Questions of authorship, ownership and originality surround all forms of music (and, indeed, all creative undertakings.) Nowhere are these questions more acute or more challenging than in digital music, where it is effortless and commonplace to exactly reproduce sonic elements generated by others. Sometimes this copying is relatively uncontroversial, as when a producer uses royalty-free factory sounds from Reason or Ableton Live. Sometimes the copying is legally permissible but artistically dubious, as when one downloads a public-domain Bach or Scott Joplin MIDI file and copies and pastes sections from them into a new composition. Sometimes one may have creative approval but no legal sanction; within the hip-hop community, creative repurposing of copyrighted commercial recordings is a cornerstone of the art form, and the best crate-diggers are revered figures.

Even in purely noncommercial settings untouched by copyright law, issues of authorship and originality continue to vex us. Some electronic musicians feel the need to generate all of their sounds from scratch, out of a sense that using samples is cheating or lazy. Others freely use samples, presets and factory sounds for reasons of expediency, but feel guilt and a weakened sense of authorship. Some electronic musicians view it as a necessity to create their tools from scratch, be they hardware or software. Others feel comfortable using off-the-shelf products but try to avoid common riffs, rhythmic patterns, chord progressions and timbres. Still others gleefully and willfully appropriate and put their “theft” of familiar recordings front and center.

Is a mashup of two pre-existing recordings original? Is a new song based on a sample of an old one original? What about a new song using factory sounds from Reason or Ableton Live? Is a DJ set consisting entirely of other people’s recordings original? Can a bright-line standard for originality or authenticity even exist in the digital realm?

I intend to parse out our varied and conflicting notions of originality, ownership and authorship as they pertain to electronic music. I will examine perspectives from musicians and fans, jurists and journalists, copyright holders and copyright violators. In so doing, I will advance the thesis that complete originality is neither possible nor desirable, in digital music or elsewhere, and that the spread of digital copying and manipulation has done us a service by bringing the issue into stark relief.

What Is Originality?

Before we can discuss the impact that digital music has had on the concept of originality, it would be helpful to have a definition of the term. Donald Coffman has a useful approach based on information theory. In his formulation, originality is coextensive with novelty, which in turn is coextensive with informational entropy. A more novel musical idea will have higher entropy because it will contain information that is new to the listener. A well-worn cliché will have lower entropy because it introduces little or no new information. Coffman’s example of a low-entropy musical idea is the leading tone followed by the tonic. This note sequence conveys little information to the Western listener; we have heard it countless times, and we have come to expect it. Following the leading tone with the flat second would be a higher-entropy move, unexpected to most Western listeners.

Analogies with physical systems are helpful here. Atoms in a regular crystal lattice like a diamond comprise a very low-entropy physical system. The musical equivalent would be a MIDI sequencer playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on an endless loop. Gas molecules bouncing randomly around a room are a high-entropy system. Here, the musical equivalent would be a sequence of pitches, rhythms, durations and so on all chosen at random, or unpredictable bursts of white noise.

We generally find the extremes of both high and low musical entropy to be equally boring. Our senses are most gratified by systems in the middle, blending order with disorder: fractals, chaos, recursion, metastability. In the physical world, our senses are most gratified by biological forms, mountains, clouds, and ripples in water. In music, we prefer a delicate balance between predictability and novelty. While Western culture gives lip service to the supreme value of originality, in actual practice, we prefer a balance of the predictable and unpredictable.

What is Authenticity?

The idea of originality is inextricably tied up with notions of ownership, authorship and authenticity. For my purposes, these three concepts are interchangeable. When we hear a piece of music, we want to know that there is a human mind behind it, a set of emotions we can connect with and relate to. The era of recorded music has posed a challenge to our notions of authenticity. Walter Benjamin puts it best:

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be….The presence of the original is the prerequisite of the concept of authenticity. (Benjamin 1969)

If we hold Benjamin’s criteria for authenticity to be true, then modern studio recordings are inauthentic indeed.

The Beatles are an excellent test case. At the beginning of their recording career, they simply performed live in the studio, producing a slightly more polished result of what you would hear if you attended one of their concerts. Their last few albums, on the other hand, were elaborately overdubbed collage works that would be difficult or impossible to recreate live. There is no single “original” performance of “A Day In The Life” or “Strawberry Fields Forever” in Benjamin’s sense.

Recent decades have seen an ever-widening gap between people playing instruments in real time and the final product of a recording, especially since the advent of synthesizers, sequencers and digital editing techniques. As Evan Eisenberg says:

The word ‘record’ is misleading. Only live recordings record an event; studio recordings, which are the great majority, record nothing. Pieced together from bits of actual events, they construct an ideal event. They are like the composite photograph of a minotaur. (Eisenberg 2005)

Jesse Walker concurs:

Critics have long debated who ‘creates’ a pop record: the artist listed on the sleeve, the producer behind the scenes, the composer in the wings, or the sometimes anonymous studio employees who actually play the music. (Walker 2003)

It is no wonder that our ideas about authenticity, authorship and ownership of music have grown so muddled. Some musicians remain convinced that synthesizers can never be “authentic” because they are “fake.” But creating a synthesizer patch “from scratch,” building up timbres from raw waveforms using modular electronics or code, could logically be viewed as being more “real” than playing a piano or guitar built by someone else. Traditional instrumentalists decry the use of samples as “unoriginal” or “stealing,” but have no difficulty at all drawing on standard chord progressions, rhythmic and melodic figures, instrumental combinations, song forms, stylistic idioms and the like. The term “sampling” includes practices as diverse as appropriating long and recognizable sections of existing recordings; using short and unrecognizable fragments of existing recordings; using single-note recordings of “real” instruments designed to be mapped to a MIDI controller in order to mimic the sound of the original; and exotic granular synthesis techniques that process short samples beyond recognition. Musicians will vary wildly in their convictions about which of these practices are acceptable and which are not.

At the most controversial end extreme end of the scale lies the mashup, a new work consisting solely of pieces of pre-existing works, individually familiar to the listener, designed to produce surprising juxtapositions. The mashup has been hailed as the most emblematic and significant art form of the time, while simultaneously being dismissed as a shallow novelty or reprehensible thievery.

Controversy over digital music extends far beyond sampling. Some musicians feel that playing digital synthesizers by hand counts as “real music,” but that MIDI sequencing is “cheating.” Some feel that laborious tape editing is acceptable, but effortless digital audio editing is not. Still others can accept digital recording and editing in general, but morally object to techniques like pitch correction and rhythmic quantization. And the situation only gets more complex when we consider the gulf between what musicians say publicly and what they practice in the privacy of the studio.

So what is authenticity in the digital world? I believe that the technological tools and techniques at work do not determine the “realness” of a piece of music. The important factor is emotional truth-telling. Does the music convey or evoke real feelings? Does it tell stories, literally or metaphorically, that truthfully convey the world in which we live? Can a human connection be formed between musician(s) and listener? If the answer to these questions is yes, then I consider the music to be authentic. That said, it may still be difficult or impossible to identify a specific author for a piece of modern electronic music, or even a clearly-defined group of authors. Can music be authentic without having an author? I believe that it can.

Recoding and oral tradition

Art and architecture critic Hal Foster coined the term “recoding” to refer to sampling, remixing, mashups, quotation and all other forms of artistic appropriation. (Foster 1985) Recoding is a useful word — while the various practices it subsumes differ technically, they spring from the same creative impulse and are treated similarly under the law. Recoding shows the way toward a future for recorded music that is more in continuity with music’s past. If I buy a recording, I can listen to it or dance to it, which are both fine activities, but what if I want to go further? What if I want to engage with it, converse with it, customize it or adapt it to my own needs?

Copyright law tightly circumscribes our ability to recode recordings. This flies in the face of the uncountable centuries of musical culture. Before recording technology existed, if you wanted to hear music, someone needed to play or sing it. The normal method for passing music along for nearly all of human history was by oral tradition. A great deal of responsive interaction, adaptation and reinterpretation was an inevitable part of this transmission process. While most of the music we encounter in the modern world is in recorded form, we still carry strong traditions of sharing, adapting and customizing our music. Our instinct to share music we like and to remake it as we see fit is in direct conflict with our notion of recordings as physical and intellectual property that we do not control.

Sampling and originality

More than any other digital music-making practice, sampling provokes the greatest controversy, the hottest emotions, and the most contentious legal battles. For the purposes of this section, I will define sampling to be the appropriation of pieces of recordings created by others in order to recontextualize them in new works. The sample might consist of a single snare drum hit or a long passage, or anything in between.

While digital sampling is a new development, the practice of interpolating familiar material into a new work is of long standing. Classical composers have frequently “sampled” one another’s themes, along with folk and traditional music. Puccini uses “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a leitmotif for an American character in Madame Butterfly. Tchaikovsky interpolates the French and Russian national anthems in the 1812 Overture, along with a Russian Orthodox plainchant and other folk songs. The Nutcracker Suite quotes the traditional “Grossvater Tanz.” At the end of his Violin Concerto, Alban Berg quotes Bach’s chorale “Es ist Genug.” The Habanera from Carmen is based on the song “El Arreglito” by Sebastián Iradier. (Slonimsky and Kassel 1998) The list of such appropriations is endless.

While we have largely made our collective peace with the idea of composers borrowing ideas from one another, sampling recordings feel like another matter entirely. A recording is a physical, tangible artifact in a way that a chord progression is not. Copying the information from a recording feels like a physical act of taking. Even though digital copying does not remove or destroy the original, our mores are still shaped by the idea that unauthorized sampling deprives the original owner of something. Sample-based forms like hip-hop, house and techno have swept the world and transformed global culture, but controversy continues to rage over their basic moral validity.

