Cold Technology, Hot Beats

A chapter of Cold Technology, Hot Beats

Making new songs by recombining old ones

The most controversial aspect of electronic music world is sampling, using pieces of existing recordings as the basis of new ones. While sampling is a technological novelty, musical quotation is a longstanding practice. Michael Jackson’s song “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” ends with a chant borrowed from  Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa.”

This chant has been sampled and referenced many times by other musicians, including Rihanna in her song “Please Don’t Stop The Music.” Sampling, like quotation, raises difficult questions about originality and ownership.

Recording playback devices as musical instruments

Sampling is predicated on the idea that playback devices can be tools for musical expression in their own right. Glenn Gould expressed this idea in the 1960s, but it didn’t find full-fledged practice until DJs began creating seamless dance mixes on the fly in the early days of hip-hop. Some people question whether DJs can be considered musicians, but the similarities between a turntable and a more traditional instrument are profound. All music-making is like sequencing a playlist. Computers make DJs of us all, turning playlist creation into a routine part of life. Internet radio stations and recommendation engines attempt to automate DJing, with partial success.

Turntablists and sequencing across song boundaries

By scratching records, DJs can transform their contents into entirely new sounds. The first widely-heard turntablist was Grand Mixer DST, who scratched a copy of a Fab Five Freddy record on Herbie Hancock’s song “Rockit.”

Turntablism is one of the signature sounds of hip-hop. Jam Master Jay scratches a copy of Bob James’ “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” on Run-DMC’s “Peter Piper,” looping the most exciting segments of the record into a new, more intense track. Turntablism has brought vinyl back into vogue, and digital interfaces enable DJs to scratch recordings on their laptops.

Digital sampling

By converting a recording into computer data, the possibilities for transformative playback multiply. Digital samples can be easily looped, sliced and otherwise manipulated, using a variety of physical control surfaces. Sampling has a considerable musical value beyond its expediency. It opens a conversation with your record collection, offering interaction, not just passive listening. Its effortlessness encourages spontaneity and a spirit of experimentation. And samples have their own sonic and musical qualities distinct from traditional instruments. Sampling has created a new musical form, the mashup, a track composed entirely of seamlessly collaged samples.

Who owns recorded music?

While popular culture has embraced sample-based music enthusiastically, copyright law is hostile to it. In the absence of clear statutes, judges have ruled on the legality of sampling in wildly inconsistent ways, sometimes coming down excessively hard on users of unauthorized samples. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s lawsuit against Biz Markie is widely regarded as bringing the “golden age” of sample-based hip-hop to an end.

The Rolling Stones’ management successfully seized copyright ownership of the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” because it contains a sample of a string arrangement of a Stones song, even though the sample is totally unrecognizable as such.

The controversy over sampling exposes a deeper debate about the nature of originality in music. My contention is that sampling and quotation have historically been much more the norm than the exception. All “new” music is a narrow variation on existing music. Music evolves according to the same Darwinian principles as the human bodies that produce it. You can trace the ancestry of music like you can trace the ancestry of a person. A few widely copied ideas make up most of the music produced in any given culture. In contemporary America, the bulk of our music is based on such shared memes as the blues scale, the backbeat and the verse-chorus song form.

Some solutions to the copyfight

Copying and imitation are foundational to music-making, and this has only become more true with the spread of inexpensive digital audio editing. In order to remain relevant, our notions of musical intellectual property will need to adapt. The musicians who will prosper in the remix culture will treat music more as a gift economy than a property system. The artists who prosper most in the internet era build fan goodwill by relinquishing some control over their recordings and encouraging sampling.

Bonus track: how to sample

Playlist:

• Michael Jackson – “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”
• Manu Dibango – “Soul Makossa”
• Rihanna – “Please Don’t Stop The Music”
• Grandmaster Flash – “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel”
• “Herbie Hancock – “Rockit”
• Run-DMC – “Peter Piper”
• Nas – “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” and “Nas Is Like”
• Fugees – “The Score”
• Biz Markie – “Alone Again”
• The Verve – “Bitter Sweet Symphony”
• DJ Earworm – “United State Of Pop”

Related images on Flickr