung Tung Sahur to Nike Shark, why do these empty shell images make people both confused and addicted?”

Italian Brainrot is the name of a 2025 meme wave of short AI text-to-image and text-to-speech clips that depict a proliferating bestiary of fictional animal hybrid with pseudo-Italian, onomatopoeic names, deliberately glossy “mid” aesthetics, and non-linear micro-narratives oscillating between nursery rhyme, folk tale, profanity, and nonsense. As a genre, its “Italianness” is less cultural geography than a phonetic costume – rolling rhythms, open vowels, and stereotypical suffixes like -ini – readily reproducible and remixable at scale through generative AI tools. And as demonstrated by the character of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, the genre of Italian Brainrot rapidly moved beyond Italianness, becoming reconfigured in other cultural contexts – in this case, that of Indonesia.

In order to understand the process of transcultural storytelling through which Italian Brainrot becomes Indonesian via a specific character, I turn to what I conceptualise as sensonarrative power: the force resulting from sensorial encounters that generate affection, interest, and narrative practices. The sensonarrative power of Italian Brainrot compels users to participate in the production and circulation of this specific genre of content. This capacity to generate circulation, replication, and, eventually, meaning does not derive from the formal qualities of the genre, but rather by what its material instantiations do to us sensorially when we encounter them in the wild.

Through this analysis, I argue that Tung Tung Tung Sahur, the most recognizable and popular Indonesian Brainrot character, epitomizes the workings of sensonarrative power. Tung Tung Tung Sahur – or more precisely, Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Sahur – emerged in late February 2025 via Indonesian TikTok user @noxaasht and rapidly became one of the most recognisable characters of the Italian Brainrot mythos. Its name refers to the Indonesian kentongan, a wooden slit drum that is struck to produce a resonant tung tung sound audible across villages. Traditionally used to convey warnings and communal messages, the ketongan plays a central role during Ramadan in calling people to sahur, the pre-dawn meal that happens before fasting. The onomatopoeic name Tung Tung Tung Sahur thus indexes mosque-centred timekeeping, communal patrols, and the sacred temporality of Ramadan. An early online instance of this phrase dates to a 2013 tweet repeating the chant rhythmically, way before the sequence became the name of an AI-generated character.

Let’s consider the Indonesian text-to-speech narration that accompanies the character’s original video:

Tung, tung, tung, tung, tung, tung, tung, tung, tung Sahur. A terrifying anomaly that appears during Sahur. It is said that if someone is called for sahur three times and does not answer, then this creature will come to your house. Ahhh, how scary! This Tung tung usually makes a sound like a gong like this. Tung, tung, tung, tung, tung, tung, tung, tung! Share this with your friends who have trouble eating sahur.

In the clip, Tung Tung Tung Sahur appears as an anthropomorphic wooden log wielding a baseball bat, often depicted against a nocturnal village backdrop bearing the phrase PENTUNGAN POS RONDA (‘patrol post club’), and is accompanied by the musical track “Sound of Your Fear”, which the video helped establish as an iconic melody of Italian Brainrot. According to the accompanying narration, if someone ignores the call to sahur three times, the creature will appear at their house. The original clip, which amassed over 31 million views in a month, is dominated by sound, with repetitive onomatopoeia, gong references, and a rhythmic insistence.

By Ramadan’s end, Indonesian users joked that the creature had “completed its mission” and returned home. Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s popularity catalysed the circulation of more Indonesian brainrot characters such as Boneca Ambalabu (a frog/car tire hybrid) and Garamararamararamanmararaman dan Madudungdungdung Tak Tuntung Perkuntung (two jars of salt and honey with human faces and legs). After having been embraced by the Indonesian TikTok community – one of the app’s largest global userbases – Tung Tung Tung Sahur became established as a quasi-mythic entity among global brainrot audiences, which often ranked it as the strongest brainrot character, or crowned it as cult leader of the whole r/ItalianBrainrot subreddit.

Semiotically, the meme subverts expectations. A traditional wake-up sound becomes attached to absurd AI-generated imagery; instead of the expected mosque courtyards, audiences see a bat-wielding wooden anomaly lurking in a village setting. The humour arises from the intertextual dissonance emphasized by the text-to-speech voiceover, which combines folk horror, slapstick comedy and algorithmic exoticism – all grafted onto sacred sound. Through Tung Tung Tung Sahur, tradition is not erased but reframed within participatory cosmopolitan digital cultures.

The effects of this sonic marker reimagined via AI absurdism are ambivalent. The character generates collective nostalgia and identification for Indonesians, who think of their childhoods and traditions, while also prompting concerns about the vilification of a religious practice, about cognitive intrusion, and about children shifting their linguistic registers into nonsensical vocalizations. Indonesian parents, concerned by all these possibilities, report difficulty in limiting exposure to the character. Ultimately, Tung Tung Tung Sahur demonstrates how a local Islamic sonic practice can be abstracted, algorithmically stylised, and reinjected into global meme ecologies through a global content genre.

Yet, if we look closely at Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s trajectory and development, we clearly see how coherently it fits with Italian Brainrot as a whole: meaning is a marginal aspect, and sensory narratives – especially aural ones – are far more central to its global popularity.