Thomas Joo represents the prevailing view of the anti-sampling camp: “[S]amples are valuable to music producers because they offer a way to obtain the sound of a musician without employing any musicians.” (Joo 2012) I take strong issue with this assertion. Sampling musicians are still musicians. Indeed, in my own experience, the selection and deployment of the right sample can require significantly more creative effort and time than producing boilerplate genre material on the guitar or on sheet music. People who like hip-hop but are uncomfortable with the practice of sampling tend to invoke the Roots, who play live instruments with considerable skill. However, the Roots are firmly part of the sampling community. Their live performances strive to emulate the sound of sample-based production, turntablism and sequencing. And even though the Roots’ drummer, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, is one of the finest musicians of his generation, he nevertheless regularly uses sampled breakbeats in his production work.

Is sampling stealing?

Sampling provokes considerable ire from not just from copyright holders, but from musicians and listeners generally. Some musicians equate sampling with simple plagiarism, and some judges ruling in high-profile sampling cases concur. My own stance is that transformative use should absolve the sampler of all accusations of theft. Sampling, say, a two-bar segment of a song takes nothing away from its author or performer. No one would ever mistake a transformative use of this two-bar sample with the original. Indeed, the sample might draw valuable attention to the original, so long as there is proper attribution.

There is a reasonable objection to sampling that has nothing to do with theft. Rather, it concerns the hijacking of emotional associations. When we hear a song based on a sample before we hear the original, then the original will inevitably evoke the sampling track. I heard “Crazy In Love” by Beyoncé dozens of times before I ever heard the source of its distinctive brass and cymbal samples, “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites. As a result, the Chi-Lites’ song will always evoke Beyoncé for me. It is natural to feel protective of one’s memories and emotional attachments around favorite songs. My hope is that while samplers should be free to recode, they would be attentive to the feelings surrounding a well-known piece of music, and that they would handle those feelings consciously and respectfully.

The creative value of sampling

Sampling is an essential part of the contemporary creative toolkit. It enables us to actively engage our music collections, to remake recordings as we see fit. In this respect, sampling has some of the same satisfaction of learning how to sing songs we like, or how to play them on an instrument. As with learning and adapting songs in the traditional manner, sampling lets us remake recordings to our own tastes.

Samples can also be sonically manipulated in real time in ways that live instruments can not. One can instantly alter the pitch or tempo of a sample, or rearrange its components in a different order. Thomas Joo, like many critics of sampling, undervalues this power to reshape the meaning of a sample’s source material: “Even the most active engagements with texts, such as the production of innovative derivative works, involve at least some ceding of the meaning-making function to the author of the source work.” (Joo 2012) This may be true for some works, but it is quite possible for sample-based music to be significantly greater than the sum of its parts. For example, the song “They Reminisce Over You” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth turns samples of a lite-jazz recording of a Jefferson airplane song into the basis of an elegaic tribute to a friend who died young. Pete Rock and CL Smooth transform trite and banal source material into a powerfully moving and substantive new work.

Sampling is also quite effective as a music teaching and studying tool. Sample hunting requires listening actively, with an acquisitive ear. Once a sample has been isolated, hearing it looped endlessly allows the sampling musician to gain a more intimate and nuanced familiarity than the usual listening experience affords. Furthermore, the expediency of sampling encourages spontaneity and experimentation. If I want to try out ideas over a certain beat, it would be logistically inconvenient to involve a live drummer. My apartment is not the right environment for a full drum kit, and I lack the equipment to record one properly. Meanwhile, I have a hard drive full of the best drummers in recorded history playing in every conceivable style, with an essentially limitless selection of others a few mouse clicks away on the internet. How could I possibly pass up the opportunity to practice and write along with Clyde Stubblefield or Questlove or Max Roach? It isn’t just beats that can inspire new tracks or compositions. A short instrumental passage, a vocal phrase, a fragment of speech, a sound effect or atmospheric sound can inspire new work. The effortlessness and immediacy of sampling creates such a wealth of possibility that the challenge becomes choosing from among them.

Samples are not only valuable for their expediency. They possess their own sonic and musical qualities. There is a substantial difference between a person playing a particular phrase repeatedly and the playback of a recorded loop. People cannot help but introduce slight variations of attack, subtle tempo changes, and all of the other nuances of live performance. In some styles of music, constant nuance and variation is a good thing. In electronic music, however, one usually wants the hypnotic, trance-like effect produced by identical looping. A sample’s effect comes not just from its musical content, but all the subtleties of its timbre imparted by the particular interaction of the microphone and preamp and mixing desk and tape or digital medium. The magic of a sample like the Funky Drummer or Amen break is not just in its beat — there is also the tape hiss, the equalization, the compression and reverb. A drummer might be able to recreate the musical performance closely, but not the particular sonic ambiance.

The evocative power of a sample can be used to create webs of reference and self-reference. A striking example is “The Score” by the Fugees, from the album of the same name. In addition to an array of samples of other artists, “The Score” samples every other song on the Fugees’ own album, making for a dizzyingly recursive work of art.

Nas Is Like

An excellent example of the sampling art form is the hip-hop song “Nas Is Like” by Nas, produced by DJ Premier. The instrumental track combines a programmed drum machine beat with twittering birds sampled from “Why” by Don Robertson. The vocals are accompanied by a sample of low-fidelity plaintive strings, sampled from a rather unlikely source, a Lutheran inspirational recording called “What Child Is This.” Imaginative though these sample choices are, DJ Premier’s real artistry comes in his construction of the song’s chorus, built entirely from snippets of other Nas songs. Most of the lines in the chorus come from Nas’ breakout hit “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” including the phrase “Nas is like” that gives the song its title. Other phrases come from Nas’ “Street Dreams,” itself based on “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics.

The most inventive sample in “Nas Is Like” is a single syllable taken from Biz Markie’s song “Nobody Beats the Biz.” Biz Markie describes himself in the song as “highly recognized as the king of disco-in.’” He hits the last syllable in ‘recognized’ in a particularly loud and nasal tone, and out of context, it sounds like he is saying “Nas.” It is no wonder that DJ Premier is an admirer of Biz Markie — both are given to creative samples and allusions. The chorus and title of “Nobody Beats The Biz” are a play on a commercial jingle that will be familiar to anyone who watched television in the New York City region during the 1980s. Just as Biz Markie’s tune evokes the familiar in a surprising context, so too does DJ Premier gratify fans of Nas’ earlier recordings by sampling them in “Nas Is Like.”

Remixes and originality

The conventional wisdom in the music world holds that remixes are antithetical to originality. After all, a remix is, by definition, a modification of an existing work, with substantial amounts of the original still present. William Gibson disagrees with this conventional view:

The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital. Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?)….The recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries. (Gibson 2005)

I agree with Gibson’s sentiment, with one caveat: remixing is not so new as we generally believe. While the recorded form of the remix is a technological novelty, the practice of placing an existing musical work in a new setting is quite ancient.

As with sampling, remixing has strong precedent in classical music. Any piece entitled “Variations on a Theme by [Composer]” is effectively a remix; for example, “Variations on a Theme by Haydn” by Johannes Brahms. It is quite common for classical works to be elaborated versions of folk, dance or religious songs. Bach is known to have drawn heavily on Lutheran hymns for source material, using their melodies and chord progressions as the bases for his Baroque elaborations. The album Morimur substantiates this hypothesis by superimposing a performance of the D minor violin partita with a choir singing the hymns believed to form its basis. The musical fit is remarkably seamless.

One could also make a case that jazz musicians’ reinterpretations of popular songs constitute analog remixing. Even the most prolific jazz composers like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane devoted album after album to highly personalized and idiosyncratic arrangements of popular standards. The emblematic Coltrane remix is his rendition of “My Favorite Things,” from his album by the same name. The E major and E minor parts in Coltrane’s arrangement of “My Favorite Things” are open-ended loops. Soloists play each one as long for as long as they see fit, and then signal the band to continue to the next section by playing the “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens” melody. The result bears the title of a standard tune, but is unmistakably Coltrane’s creative statement. Even Coltrane’s completely “original” music draws heavily on other sources. His classic tune “Impressions” is a mashup of “So What” by Miles Davis and “Pavane” by Morton Gould.

Aficionados of dance music know that the official release of a song is just the beginning of its musical evolution, and that its truest expression may well come in the form of an extended dance remix. Björk, for example, has embraced the idea of her work consisting of an endless stream of remixes, rather than final, fixed recordings. She encourages her collaborators to find surprising settings for her material, sometimes changing their key and mood entirely, making these songs remixes from the outset. Each single she releases is accompanied by a string of official remixes commissioned by a variety of other artists. Björk released an album, Telegram, consisting almost entirely of remixes of her previous album Post, some of which are quite radical — the electronic dance beats of “Hyperballad” were replaced on the remix by a classical string quartet. Furthermore, Björk has been positively encouraging of fan remixes, to the point of releasing an entire album of remixes and covers of her song “Army Of Me” to benefit tsunami victims in 2005.

It is possible for an artist to make a rich and varied career solely from remixing the work of others. Examples of pop remixers range from the starkly avant-garde “Plunderphonics” recordings of John Oswald, mangling songs beyond recognition, to the good-natured Tangoterje, who extends the funkiest and most danceable parts of songs and layers them with psychedelic echoes. The genre of Jamaican dub consists substantially of remixed “riddims,” recordings of rhythm-section grooves overlaid with snippets of vocals and sound effects, and processed heavily through echo and delay. William Gibson’s statement that the remix is less the anomaly than the static recording, fixed for all time, becomes less controversial with each passing decade.

