Earrape is a term used for incredibly loud and distorted audio, often used to 'jump' the viewer with a sudden burst of noise. In tennis, earrape is very common often just because editing styles tend to get very loud. There is less of an emphasis of being shocking, instead more towards the vibe of something like a metal or noise concert.

Earrape has been used since the beginning of YouTube Poop, with players such as Toadomos becoming known for their loud videos. It quickly found a place in tennis as well; With tennis' emphasis of building off of existing videos, layers of earrape would build on top of each other leading to entire videos being incredibly loud.

Usage

Earrape is usually done by applying a distortion or overdrive filter to audio and setting it to its maximum setting (usually a top-left graph in the visualizer). Just moving the audio all the way up is usually not enough, or may not produce the distortion usually associated with earrape.

Audacity

Add the Distortion effect, then set the clipping level to -100 and the drive to 100. The make-up gain can help make the distortion not as "loud" while still sounding blasted-out.

Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker does not have audio effects, and its volume options are very limited. Often the best option is to set the volume to max, render, then do it again until desired noise is reached.

Vegas

In Vegas, apply the Distortion audio effect to your footage, then drag the graph to the top-left:

Premiere

In Premiere, the easiest way to to this is with the "Infinite Distortion" distortion preset:

Similar results can also be done with the GuitarSuite plugin, which has its own set of Overdrive effects for similar sound.