You can trace the ancestry of music like you can trace the ancestry of a person

Each new song is built using the same modular components as the other songs of its time and place, the way that all humans share the same genetic toolkit. My sister and I are like two different songs from the same album by the same band. My cousins are like songs on different albums by bands with overlapping members. Here’s a diagram of my entire extended family – parent/child relationships are green and spouse/partner relationships are red.

The ancestry of music is more complicated than the ancestry of humans. A better model for music is the evolution of microbes, with a lot of horizontal gene transfer happening. Biologists use the term “gene cassettes” to describe the semi-self-contained hunks of DNA that bacteria swap back and forth. The analogy to music fans spreading memes by passing tapes around couldn’t be any more perfect.

Some musical relationships do conveniently lend themselves to family tree-like representation. The practice of sampling and quoting existing songs creates a particularly clear and unambiguous set of relationships well-suited to network diagramming. The internet has several handy sample databases, including the Rap Sample FAQ, Whosampled.com and Wikipedia. I’ve been hard at work the past year or so making sample maps visualizing the more interesting chunks of data.

See all of my sample maps here.

Sampling is the easiest set of relationships to diagram, but I could draw similar charts for use of particular scales, chords, rhythmic figures, melodic motifs, rhyme schemes, combinations of instrument sounds, and all the other memetic nuts and bolts of music.

A few really successful memes make up most of the music we hear

Some musical memes are better at getting themselves copied than others, the way genes for color vision or opposable thumbs are good at getting themselves copied. Here in America, the most successful memes include the backbeat, the one-four-five chord progression and the blues scale.

To illustrate just how widespread a musical meme can get, here’s a video called “Four Chords, Thirty-Six Songs.” In the key of C, the four chords are C, G7, Am, F. (Some coarse language towards the end.)

The video barely scratches the surface of all the songs, famous and not, that have used those four chords. So why is this chord progression such a big hit? For one thing, it’s easy to play on piano or guitar or whatever. For another, the four chords sound good in any sequence or combination, spaced out on any harmonic rhythm. They have a wistful yet still uplifting mood that suits a variety of musical statements in a variety of styles.

Computers make recombining and resequencing the memes effortless

Pre-computer, composing and recording a song was a slow and effortful process. You wrote the song out or memorized it. Then you got a band together and they read the song, or you repeated it to them until they memorized it. Then you rehearsed it a bunch, and then recorded it from beginning to end. Sometimes you had to record many takes to get a good one. To get a polished, professional-sounding result generally required expensive gear operated by highly specialized engineers.

You can still operate that way if you want, but computers offer some faster and easier alternatives. I prefer to write by improvising into the sequencer or digital audio editor, picking the best patterns and editing them into shape. The computer gratifyingly collapses improvising, composing and recording into a single act. Making music electronically is like being able to type out any DNA sequence you want and immediately seeing how it will look as an organism. You can skip the tedious embryonic development of notating, rehearsing and memorizing. Technologies like MIDI, sampling and pitch-detection software let you read any existing musical genome and resequence it to your heart’s content.

All this freedom is positively alarming to some of the musicians I know, who view it as evil or immoral in some way. I find that the computer eliminates some of the labor, but doesn’t do the imaginative work for you. The computer makes it effortless to spin out ideas, but you still need to select among them and decide which are the good ones. The creative act itself stays the same as it always has been; there’s just less friction.

Towards a unified theory of musical evolution

A genome is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating the proteins and other structures making up an organism. A group of memes (a memeplex, as Susan Blackmore puts it) is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating performances and recordings. What makes a song likelier to get itself heard, and eventually copied or adapted? Exact copying of previous generations of songs is a bad long-term strategy. Tastes change, like the way the environment changes for organisms. A meme that was successful yesterday may not be successful tomorrow.

Total originality is a bad strategy too. It’s easy to be original, to create a piece of music with no precedent or borrowing from anything existing. Bang randomly on a piano and you’re probably going to play something that’s never been played before. It’s likely that your random banging will mostly be annoying. Chances are, a random DNA sequence won’t make for much of an organism either.

To be liked enough to be copied and imitated, your song will need to be substantially familiar. Forming an emotional connection with the listener requires a lot of shared vocabulary and associations. What works the best in music, as in biology, is a minor mutation on an existing successful replicator. Most mutations will make it harder to get copied, but a lucky few improve your chances dramatically.

See a version of this post on Quora.

The Apache break is an especially interesting sample, because there’s a yawning gap between its lame original context and the diversity of uses that musicians have since put it to. More than most samples, the Apache break has enormously transcended and eclipsed its original context. “Apache” was first written as fake Native American music by Jerry Lordan in the late fifties, inspired by a cowboys-and-Indians movie. How such a lame song became a cornerstone of electronic music is a long and convoluted story. Here are two good tellings: an essay called All Roads Lead To Apache, and a followup New York Times article.

Here’s the story of “Apache” in network diagram form:

“Apache” has been sampled uncountably many times. The first noteworthy example is “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.”

In a similar vein, check out Double Dee & Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. They’re must-hears if you care about the art of the mashup.