Mashups and originality

Even more than sampling and remixing, mashups challenge our conventional notions of authorship, ownership and authenticity. Are mashups the most innovative and vital musical form of our time, representing the independent musician’s reclamation of consumerist pop culture? Or are mashups lazy and dishonest, the most venal kind of intellectual property theft?

Club DJs have been mashing up songs on the fly for decades, intermixing popular dance dance tracks with hooks and breaks from other well-known dance tracks. Most of these mixes are ephemeral, created on the spur of the moment for a particular club crowd, but some get recorded and find their way into non-club contexts. High-profile examples include “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel” and Double Dee and Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. You could think of these early mashups as very fast-paced medleys, stringing together short segments of well-known songs into a cohesive whole.

While it is possible for a vinyl DJ to combine two different songs simultaneously, lining up the keys and tempos requires considerable skill. The mashup did not find widespread expression until digital editing software made the beat-matching and transposing tasks easier. Using a modern program like Ableton Live, it is possible to superimpose any combination of recordings at the same tempo in the same key with a few minutes of work. Dance and pop songs have long been released in DJ formats with unaccompanied vocals on one side and instrumental versions on the other, facilitating remixing on the fly; such releases are invaluable raw material for mashup artists.

The most typical mashup strategy is to layer the acapella vocals of one song onto the instrumental from another. The challenge is to find two songs that are stylistically wildly different and get them to sound like a unified whole. For example, an anonymous internet artist created a track called “Gettin’ Freaky In Black,” combining vocals from Missy Elliot’s hip-hop/dance song “Get Ur Freak On” with the instrumental version of the hard-rock “Back In Black” by AC/DC. This improbable-seeming combination has a joyous quality distinct from either of its sources.

More adventurous mashup artists take the medley concept of Grandmaster Flash a step further by layering several different songs together simultaneously. DJ Earworm has produced an annual mashup series called The United State Of Pop. Each year, he combines the top twenty-five Billboard hits of that year into a single track. He invests considerable effort into making all of these fragmented songs cohere musically, and the result is a remarkably deep dive into the collective American psyche.

As a practitioner of the mashup, I am strongly in favor of the form as a valuable form of artistic commentary and musical expression. But it is worth examining opposing viewpoints. David Gunkel summarizes them well:

[T]he mash-up is regarded as ‘bastard pop.’ It is the monstrous outcome of illegitimate fusions and promiscuous reconfigurations of recorded music that deliberately exceed the comprehension, control, and proper authority of the ‘original artist.’ In doing so, however, the mash-up does not just challenge the authority of the author but demonstrates that the concept of authorship in popular music has itself always been equivocal and something of an artifice.(Gunkel 2008)

Gunkel’s invocation of the word ‘bastard’ is richly significant. It suggests that there is a proper, ‘pure’ way of breeding songs, and that mashups violate our most basic mores around legitimacy. If artists’ works are their exclusive progeny, then appropriative forms like the mashup are an assaultive affront to artists’ rights to control and protect their ‘children.’

But do artists really own their work, once it is completed? Whatever copyright law may have to say on the subject, our society has not made up its collective mind on this question. Many of us feel that if we purchase a recording, or a book, or a computer program, it is now ours to do with as we please. Sasha Frere-Jones defends the rights of audiences to use creative work to suit their own needs:

See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones. (Frere-Jones 2005)

Frere-Jones articulates my motivation as a mashup artist precisely.

Kembrew McLeod, a passionate advocate for remixers and other makers of appropriation art, is nonetheless conflicted about the mashup:

Despite my appreciation for them, I do not mean to idealize mash-ups because, as a form of creativity, they are quite limited and limiting. First, because they depend on the recognizability of the original, mash-ups are circumscribed to a relatively narrow repertoire of Top 40 pop songs. Also, mash-ups pretty much demonstrate that Theodor Adorno, the notoriously cranky Frankfurt School critic of pop culture, was right about one key point. In arguing for the superiority of European art music, Adorno claimed that pop songs were simplistic and merely made from easily interchangeable, modular components. Yes, Adorno was a snob; but after hearing a half-dozen mash-ups, it is hard to deny that he is right about that particular point. (McLeod 2005)

This is a thoughtful criticism, but in this instance, I do not believe McLeod and Adorno to be correct. Adorno’s vaunted European art music is, in its way, as modular as contemporary American pop. The components are different, but they nevertheless comprise a finite set, overlaid with fairly rigid restrictions on what is and is not permitted. The rules of harmony and counterpoint are algorithms for producing common-practice era classical music. Software has produced ersatz Bach pieces good enough to fool experts.

Meanwhile, where is it written that mashups must be limited to top 40 pop? Any recording is fair game. Jazz fans can enjoy jazz mashups; country fans can enjoy country mashups; opera fans can enjoy opera mashups. The aforementioned DJ Earworm produced the delightful “Brazilian Diamonds,” combining Django Reinhardt’s “Brazil” with Paul Simon’s “Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.” The result is a heady blend of jazz, samba, soft rock, isicathamiya and mbaqanga. Who would have guessed that the bouncy rhythms of samba as filtered through the mind of a Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist would mesh so well with the bouncy rhythms of South African pop as filtered through the mind of a Jewish folksinger from Queens? This sort of discovery is only possible via extensive trial and error, and should be rewarded as we would reward any other form of creativity.

It has been my experience that writing an “original” song “from scratch” is more like creating a mashup than unlike it. Songwriting consists of splicing and hybridizing together a series of scale fragments, chord progressions, rhythmic figures, melodic shapes and timbral combinations. The given set of musical modules is bounded by stylistic considerations — I will draw on a different set of modules to write a bebop head than a country ballad. The combinations may be novel each time, but the basic ingredients are not.

The Grey Album

Perhaps the most famous (or notorious) mashup is the 2003 album-length work by Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton called the Grey Album. It accompanies every acapella track from Jay-Z’s Black Album with new instrumentals comprised solely of samples taken from the Beatles’ White Album. Danger Mouse never intended the Grey Album to be a commercial product; he conceived it as a creative challenge to himself. Nevertheless, copies found their way into record stores, and Danger Mouse found himself on the receiving end of legal threats from EMI, administrator of the Beatles’ copyrights. Danger Mouse cooperated with EMI’s efforts to remove The Grey Album from stores, but in the meantime, copyright reformers on the internet turned him into a cause celébre.

On February 24, 2004, the activist group Downhill Battle led an act of civil disobedience known as Grey Tuesday. Hundreds of web sites changed their color schemes to grey, and approximately 170 sites made the Grey Album freely available. Over one hundred thousand copies were downloaded, and the ensuing controversy vaulted Danger Mouse into celebrity. Both Jay-Z and Paul McCartney were vocally supportive of the Grey Album. In Jay-Z’s case, this is unsurprising; he released the entire Black Album in DJ format with the explicit hope that remixers and mashup artists would do exactly what Danger Mouse did. McCartney’s reaction is somewhat more surprising, since the Beatles have generally been strongly protective of their recordings. Nevertheless, in a February 11, 2011 interview with the BBC, McCartney indicated that he regarded the Grey Album as a flattering homage.

Thomas Joo maintains that Danger Mouse “never stood a serious chance of contesting the cultural meaning of the Beatles‘ White Album or Jay-Z‘s Black Album.” (Joo 2012) I myself am proof that this is untrue. I was indifferent to Jay-Z until I heard his music combined with Beatles songs that I had long known and loved. The Grey Album acted as a cultural ambassador, opening me up not only to Jay-Z but to many other hip-hop artists as well. The Grey Album has inspired a flood of imitators, album-length mashups combining Jay-Z’s vocals with Radiohead, Weezer, Brian Eno and others. A notable example is “Dirt Off Your Android,” combining Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” with Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android.” As mashups like these become commonplace listening, their impact on the rest of popular music is already being felt, as wild eclecticism and jarring stylistic combinations have moved from the fringe toward the mainstream.

DJs and originality

The least likely exemplars of musical originality are disk jockeys. The typical DJ simply plays one preexisting recording after another. While the job requires attention to song selection and sequencing, few “real musicians” would consider DJing to be a form of creativity, much less an outlet for original expression. Nevertheless, the most skilled DJs have shown considerable ingenuity in their ability to deconstruct and recombine recordings. The cut-and-paste style of urban disco DJs in the 1970s was a crucial influence on the first generation of hip-hop and electronica producers. As technology progresses, the practices of turntable virtuosos have become accessible to average working DJs as well. Ed Montano quotes DJ Goodwill:

You used to be able to just get up and play a record, and it would go for seven minutes, and there’s not much you could do with it. But now… I can loop sections of it, and add bits to it before I go out, and I can get rid of the breakdown if I don’t like it. As technology becomes more palatable and it all goes towards laptops that you’ve already put the music into, you’re going to be able to have so much influence on the music you’re playing. (Montano 2010)

Only the most ambitious DJs presently take advantage of the freedom to create remixes and mashups on the fly in front of a dance club audience. Nevertheless, the practice is spreading. The most meticulously curated and creatively blended mixes show as much of the creative stamp of the DJ as a jazz solo speaks with the voice of the improviser. I foresee that the best DJ mixes will come to be regarded as compositions in their own right, with DJs considered creative authors in their own right. Dance music aficionados already widely hold this view.

The evolutionary model of musical creativity

In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” to describe a self-replicating information virus, using our minds as hosts. The analogy is to genes, self-replicating molecules using the bodies of organisms as machines to perform the replication. (Dawkins 1976) Memes are transmitted from one mind to another by imitation. This transmission process has been helped greatly in recent history by meme-friendly media like books, recordings and especially the internet.