First of all, when Tung Tung Tung Sahur started circulating online, most viewers did not know it was Indonesian, and were interested in what the meme actually meant only after it became popular worldwide. In this sense, while Italian Brainrot is not really Italian – its Italianness is only relevant if we assume it is a mediated version of global stereotypes about how the Italian language sounds – the opposite goes for Indonesian Brainrot. For global audiences, a lack of knowledge and familiarity estranges these characters from their “Indonesianness” – from what they mean when situated culturally in terms of language and imagery. As a sound scholar researching Indonesia, I myself had to explain to non-Indonesian brainrot fans that the character was, in fact, Indonesian: people were more attracted by Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s unintelligible audiovisual allure than by its story and cultural origins. For many, it is just a cool and funny anthropomorphic log with a powerful stick inhabiting an algorithmic folk horror setting.

While it might be argued that the layer of Indonesian culture and customs embedded in the character’s imagery was then absorbed and processed by its global audiences, this was certainly a secondary step. Culture, custom and geographical provenance are all accessory here, and certainly not the main key to decode the fascination with this anomaly. While culture might still constitute an interesting aspect in the Italian versions, it is now reduced to a secondary feature, if not merely a device for creating semiotic distance – having no idea what this exotic, uncanny thing is supposed to represent.

Following the emic logic of Italian Brainrot – absolutely mindless infohazardous content that supposedly makes you stupid – one can understand why Tung Tung Tung Sahur has become so popular worldwide. Drawing from a more obscure cultural and linguistic context has increased its flexibility and its capacity to function as a blank canvas, an absent referent that can be imagined and re-imagined by global audiences as they please without having to think too much about its meaning. After all, what matters is how everything – from its name to its sound to its visual appeal – constitutes a hypnotic, powerfully memetic sensory media that nests in our dopamine-addicted, digital voyeurism-driven brains and reproduces itself online in the form of commentary.

The notion of commentary I use here is the one described by media scholar Mark Hobart as the study of “people arguing about things” using verbal statements and practices. In his 2001 talk “Loose Canons”, Hobart describes commentary as follows:

Commentaries comment on their subject matter. They frame what is going on, give you context or tell you which bits of context are relevant to understanding the facts, tell you what sort of facts they are, what you should rely on and what distrust – in short how to appreciate and respond to what is going on. (p. 7)

As such, commentary is a practice of determination through which a subject matter is dialogically analysed and acted upon, generating new outcomes from what is already established, without the need to reduce this formation to agreement or disagreement. Consequently, commentary is a set of practices (explanation, exposition, illustration, remarks, description, and so forth) involving a relationship between particular performers, performances, referents, audiences, occasions, and purposes. Hobart stresses how commentary does not privilege textual or verbal approaches. Indeed, there is no reason why you cannot argue through different media, like paintings or music, when these are arranged to draw the viewers’ attention to the logical, ethical, or emotional validity of beliefs and values that commentary alludes to.

In the case of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, the commentary practices developing around algorithmic folklore – remixing, sharing, worldbuilding through post-ironic lore – articulate the emotional valence and entertaining value of the meme without ever concluding what it ultimately means or what its function, relevance, or role is. Similarly to other viral global phenomena originating in Indonesia and circulated transnationally, the only thing that is certain about Tung Tung Tung Sahur is that its popularity was catalysed by a sanguine reaction to it – an almost unexplainable embodied response.

In the book Unconscious/Television, psychologist and researcher Lucas Ferraço Nassif focuses on different worldwide famous anime – Pokémon, Devilman Crybaby, Evangelion – explaining how these animated series thrive on embedded, subtle sensorial narratives layered inside the image. Focusing on the famous 1997 “Pikachu Shock” incident – an historical event in which around 600 children in Japan suffered seizure attacks after watching a Pokémon episode in which Pikachu used the thunderbolt attack against Porygon, he argues that in order to understand its significance for media narratives, aesthetics, and products, we should focus on the sensory environment and media ecosystem in which Pokémon participated, rather than resorting to semiotic, medical or biological explanations.

In Nassif’s analysis, the environmental and ecological contexts of sensorial narratives – the rooms we are in, the screens we are staring at all the times, the distance between our faces and screens and how electromagnetic and audio signals interact with the room – are the most immediate layer of meaning that these images have. These media have plots, meanings and cultural significance, but for Nassif, in order to explain the particular ways we are drawn to and enjoy such media, we have to consider how sensory forces act on our imagination through a neuro-tactile power – an embodied feeling of encounter with media contents – instead of reducing them to mere consumption, interpretation, and sensemaking.

Accepting sensorial narratives as a way to articulate the validity of commentary within the perspective of media ecology means understanding that genres of algorithmic folklore like Italian Brainrot increasingly establish their presence and relevance thanks to their sensonarrative power: a memetic vector of content reproduction driven by how screen-based content expands in our lived environment, touching us in particular ways.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur is born at the intersection between Indonesian-Muslim sacred traditions and algorithmic folklore. Its circulation in the form of nonsensical, AI-generated memes has deterritorialized the character’s cultural background, paradoxically enhancing its exotic attractiveness in digital spaces. The anthropomorphic log with a bat accompanied by spooky visuals, incomprehensible words and a sinister music skit accrued a formidable aura not because of what it is and means, but as a consequence of what it makes people feel in a mediascape of cyanotic blue lights and small OLED screens talking to us all the time, and compelling us to re-tell and reproduce these narratives among our circles of virtual and IRL friends. Coherently, the influence this particular apex predator has in the media ecology of attention wars is not one of sociopolitical meaning-making, but of uncanny sensonarrative capital.