Katy Perry and Demi Lovato’s Millennial Whoop

What do Katy Perry, Frank Ocean, Carly Rae Jepson and nearly every other pop artist have in common? The millennial whoop. As Quartz warns, “Once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it. It will forever be with you.”

While many popular songs sound the same because they feature the same chord progression and have the same musical tropes, Quartz shares that the millennial whoop is another the reason. According to product manager Patrick Metzger, the millennial whoop is “a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, typically starting on the fifth.” Listeners can easily recognize this in songs because a singer “usually belts these notes with an ‘Oh’ phoneme, often in a ‘Wah-oh-wa-oh’ pattern,” Metzger adds.

Because it’s so obvious, you’ll know it when you hear it and, as Quartz says, “you’ll realize that you’ve heard it before, in countless other songs.”