Dawkins inspired subsequent theorists like Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett to argue that all of human culture, language and technology are vast complexes of memes; indeed, memes may even comprise our consciousness and social identities. A key corollary to this theory is that memes evolve semi-independently of their human hosts. Rather than thinking of ideas as belonging to us, we should think of them as symbiotes or parasites, like the mites on our skin or the bacteria in our guts. Sometimes musical memes reward their human hosts (musicians) with wealth, fame and personal happiness. Sometimes the human host ends up broke, despised and alone. The memes don’t “care” one way or the other; they are as mindless as viruses. Whenever we have a song that we dislike stuck in our head, we experience just how independent our resident memes can be.

Susan Blackmore encourages us to take the “meme’s eye view.” From the memes’ viewpoint, humans don’t write music at all. Musical memes self-replicate, mutate and hybridize in our heads. They spread via performances, scores, recordings, teachers, television, movies, web sites and countless other cultural vectors. (Blackmore 2000) The meme theory gives us a useful paradigm for understanding how musical ideas spread. Just as biologists create tree diagrams showing the descent and spread of a particular gene, bifurcating at each mutation point, so too can we make evolutionary trees for memes. Digital sampling in particular makes the heredity networks neatly unambiguous and easy to parse out. It is more difficult to trace the spread of a certain melodic motif or chord progression or rhythmic pattern, but such hereditary histories most assuredly exist.

DNA gets copied when cells divide and replicate. Music gets copied from mind to mind when people hear it and want to reproduce it. All musical learning begins with imitation of other musicians. As music gets copied from one person’s mind to another, it sometimes mutates. Think of learning an existing piece of music as being like asexual reproduction. Usually the two child cells are exact clones of the parent cell. Mutations are errors that result in inexact copies. Mutations generally harm the child cells’ ability to survive and reproduce, but every once in a while the mutation is advantageous.

Consider “Amazing Grace,” which was sung to as many as twenty different melodies before it settled into the one familiar to us. Imagine that you know how to sing one of the “Amazing Grace” variants, and that I want to learn it. Say that we can’t read music and have no way to make recordings. You will likely repeat the song to me until I can successfully copy it by imitation. Perhaps I will not quite learn the melody accurately, and will remember it with one or two notes changed. This mutation will probably make my version of “Amazing Grace” less compelling and memorable, and other people will be less interested in learning it from me. But perhaps I will have stumbled upon an improvement. My version might even spread and eventually crowd out your version. Such a process surely produced the “Amazing Grace” that the world knows now, just as mutation and natural selection produced a variety of hominid species at were then crowded out of existence by humans.

Musical imitation need not take place at the scale of entire songs. It can happen at smaller scales, at the level of riffs and chord progressions and rhythmic motifs. Particularly successful memes in the American folk tradition include the I-IV-V chord progressions, the major and minor pentatonic scales, and the blues scale. When someone combines a variety of memes into a novel configuration, we call the process “composing” or “songwriting.” Writing music is closer to hybridizing and selective breeding than creating a new life form from scratch.

The pioneering producer Brian Eno likes to use the word “scenius” rather than genius to describe exceptional creativity. He believes that the image of the lone visionary is a myth, and that valuable innovations are produced by networks of people communicating ideas back and forth. This view dovetails neatly with the meme theory. A rich and thriving ecosystem of memes under strong selective pressure will produce the most robust and adaptive replicators. By this view, environments like 18th century Vienna or Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s are to be credited for the music they produced more than any particular individual person in those environments.

The meme theory neatly resolves the vexing issues of authorship underlying music-making in the digital domain. Rather than searching in vain for an individual author, we can look at a piece of music and inquire into the natural history of its component memes. We can trace them through software companies, magazines, schools, producers, engineers, compilers of sample libraries, session musicians, songwriters, critics and all the other vectors through which they have traveled to coalesce and hybridize in this particular songwriter’s mind, this sheet of staff paper, this reel of tape, this Pro Tools session, this MP3. Perhaps this complex of memes will be unsatisfying or unfashionable, and will vanish in obscurity. Perhaps it will cause enough gratification to motivate us to copy it, to share it with friends, to imitate and sample and remix it. So it is that the memes evolve and spread.

An example meme: The Amen Break

The most-sampled recording in history is likely a song called “Amen Brother” by the 1960s soul band The Winstons, specifically a five and a half second rhythm break by drummer Gregory Cylvester Coleman. “Amen, Brother” was an obscure B-side that would likely have been forgotten had crate-digging hip-hop producers not discovered Coleman’s drum break and begun sampling it extensively in the 1980s. The Amen break gained a higher profile among hip-hop musicians when Breakbeat Lenny included it in the first volume of his compilation series Ultimate Breaks and Beats.

Over the years since, the Amen break has become ubiquitous not just in hip-hop, but in every style of dance music. It almost single-handedly spawned entire genres of electronica, particularly especially drum ‘n’ bass and its various offshoots. The Amen appears in songs by rock and pop artists ranging from Oasis to Nine Inch Nails. It has also been used in television theme songs and commercials. Casual popular music listeners have likely heard the break it in dozens, if not hundreds, of recordings. Noteworthy examples of the Amen break include “King Of The Beats” by Mantronix, “I Desire” by Salt N Pepa, “Straight Outta Compton” by NWA, “The Angels Fell” by Dillinja, “Girl/Boy” by Aphex Twin, “Nightlife” by Amon Tobin and “Streets On Fire” by Lupe Fiasco. Luke Vibert made an album under the pseudonym Amen Andrews in which nearly every song uses a resequenced variant on the Amen break. Noteworthy television usages include the themes to Futurama and the Powerpuff Girls. The Amen is the exemplar of a successful meme. Its success has not benefitted Gregory Cylvester Coleman, however; he died in obscurity, sharing none of the fame of his drum break.

An example meme: The Champ

“The Champ” by The Mohawks has had a particularly colorful evolutionary history as a meme. The organ riff that begins the song will be instantly recognizable to hip-hop fans due its repeated sampling. The Mohawks were an ad-hoc band of session musicians led by a British organist named Alan Hawkshaw, best known for his commercial jingles, library music and television theme songs. He also played on records by Barbra Streisand and Olivia Newton John, making him a rather unlikely source of inspiration for hip-hop artists. Nevertheless, the Champ riff is one of the signature sounds of 1980s hip-hop. It is sampled in “Eric B is President” by Eric B and Rakim, “Smooth Operator” by Big Daddy Kane, “The Big Payback” by EPMD, and “Miami Bass” by Stetsasonic. Its use tapered off somewhat in the 1990s, but it has never gone out of style entirely; for example, Mary J Blige loops it under almost the entirety of her 2005 song “Gonna Breakthrough.”

The most interesting uses of the Champ riff are the ones that reshape or recontextualize the sample. Guy reharmonizes the sample in “Groove Me,” using the accompaniment to change the riff’s key from B major to C# minor. Fu-shnickens shifts and reorders segments of the sample in “La Schmoove” to produce a variant riff. KRS-One alters the sample even further, reordering its constituent notes until it becomes an almost entirely new melody on “Step Into A World (Rapture’s Delight.)” The most popular song to draw on “The Champ” is “Slam” by Onyx. It does not use the sample itself; rather, Onyx shouts/sings its melody for their chorus.

An example meme: ORCH5

While most famous hip-hop and dance samples come from soul, R&B or rock records, a particularly famous sample comes from a highly improbable source: The Firebird by Stravinsky. A single loud orchestral attack from The Firebird was included in the sample library that came with the Fairlight CMI, where it was labeled “ORCH5.” This orchestral stab came to fame in electronic music culture when Afrika Bambaataa used it in his breakthrough 1982 electro-funk/hip-hop song, “Planet Rock.” Robert Fink evocatively describes ORCH5 as “the classical ghost in the hip-hop machine.” (Fink 2005)

ORCH5 is the loud chord at the beginning of “the Infernal Dance of All the Subjects of Kastchei,” pitched down a minor sixth and slowed somewhat. Fink observes that the eight-bit resolution of the analog-to-digital conversion “produced a brittle, grainy sample whose frequency spectrum is shifted noticeably towards the upper registers of the orchestra. This has the paradoxical effect of making the sample sound both ‘old’ (because its low fidelity cannot capture the full range of the orchestra, as in the pre-LP era), and ‘new’ (because the sound itself is noticeably devoid of romantic lushness).” John Robie, the keyboard player on “Planet Rock,” found that he could play eight instances of ORCH5 simultaneously on both hands, producing a distinctive and enormous-sounding minor-key synthetic orchestral hit. This sound has become a standby in hip-hop and electronica production since then.

Other artists of the early 1980s were inspired by Bambaataa or by happenstance to use ORCH5 as well, including Kate Bush, Art of Noise and Mantronix. The multi-octave minor-key orchestral stab has become something of a trope in hip-hop production, though usually not produced with the expensive and user-unfriendly Fairlight CMI. Instead, producers have imitated the general sound of ORCH5, using whatever combination of synthesizers and samplers is at hand. Meanwhile, “Planet Rock” itself has been sampled and referenced a great many times in later hip-hop and dance tracks, including the aforementioned Fugees song “The Score.”