In keeping with the old-skool flavor, here’s West Street Mob’s “Break Dance Electric Boogie,” which uses some of the horn parts from the Incredible Bongo Band recording in addition to the percussion break. Got to love those vocoded robo-vocals.

The first song to sample Apache that landed on my consciousness was probably “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” by C+C Music Factory:

Drum n bass producers love the Apache break. Instead of just looping the sample, they like to slice and dice it into new, more complex beats. Goldie’s “Inner City Life” is a high-profile example. I admire the drum n bass guys conceptually, but when it comes to day-to-day listening I’ll take hip-hop every time. Nas uses the Apache break on “Made You Look” — I think he even paid for it.

I have some friends who like hip-hop as music but are uncomfortable with the practice of sampling. They have this idea that sampling is a form of stealing. These friends tend to rally around the Roots, who play hip-hop on live instruments. The thing is, even though the Roots’ Questlove is one of the best drummers in the world, he also programs and uses samples in his production work. Hear Roots MC Black Thought do one of his hottest rhymes over Apache on “Thought@Work”:

When the Roots play this live, Quest and the percussionist re-create the break in the manner of The Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache Rap.” Missy Elliot sampled the Sugarhill Gang remake in “We Run This.”

Electronic music undermines the western concept of the composer. For any track based on the Apache break, who composed it? Jerry Lordan wrote the song but you’d never guess a connection between his original recording and anything that samples the Incredible Bongo Band. Should the composer credit go to the Incredible Bongo Band? Or just their rhythm section? Should it go to Kool Herc or whichever DJ first had the idea to loop the break by itself, or the producer who did the sampling? What’s the connection between Jerry Lordan’s song, the Bongo Band version, the Sugarhill Gang’s recreation of it and Missy Elliot’s song sampling the Sugarhill Gang? To me, the question becomes meaningless. Music emerges out of collective cultural practice more than any single person’s mind.

Asking what the origin is of a given piece of music is like asking what the origin is of my blue eyes. The gene/musical meme analogy is a useful one. James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” has dominant hip-hop genes. The roots of hip-hop are obvious in this song, since JB is literally rapping over a funk beat. It’s like the way my mom has blue eyes — there’s no big mystery where that gene came from in me. My dad had brown eyes, though; the blue-eyed gene was recessive in him. The hip-hop gene is recessive in the Bongo Band’s “Apache”, and more recessive still in Jerry Lordan’s original.

Hit me in the comments for noteworthy Apache mixes. I’m working on a mix of my own, I’ll post it when it’s done.

To take a sample, the first step is to extract it as a separate audio file. I like to use a program called Transcribe for this purpose. Once I have a sample, my preferred tools for remixing are Recycle, which slices a sample into individually-manipulable pieces, and Reason’s Dr Rex loop player, for reshuffling and resequencing the slices, changing the key, adding effects and doing further transformation.

Here’s the Funky Drummer loop as seen in Recycle. Click through to see it bigger.

Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the loop as it’s played repetitively.

Here’s how the Funky Drummer loop looks in the Reason loop player and sequencer. The blue thing is the loop player itself, where you can add effects like filter sweeps and pitch shifting. Below, the sequencer shows eight repetitions of the loop, forming an eight-bar phrase, a metaloop.

Here’s the view inside one of the colored boxes in the sequencer, a single iteration of the loop.

Each red brick is a slice, a rhythmic event, a drum or cymbal hit. There are sixteen of them in this loop. Reason follows the dance music convention of thinking of a bar as sixteen sixteenth notes, so it considers the Funky Drummer loop to be one bar long. This convention makes me crazy; I prefer to think of it as two bars of eight eighth notes each. However you want to count it, musicians usually describe this as a sixteenth note feel. Hear the loop:

By removing every other slice of the loop, you change the groove from a sixteenth note feel to a more spacious eighth note feel. The silences have as much presence as the drum hits.

Here’s how the loop sounds in eighth notes.

You don’t need to play the slices of a loop in their original order. Reason lets you play the slices in any order at all. Here’s the Funky Drummer loop completely randomized:

I’m not posting an mp3 of this because it sounds terrible, but sometimes randomizing the slices of a sample can give unexpectedly delightful results. You get especially interesting sounds when you map the MIDI data from one loop to the audio from a different one. You can also try new combinations by playing the slices from a keyboard or other MIDI controller. The slices automatically map to the chromatic scale, so slice one is the lowest C on the keyboard, slice two is C sharp, slice three is D and so on.

The loop player gets even more interesting when you supply it with a melodic phrase. By playing pieces of the melody in different orders and shifting the individual notes up and down, you can effortlessly create new melodies from any existing sample. The combinatorial possibilities are dizzying.

I see a strong analogy between shuffling the pieces of a sample to create new music and shuffling DNA letters to create new organisms. In biological evolution, all new organisms come about by the semi-accidental reshuffling of existing organisms’ genomes. So, for instance, mutations can happen when a sequence of DNA gets repeated accidentally during copying:

I believe that new music comes about this way too. Before software like Reason and Recycle, the reshuffling of musical memes happened exclusively in musicians’ minds, or later on paper. The software extends the power of our recombinational imaginations to recorded music, not just imaginary music. Powerful stuff!