Nobody knows who first uploaded a clip of pure silence, and there is no original recording to credit, since the file contains essentially no audio at all. It survives because editors constantly need clean gaps they can drop into timelines without recording their own. On soundboards it sits alongside airhorns and bass boosts as a utility clip rather than a joke, valued for precision timing instead of humor. Its staying power comes from that practicality: every meme format eventually needs a beat of nothing.