The Anxiety and Ecstasy of Influence

The literary critic Harold Bloom published a book in 1973 entitled The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. In this book, Bloom argues that a poet drawing on the work of another poet will produce weak, derivative work. While he recognizes that some outside influence is inevitable, he urge poets to resist these influences. Bloom gives voice to the broad consensus surrounding up all fields of creativity in western culture: that an original idea is the most valuable idea, and that artists must strive to avoid imitating their predecessors. The anxiety of influence can be felt whenever musicians resist sampling for moral grounds, rather than aesthetic or legal ones. Jonathan Lethem wrote an eloquent rejoinder to Bloom, an essay entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Not only is this essay a rousing manifesto in favor of the remix and the mashup aesthetic across all art forms, but it is itself an example of the mashup form — the essay is comprised entirely of quotes and paraphrases appropriated from other sources. Lethem asks whether it is necessary that we continue to resist the collective nature of creativity. Emphasis is in the original:

[D]oes our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists? (Lethem 2007)

One might well consider appropriation of sounds created by others to be a form of theft, but one could just as easily consider it to be a tribute, an homage, a way of humbling oneself before one’s source of inspiration. In an ideal world, all samples would be clearly sourced and accredited. Sadly, the high cost of sample licenses drives many sampling musicians underground and encourages secrecy about sources.

Copyright

Plato predicted the modern attitude toward copyrighted recordings when he spoke about the written word in Phaedrus: “[E]very word, when once it is written, is bandied about alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect itself.” (Gunkel 2008) Copyright protects recorded artifacts from “ill-treatment.” It does not protect creative acts themselves.

The image of paternity continues to underlie our moral instincts around copyright. Gunkel makes the connection to parenting explicit:

[R]ecordings are, to put it in rather blunt terms, promiscuous bastards… And, in being separated from and abandoned by its progenitor, writing is unavoidably exposed to considerable abuse and misuse… Copyright… includes stipulations that articulate proper use of recorded material and delineate what constitutes inappropriate application of the same. This is done, it is argued, in order to assert the property rights and moral authority of the legal author over his/her creative product. It is, to redeploy the Platonic metaphor, a matter of paternity.” (Gunkel 2008)

The legal status of derivative musical works like remixes and mashups is murky at best. Judicial opinion has been contradictory, with some rulings allowing small portions of copyrighted recordings to be used without permission, while others forbid taking even the shortest and unrecognizable unauthorized sample. The Fair Use exception has protected satirical works, but has thus far not afforded sampling artists much protection generally.

The free-culture adherents believe that copyright law exceeded its original purpose to “foster the Useful Arts and Sciences,” and that now it mostly stifles less-powerful creators while benefiting more-powerful entities. Lawrence Lessig and his allies believe that sampling and remixing of popular culture can empower us, enabling us to take ownership over the products of the dominant culture industry and enhancing “semiotic democracy.” In their view, copyright law is grossly overbalanced in favor of large corporate entities and other powerful actors. (McLeod and DiCola 2011) Thanks in part to high-profile controversies like the Grey Album, there are signs that our copyright culture might be relaxing, de facto if not de jure.

Greg “Girl Talk” Gillis is a mashup artist whose work consists entirely of highly recognizable pop samples. Girl Talk samples with no permission whatsoever, and sells his music commercially. He invokes Fair Use to justify his practices. So far, no one has taken action against him. This is probably due less to the robustness of Fair Use as a legal argument, and more to public relations considerations. Copyright attorney Martin Schwimmer once assured me that no one will ever sue Girl Talk, regardless of the legal merits, because it would be a losing proposition. Girl Talk would be a highly sympathetic defendant, with a fervent online following. (Martin Schwimmer himself is a fan.) If Girl Talk is successfully sued, the internet will rise up in protest, resulting in a public relations disaster that would cost the copyright holder far more than they could win in a settlement. If the hypothetical copyright holder brought a case and lost, it would open the floodgates to unlicensed sampling. Rights holders prefer the status quo, where the law is murky and people mostly license their samples to be on the safe side. This tenuous arrangement is unlikely to be stable in the long term.

Is Compulsory Licensing the Answer?

A compulsory license for compositions has been in place since the Copyright Act of 1909. The license allows anyone to perform or record a cover or arrangement of an existing copyrighted composition, so long as they pay a license fee. This fee is determined by statute, not by the copyright holder. Furthermore, the copyright holder can not refuse to grant a license. In fact, there is no need for the would-be cover artist to have any contact with the copyright holder whatsoever; licenses are handled by the quasi-governmental Harry Fox Agency. The compulsory license does not allow musicians to alter the composition beyond light stylistic adaptation, nor does it allow derivative works to be created. While this scheme has been the occasion for some debate, it has worked well enough for over one hundred years.

Legal scholars of the free-culture movement argue that there should be a similar compulsory licensing scheme for sampling and remixing of recordings. (McLeod and DiCola 2011) Currently, anyone who wishes to sample a recording needs the permission not only of the copyright holder of the composition on the recording, but also the copyright holder of the master recording itself. Typically, a songwriter will hold the composition copyright, and a record label will hold the master recording rights. Either of these rights holders can agree to a sample license or refuse it, and can set whatever license fee they see fit. A compulsory license would make it as easy and inexpensive to license a sample as a cover version. Thomas Joo, an opponent of such a scheme, believes that by holding down the market rate for sample clearance, a compulsory license would be a de facto subsidy for samplers and remixers. He objects to such a subsidy, because he does not feel that the interests of appropriation artists should be favored over those of rights holders. (Joo 2012)

Should we place a higher value on the right of a copyright holder to control the use of their work, or on the right of everyone else to recode that work? As a producer and ardent fan of sample-based music, I come down firmly in favor of a compulsory license, along with a clear and generous fair use policy. In the media-saturated world we inhabit, the ability to claim ownership over that media, to repurpose it for our own creative ends, and to be able to freely disseminate our derivative works, is essential to a healthy and functional intellectual climate. Our culture needs remixes and mashups far more urgently than it needs new string quartets or bebop heads. It is exactly the controversial nature of recoded works that makes them culturally valuable.

Conclusion

Trying to identify the author or authors of a given work of electronic music is challenging at best and impossible at worst. Consider “Nas Is Like.” We can identify Nas as the writer of the rap portion, any quotes and allusions aside. But the authorship of the backing track. The components were arranged by DJ Premier, who also programmed the drum machine. But those components were created by Nas and his various collaborators, by the producers and performers on the records that Premier sampled, by Biz Markie, by the makers of the turntables and samplers Premier used in his production, and so. Once we include the web of influences on all of these people, the notion of authorship comes to appear irrelevant.

We will still need some way to identify composers and copyright owners, if only for the sake of the commercial and legal status quo. Regardless of our laws, however, the memes will continue to replicate and spread, as Danger Mouse proved. We should bring the law in line with the inflexible realities of our culture, with an awareness of the true complexity of the concept of authorship in any work that we produce. Ideally, we can embrace the meme’s eye view, and see ourselves and our computers as host environments where music can make itself. The less we resist the memes’ natural evolution, the greater the diversity of new ideas they will produce for us.

Bibliography

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Discography

Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force — “Planet Rock”

Anonymous — “Gettin’ Freaky In Black”

Biz Markie — “Nobody Beats The Biz”

Danger Mouse — The Grey Album

DJ Earworm — “The United State of Pop” series, “Brazilian Diamonds”

Double Dee and Steinski — “Lesson 1 – The Payoff Mix,” “Lesson 2 – The James Brown Mix,” “Lesson 3 – The History of Hip-Hop Mix”

Fugees — “The Score”

Grandmaster Flash — “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel”

John Coltrane — “My Favorite Things”

Max Tannone — “Dirt Off Your Android”

The Mohawks — “The Champ”

Nas — “Nas Is Like”

Pete Rock and CL Smooth — “They Reminisce Over You”

The Winstons — “Amen Brother”

Guberman divides the history of recorded music into two distinct sections: the fidelity era, stretching from Thomas Edison through the invention of the compact disk, and the post-fidelity era, beginning with the iPod. He argues that, since about 2001, the listening public has come to value convenience, variety, personalization and curation over sound quality.

An emblematic image of the late fidelity era: the Maxell advertisement showing a wealthy young man in his home, sitting deep in an easy chair with a martini, getting physically blown away by giant, powerful speakers.

The emblematic image of the post-fidelity era: silhoutted people of both genders and diverse backgrounds, dancing with iPods.

During the fidelity era, publications and advertisements focused on the “realness” of recording media and playback. High-end stereo equipment became steadily more elaborate and expensive in the pursuit of ever-better clarity and dynamic range. Even the Walkman was initially promoted in terms of its sound quality. Guberman cites a 1980 New York Times article rhapsodizing about the “astonishing . . . fact that a pocket-size set plays true stereo sound with stereo-separation.” By the end of the twentieth century, though, even the most exacting audiophiles were no longer expecting much in the way of further improvements in recording or playback fidelity. While the compact disk was initially presented and marketed for its clarity of sound, its real selling point quickly became convenience: the ability to skip tracks, not having to flip records, not needing to replace needles and so on.

The MP3 format did not immediately challenge the values of audiophiles. The format was a technical curiosity mostly of interest to computer enthusiasts, and the first generation of portable players were considered geeky toys, not serious listening devices. When the iPod was first introduced, it was not met with much enthusiasm. The iPod was relatively expensive, worked with Macintosh computers only, and did not boast any major technological advantages. Certainly, no audiophile would have predicted that it meant the beginning of the end of fidelity culture. But the iPod’s attractive visual aesthetic and remarkably simple user interface helped bring MP3s into the mainstream.

In the past ten years, the iPod and devices like it have changed our relationship to recorded music. We now expect that we can carry a vast quantity of music wherever we go, that we can create playlists at will, and that we can access our libraries via intuitive and attractive interfaces. Furthermore, MP3 software and players introduced the shuffle feature. Some CD players were able to shuffle the tracks on a single disk, but the ability to randomly play from among hundreds or thousands of songs is another qualitative experience entirely. Fidelity has been so completely overtaken by convenience and variety that, as Guberman points out, CDs are frequently purchased just to be converted into MP3 files. Furthermore, elaborate and expensive home stereo systems that might once have centered around a high-end turntable and amplifier are now designed specifically for MP3 playback.

Record companies have been slow to embrace the post-fidelity mindset. They worked to stem the tide of MP3s while pouring resources into higher-end digital formats like the SACD and DVD-A. As recently as five years ago, I was employed to write marketing copy for these formats, and it was difficult to muster an enthusiastic tone for products I knew were of interest to almost no one. Technology companies like Apple and Amazon have been the beneficiaries of post-fidelity culture, while the record labels are in a tailspin.

Today, the audiophile community has largely been subsumed by the home theater and hardcore gamer communities. While these groups value good sound, they also value picture, engaging content, the physical appearance of their gear and various other considerations. Guberman cites the prevalence of speakers designed more for aesthetics than functionality, like the tall, slender towers popular in home theaters setups. He further notes that, even among audiophiles, discussions tend to center around actual music, rather than the technology used to play it back. He surveys the Audioholics forum and finds that “[t]he most popular discussion threads include ‘best female voice,’ ‘best male voice,’ and ‘20 albums you should own but probably don’t.’ All of these involve users recommending albums to each other for various reasons, rarely mentioning the sound quality. Instead users try to describe the appeal of the music itself.” This is for the best. Music technology exists to convey music, and it’s healthier to focus on the music than the technology for its own sake.

Even the MP3 does not represent the lowest-fidelity music experience. That distinction goes to the increasingly common practice of listening to music with the small, low-quality speakers in laptops, tablets and even cell phones. If you’ve taken public transportation in a major city in the past ten years, you’ve probably heard teenagers playing music for each other from their phones. The UK has a slang term for this practice: sodcasting (with sod meaning “inconsiderate jerk.”) This behavior is considered a nuisance by most non-adolescents, and in 2006, London mayor Ken Livingstone went so far as to call for a sodcasting ban. But social music sharing is a fundamental part of our social life, and we should expect kids to do it with whatever tools are at hand. Some scholars take a more positive view of sodcasting, which  technomusicologist Wayne Marshall terms “treble culture.”

Guberman observes that while we have lost something in the post-fidelity era, we have gained much from the access of vast digital music databases. When searching an online store or file-sharing site for a particular song, we serendipitously encounter other songs that happen to share a word their titles. Guberman gives the example of a search that turns up both Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Blue Öyster Cult. This kind of effortless, semi-random encounter has been a source of inspiration for the current generation of musicians. For example, the wildly eclectic singer-songwriter Janelle Monáe has said specifically that she wants her albums to create the sensation of an iPod on shuffle.

Post-fidelity culture impacts the sonic qualities of contemporary pop as well. Smart producers recognize that their work will likely be heard in less-than-optimal listening conditions, and adjust their process accordingly. Hip-hop producers in particular design their mixes for real-life listening: in cars and clubs, and on noisy streets, buses and trains. In the 1990s, Los Angeles hip-hop producers were already in the habit of listening to mixes in progress in the car. Current pop and dance music favors fat synthesized bass sounds and kick drums with a lot of overtones. These sounds work well on tiny speakers, because the upper harmonics supply enough information that the listener can fill in the lower ones mentally. Similarly, high-pitched, crisp synthesizers bracketed by abrupt silences cut well through noise and poor speakers. By keeping the midrange relatively empty, producers can design their music to coexist with engine noise, people talking, humming air conditioners and fans, airplanes and all the other noise pollution we find ourselves immersed in. Music of the high-fidelity era fares poorly in such conditions.

Like most technological changes, post-fidelity culture brings both losses and gains. Consider again the two advertisements. The Maxell guy in the fidelity era has great sound, but he enjoys it alone in his home (aside from his butler.) The post-fidelity iPod people are dancing in a social context. Audiophiles lament the MP3 and treble culture, but these developments facilitate the social sharing and connection that is music’s true purpose.

Before “Believe,” Auto-tune was used for its intended purpose: to correct vocal performances in a natural-sounding, transparent way. Cher’s producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling discovered that if they turned the Retune Speed setting to zero, it produced the futuristic robot sound we’ve all come to know well. Since they were producing a high-tech dance track, they figured that the robot sound fit the mood, so they kept it in.

I doubt that Taylor and Rawling were the first people to discover the zero retune speed setting, but they were the first to use it on a mass-market commercial recording. To keep other people from imitating the sound, they told interviewers that they had achieved the effect with a vocoder. The music press repeated their story endlessly, so to this day there’s widespread confusion about the difference between vocoder and Auto-tune.

Original question on Quora

Music notation

Western music notation is a venerable method of visualizing music. It’s a very neat and compact system, unambiguous and digital, and not too difficult to learn. Programs like Sibelius can effortlessly translate notation to and from MIDI data, too.

But western notation has some limitations, especially for contemporary music. It doesn’t handle microtones well. It has limited ability to convey performative nuance — after a hundred years of jazz, there’s no good way to notate swing other than to just write the word “swing” at the top of the score. The key signature system works fine for major keys, but is less helpful for minor keys and modal music and is pretty much worthless for the blues.

Here’s a suggestion for how notation could improve in the future. It’s a visualization by Jon Snydal of John Coltrane’s solo in Miles Davis’ “All Blues”  (I edited it a little to be easier on the eyes.)

Snydal’s visualization is more analog than digital — it shows the exact nuances of Coltrane’s performance, with subtle shadings of pitch, timing and dynamics.

MIDI sequencers suggest further improvements over standard notation. Here’s a simplified electronic music sequencer called iNudge. Play, it’s fun:

Here’s Thelonious Monk’s tune “Four In One” as shown in standard MIDI “piano roll” view. The rectangles show not only which notes are being played and when, but exactly how long they’re held. Darker red means louder, paler pink means quieter. You can also read volume off the bars along the bottom.

MIDI is a versatile and user-friendly system. It can capture your keyboard performances, you can import scores, and you can even just draw notes onto the screen directly (my preferred method.)

The Music Animation Machine has a wonderful series of videos matching MIDI piano rolls of various classical pieces with recordings of them. Here’s Bach’s infamous Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

As software gets more sophisticated in its ability to extract pitch data from actual audio recordings, you can start manipulating them with the same ease as MIDI. Here’s a screencap of the pitch-correction program Melodyne, a close cousin of Auto-tune.

The lines show the actual sung pitches, and the orange blobs show the notes the program thinks the singer meant to hit. The blobs’ thickness shows volume. You can drag and drop the blobs and redraw the lines at will to alter the melody to your heart’s content. Melodyne even transcribes the performance to standard notation and MIDI for you.

High and low

We’ve made up our collective mind that faster frequencies should be spatially represented as being “higher,” and that slower ones should be spatially “lower.” It seems so reasonable, but really it’s totally arbitrary, and doesn’t even line up with physical experience. On the piano, the high notes are on the right and the low ones on the left. On the guitar, the “low” E string is physically located above the “high” one. The fingerings for higher and lower notes on wind instruments don’t correspond to a simple higher-lower axis either.

Absolute pitch is a straight line ladder, but pitch class is circular. The truest representation of pitch space is a helix.

Other ways to conceptualize pitch space

High and low aren’t the only metaphors we use for faster and slower vibrations. Like I said, pitch class is circular.

But the circle is really just replacing up/down with clockwise/counterclockwise. There are other ways to conceptualize pitch. We intuitively experience changing pitches as moving closer and further, or inwards and outwards. We also think of higher pitches as brighter and lower pitches as darker. Players of stringed instruments sometimes tune their upper strings a little bit too high on purpose, producing an effect known as brilliance.

Time

It’s a universal convention that notation shows time moving from left to right. But that’s not the only possible axis to use. How about forwards and backwards instead? That’s the paradigm in rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. The purest realization of this concept is in a game called FreQuency.

The game even allows you to construct your own remixes.

I like this tunnel metaphor and would like to see it extended into a full-blown production environment.

Waves

Pitches are sine-wave vibrations, and you can visualize them as such.

Sine waves wouldn’t make for very a helpful music notation, but they do help you understand what’s going on scientifically when you physically hear something. They’re even better animated:

See all of Wikipedia’s animated drum heads.

Waveforms

Audio editors show music as amplitude waveforms, blobs that get wider where the sound is louder. Here’s the Funky Drummer break in Recycle. The blue blobs show drum hits. These amplitude blobs don’t tell you much about the musical content except for timing and volume. But Recycle was meant for drum loops, where timing and volume are the only information you really need.

Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the Funky Drummer as it’s looping:

In a post on Design Observer, Rob Walker discusses the waveform as the new icon for music, replacing the stylized eighth notes or records that have done the job in the past. The SoundCloud player uses an attractive waveform graphic that helps the listener track where they are in the song by following the volume peaks. There’s even a SoundCloud group called Pretty Waveforms.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

The waveform has the potential to move from purely functional settings to more decorative ones. Here’s a waveform-based labeling concept by Joshua Distler, showing the tracks on Post by Björk.

Music theory and networks

I’ve always thought it would be cool to use networks to conceptualize music theory, and have made a few attempts at doing so. Here’s a comparison between the circle of half-steps and the circle of fifths, which are involutes of each other:

Here’s a map of the chord progressions in “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane.

And here’s a flowchart showing how you can figure out what scale or mode you’re hearing.

It would be way cooler to have more abstract three-dimensional interactive visualizations showing how chords, scales and melodies function. Leonhard Euler showed how you can represent tonal harmony as a lattice with the topology of a torus, as shown in this animation. Red lines show major thirds, green lines show minor thirds, and blue lines show fifths:

I have ambitions of my own in this area, but so far, I lack the programming skills to realize them. Others are taking some exciting strides, though. Dmitri Tymoczko made waves for getting the first music-related article published in Science about his topological visualization methods for tonal harmony. I can’t quite wrap my head around his ideas, but they’re intriguing.

Here’s an illustration by Aniruddh Patel from his paper, “Language, Music, Syntax And The Brain.” Again, I’m not totally clear what it all means, but I plan to investigate further.

Other theorists have attempted to use color to show harmonic function. Scriabin invented a “keyboard of lights” for that purpose, though it didn’t really catch on.

Visualizing musical form and structure

I like to use simple color-coding to keep track of which section is which while working on a song. Yellow is for intros and outtros, blue is for verses, green is for choruses and orange is for instrumentals and breakdowns.

Edward Tufte shows some more sophisticated song structure visualizations on his forum:

The Shape of Song project by Martin Wattenburg shows repetition within a piece of music. Here’s his visualization of “Like A Prayer” by Madonna.

Here’s Wattenburg’s visualization of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”

Speculation

Here’s an entertaining video showing how you can create a happening drum machine sequence using counting in binary by Niklas Roy.

Wouldn’t this graph coloring system make a cool music notation or interface?

Visual Complexity has many more ideas like this one.

I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of useful and attractive schemes. Are there other cool visualization methods I should know about? Hit the comments.

Updates

John Clover hipped me to this post, which overlaps heavily: Amazing Music Visualizations and Teaching

I just had the chance to play with some of Björk‘s Biophilia song/apps. Some of them are groundbreaking interactive visualizations; some are just entertaining and groovy; some are baffling but deserve points for creativity. All the way around, it’s a remarkable experiment, one that I think is going to be influential.

See this post on Quora

My preferred method the past few years is to record some improvisation over a beat, and then edit the high points together in the computer. I also like to take samples, slice them and see how far I can get rearranging and pitch-shifting them. With vocals, I like to sing wordlessly or scat nonsense syllables, and then fit lyrics to them later. I learned a lot of these methods from working with hip-hop and electronic dance-pop artists and they’ve done a lot to freshen up my writing, make me take chances, and not be too precious about my ideas. When I’m doing work for hire, of course, I have to follow to the client’s process, and that can be a drag, but I try to adapt to whatever the method is.

If you’re immersed deeply in music, ideas will just pop out of your head continually. He’s wise to carry a recording device with him at all times. Paul McCartney famously kept a tape recorder, notebook and guitar or piano in every room of the house. “Yesterday” came to him more or less fully formed in a dream, and when he woke up, he just rolled over and recorded it before it vanished. These sorts of bolts of inspiration don’t just come out of nowhere. You need to feed your brain a lot of raw material. Listening isn’t enough. You need to memorize and perform other people’s material, and play around with it. Try extending or dropping sections, try combining parts of different songs together, try altering a chord here or there. Your brain will take in all these chunks of music, digest them and recombine them while you go about your day (and apparently also while you sleep.) When something hits, you need to be ready for it.

What is the creative process like when writing a song?

It’s on my mind because Dangerous Minds posted the isolated tracks, and they’re a lot of fun. It’s fascinating to hear the separated vocals, guitars, bass and drums. The Youtube videos containing the tracks were swiftly taken down by the Stones’ lawyers, of course, but as of this writing you can still download the stems in multitrack Ogg format. You can open and edit the Oggs in Audacity, and export pieces in other formats.

Whenever a guy like me hears “isolated tracks” I know it’s remix time. So here are some samples from “Gimme Shelter” along with various other sounds, enjoy.

Rock With Shelter

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson

mp3 download, ipod format download

Shelter Guitar

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson vs Glen Velez vs Britney Spears vs Charles Mingus

mp3 download, ipod format download

There’s such a business opportunity with these kinds of isolated tracks. I haven’t bought too many recordings lately, but I’d happily plunk down money for easily-remixable stems, especially if they came pre-sliced in Recycle format. I doubt the Stones would be interested in selling such a thing, since they have plenty of money already, but I could see this being a great revenue stream for younger, hungrier bands. A big part of the reason people like music-based video games is that they get you inside familiar songs in a new way — you’re focused on the guitar or bass in a way that casual listeners rarely do. I could see the Guitar Hero generation eagerly embracing a simplified version of Ableton Live or Reason.

Anyway, “Gimme Shelter.” The female vocalist on the track is Merry Clayton, and she kills it. Aside from this song, she’s had a colorful career. She’s sung on various movie soundtracks, and did backing vocals on songs as diverse as “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos. During her solo verse on “Gimme Shelter,” her voice cracks on the word “shot” from the last line, and then again on the word “murder.” That’s the kind of total emotional commitment that grabs the listener hard. On the isolated vocal you can clearly hear Mick give an appreciative “Yeah!”

The isolated tracks highlight how sloppy the Stones were even at their absolute best. The Dangerous Minds post describes Charlie Watts as sounding like “a human metronome here.” This is completely wrong. I put those drums on the grid and can assure you that Charlie Watts’ time is all over the place. So are the rest of the Stones. That’s the point. Sloppy chic runs directly counter to the musical sensibilities of the digital audio era. I sincerely doubt that any producer would permit such raggedy playing onto a commercial release in this day and age.

I’m no big lover of willful sloppiness. The Stones’ superficial casualness on their best stuff is underpinned by a very disciplined sense of groove and restraint. Later in their career, they got genuinely careless, and that’s when they started sucking. It’s a fine line between insouciant confidence and plain indifference. On “Gimme Shelter” the Stones walk that line perfectly.

Mick Jagger is amusing and everything, but Keith Richards is the Stones’ main point of musical interest for me. He plays simple, well-worn cliches, but he has a totally distinctive touch and approach that keeps his licks fresh all these decades later. Keef gets some of his signature sound from an unusual guitar tuning. He tunes to open G, which is common enough for slide players, but then he takes the low E string off, so he’s left with D G D B D. (On “Gimme Shelter” he has a capo on the second fret.) If you’re a guitarist, try it sometime, it’s fun. Here’s a detailed guide to Keef-style guitar.

Keef supports my assertion that songwriting is not about having original ideas; it’s about recombining existing ideas. When asked about his songwriting by Guitar World, here’s what he said:

Personally, I don’t consider that you create or write anything. The best way to think about it, for me anyway, is that you’re an antenna. I sit down at an instrument-guitar, piano, bass or whatever-and play somebody else’s songs. And usually within 20 minutes, more or less, suddenly something’s coming. And that’s when the antenna goes up. [He wets his finger and raises it in the air.] Incoming! So you get this sort of gift. You work it up a bit and then transmit it. The idea that “I wrote that,” or “I created that” is an overblown artistic sort of thing that people love to put on writing songs. It can screw you up. If you think that it’s all down to you, you’ve got another thing coming.

Words to live by. Too bad the Stones lawyers are so sampling-unfriendly. If Keef was a young up-and-comer right now I bet he would skip the imitation of his blues heroes and just sample them directly.

It’s hard for us now to imagine a time when recorded sound was a wondrous technological novelty.

Those gathered around the phonograph were experiencing music in ways unimaginable not so many years before. They were hearing performers they could not see and music they could not normally bring into their homes. They could listen to the same pieces over and again without change. And they ultimately decided what they were to hear, and when, where, and with whom.

Before the phonograph, music was an intrinsically social activity. The only way to hear it was to be in the physical presence of the performers, necessarily placing the experience into a strong social context. Recordings suddenly divorced the sounds from their original context. Now that recordings flit effortlessly to and fro on the web, the original context of their making is even further removed, and often not even recoverable. Katz gives the usual Walter Benjamin quote about how reproduction of art destroys its aura.

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art,” [Benjamin] maintained, “is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Reproductions, therefore, lack what Benjamin called the “aura” of the artwork. From Benjamin’s standpoint this absence is to be lamented. He speaks of the withering of the aura, the depreciation of the artwork, the loss of authenticity, and the shattering of tradition. Benjamin, however, missed half of the equation. True, mass-reproduced art does lack temporal and physical uniqueness, yet reproductions, no longer bound to the circumstances of their creation, may encourage new experiences and generate new traditions, wherever they happen to be… [W]hile recorded music is often decoupled from its origins in space and time, this “loss” begets a contextual promiscuity that allows music to accrue new, rich, and unexpected meanings.

All this freedom can be disorienting. It’s particularly weird to not be able to see the performers’ faces and bodies. Katz ascribes the popularity of music videos to our discomfort with the lack of visual emotional cues in recordings. The problem is that the videos have so little to do with actual music making that they usually contribute to the alienation. The found videos in Auto-tune The News have an authenticity to them that traditional music videos don’t. The Auto-tune on Antoine Dodson’s voice might be fake, but the anger in his face is very real.

When musicians record, their invisibility to listeners removes an important channel of communication, for performers express themselves not only through the sound of their voices or instruments but with their faces and bodies. In concert, these gestures color the audience’s understanding of the music. As Igor Stravinsky rightly explained, “The sight of the gestures and movements of the various parts of the body producing the music is fundamentally necessary if it is to be grasped in all its fullness.” The violinist Itzhak Perlman, for example, is effective in concert in part because his face registers and reinforces every expressive nuance in the music. Perlman himself once remarked that “people only half listen to you when you play—the other half is watching.”

Recording artists have also reacted to the fact that they cannot see their audiences. For many, the task of performing to unseen listeners, with recording equipment as their proxy, can be both daunting and depressing. In her memoirs, French soprano Régine Crespin registered her dismay at the artificiality of performing in the studio:

“Fear of an audience is healthy; it stimulates you. The people are there in front of you. With them there can be mutual lovefests. But how can you fall in love with a microphone? First of all, a microphone is ugly. It’s a cold, steel, impersonal thing, suspended above your head or resting on a pole just in front of your nose. And it defies you, like HAL the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, although at least he talked. No, the microphone waits, unpitying, insensitive and ultrasensitive at the same time, and when it speaks, it’s to repeat everything you’ve said word for word. The beast.”

Recordings have created the possibility that a musical experience can be exactly repeated.

Live performances are unique, while recordings are repeatable… [A]ny orchestra can play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony many times; each performance, however, will necessarily be different.

For listeners, repetition raises expectations. This is true in live performance; once we’ve heard Beethoven’s Fifth in concert, we assume it will start with the same famous four notes the next time we hear it. But with recordings, we can also come to expect features that are unique to a particular performance—that a certain note will be out of tune, say. With sufficient repetition, listeners may normalize interpretive features of a performance or even mistakes, regarding them as integral not only to the performance but to the music. In other words, listeners may come to think of an interpretation as the work itself.

The repeatability of recorded sound has affected listeners’ expectations on a much broader scope as well. When the phonograph was invented, the goal for any recording was to simulate a live performance, to approach reality as closely as possible. Over the decades, expectations have changed. For many—perhaps most—listeners, music is now primarily a technologically mediated experience. Concerts must therefore live up to recordings. Given that live music had for millennia been the only type of music, it is amazing to see how quickly it has been supplanted as model and ideal.

I’ve played in a lot of bands, and one of the biggest obstacles they all faced was that most of the time, people would prefer to hear recordings than to hear us play. I’ve backed some very good jazz singers, but why would you want to listen to them when you could hear Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald? Live music is an invaluable art experience but if you just want to dance or be entertained, DJs beat bands nine times out of ten.

A lot of musicians I know would read the previous paragraph and bitterly remark on the harm that recording has done to musical culture. Maybe they’re right, but recordings have given us a lot too. I think that the experience of repeat listening to recordings has made Western listeners more accepting of repetition as a feature of the music itself. Westerners have historically resisted the loop-based, chant-oriented forms in other world cultures. But American popular music has been getting more and more loop-based, especially in my lifetime. Tape loops and samplers have both created the tools to make loop-based recordings, and fueled the demand for them.

Recording has changed music education radically, putting improvisation and other non-notated forms on an equal scholarly footings with written scores.

With recordings, performers can study, emulate, or imitate performances in a way never before possible. In the early days of recording, this possibility was trumpeted as a gift to all musicians, who could learn from the world’s great masters by studying their discs. For performers of popular music, recordings have been especially valuable learning aids. The available scores do not always represent performances adequately, and they cannot easily indicate the timbres and sonic effects that musicians seek to develop.

Audio editing tools also make it possible to build recordings without an actual “performance” ever taking place.

Listen to most early-twentieth-century recordings and you will hear a performance in the traditional sense. That is, you are hearing a single and complete take, in which the beginning, middle, and end of the piece were recorded in that order on the same day, in the same place, and by the same performer or group. This was hardly out of a desire for authenticity; it was a product of necessity. However, since the introduction of magnetic tape (in the late 1940s) and digital recording (in the late 1970s), it has been possible to offer the illusion of a traditional performance as well as to create “performances” that could never have existed. With the ability to manipulate sound through such technology, musicians have been able to transcend time, space, and human limitations, and in the process have created wholly new sounds, works, genres, and performance traditions.

One of the most basic manipulations is splicing, in which passages recorded at different times are joined together. The Beatles’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967) provides a famous example. The Beatles did over two dozen takes of the song, none of which completely satisfied John Lennon. But he did like the first half of Take 7 and the second half of Take 26. So he asked George Martin, their producer, to put the two together. Unfortunately, they were in different keys and tempos. The two takes, however, were related in such a way that when one was sped up and the other slowed down so that the tempos matched, the pitches also matched. Thus the two takes could be joined, the splice occurring at about 0:59 on the word going in “Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields.” Although the splice is nearly undetectable, the slightly altered speed of Lennon’s voice helps give the song its distinctively dreamlike quality.

You can build recordings entirely from samples, synthesized and sequenced sounds and jamming. It’s common in pop, dance music and hip-hop to go into the studio with no prepared material at all, and come out with finished songs. Songwriting, improvising and recording have collapsed into a single act.

The job of assembling an electronically-oriented recording is a new form of musicianship unto itself.

It is important to realize that sound is manipulated in the studio not (or not typically) by performers, but by a variety of sound engineers and producers, sometimes referred to collectively as recordists. Recordists fall outside (or perhaps in between) the traditional triad of composer, performer, and listener. They might be thought of as sound shapers, artists in their own right who collaborate with performers and composers.

[T]he very possibility of manipulating sound after its creation—from splicing to digital pitch correction—forces us to reformulate our ideas about composition, performance, and the relationship between the two.

[R]ecording does more than influence the activities of composers, performers, and listeners. It affects the relationship among these actors and in fact challenges the stability, even the validity, of the triad. It is no longer necessary for listeners and performers, or for performers and composers, to work together in order to create music. Yet at the same time, listeners and composers have discovered a more intimate relationship, one that can bypass the mediation of performers, while performers can work in solitude, without the need to stand before listeners. Performances and works are no longer clearly distinct, for recordings can take on the function and meaning of both. Just as recordings can be heard as spontaneous interpretive acts, their repetition can transform them into compositions, works that can be analyzed, historicized, canonized, politicized, and problematized. Nor are production and reproduction so easily separated when preexisting sounds can be manipulated in real time.

A lot to think about. But not everything in the book is so serious. From the introduction:

Several years ago a friend asked me to explain the subject of this book, then in its early stages of development. Opting for a dramatic approach, I pulled a CD at random from a nearby shelf and brandished it in front of me. “This,” I declared, “has changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music.” My friend squinted at the CD, gave me a quizzical look, and asked, “That did?” “Yes!” I answered with gusto. Seeming unconvinced, he clarified his question. “Van Halen changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music?”

Yes, yes they did.

The track isn’t so much a song as it is an early mashup. Just about everything in it is a sample or quote. Here are the sources:

• The eighties version of the Doctor Who theme music
• “Rock and Roll (Part Two)” and “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)” by Gary Glitter
• “Blockbuster!” by Sweet
• “Let’s Get Together Tonite” by Steve Walsh

Drummond and Cauty formed the KLF with the specific intent to thumb their nose at the concepts of ownership and copyright. Nevertheless, by the time of “Doctorin’ The Tardis,” they had attained enough commercial success that that they were able to license all of their samples and quotes. In spite of their not owning much of the publishing rights to their song, Drummond and Cauty ended up making over a million pounds from it. Not bad for a few days’ work. With a modern laptop and Pro Tools the track probably would have taken them twenty minutes.

“Doctorin’ The Tardis” was hot for a very brief instant in the UK, and an even briefer one here in America. I heard it on the radio probably once, after which I went around in an agony of frustration at never being able to track it down and hear it again. What I wouldn’t have given in the eighth grade for the internet. At the time, Doctor Who was a very fringe, very nerdy taste. Even the Trekkies looked down on Doctor Who fans.

Much as I love their one hit and their overall concept, I can’t say I’m too wild about the rest of the KLF’s music that I’ve heard. The only other track of theirs that really does it for me is another crazy mashup, “Whitney Joins The JAMS,” which combines “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “The Theme From Shaft” and the Mission: Impossible theme.

Also, Jimmy Cauty later went on to form The Orb, whose music I love as music and not just conceptually.

After their trip to the top of the charts, the KLF went on to write “The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.” It’s an excellent guide to the production of electronic music generally. I was tempted to just paste the whole thing in, but that would have been ridiculous, so here are some choice quotes, along with my responses.

The emotional appetite that chart pop satisfies is constant. The hunger is forever. What does change is the technology this is always on the march. At some point in the future science will develop a commodity that will satisfy this emotional need in a more efficient way.

Hopefully something more participatory, interactive and gamelike?

To make pop music, you don’t need a band. You need a programmer.

Just after 1 pm Tuesday telephone the studio that you have booked and tell them you are going to need someone who can programme, ideally a programmer who can play the keyboards. Every studio can get one for you. This programmer is going to be the person who will provide, sample, originate, compute, even play all the music you will need on your record.

In hip-hop terms, this person is known as the beatmaker. The word producer is also sometimes loosely used for programmers/beatmakers.

The process of sequencing a pop or dance track is more like methodically cooking a meal or building a building than a wild Dionysian outburst.

It is going to be a construction job, fitting bits together. You will have to find the Frankenstein in you to make it work. Your magpie instincts must come to the fore. If you think this just sounds like a recipe for some horrific monster, be reassured by us, all music can only be the sum or part total of what has gone before. Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested. They have to believe it is through this sojourn they arrive at the grail; the great and original song that the world will be unable to resist.

So why don’t all songs sound the same? Why are some artists great, write dozens of classics that move you to tears, say it like it’s never been said before, make you laugh, dance, blow your mind, fall in love, take to the streets and riot? Well, it’s because although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before their own soul shines through; their personality demands attention. This doesn’t just come via the great vocalist or virtuoso instrumentalist. The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes – a million years of pain and lust.

Creators of music who desperately search for originality usually end up with music that has none because no room for their spirit has been left to get through. The complete history of the blues is based on one chord structure, hundreds of thousands of songs using the same three basic chords in the same pattern. Through this seemingly rigid formula has come some of the twentieth century’s greatest music.

Can I get an amen!

Inexperienced songwriters start with lyrics, treating the rest of the song as decoration. This is like building a house and starting with the wallpaper. Wiser songwriters start with a melody or chord progression, and the wisest ones start with the groove, the foundation of any musical structure:

Before we go any further we had better define “groove”. It is basically the drum and bass patterns and all the other musical sounds on the record that are neither hummable or singalongable to. Groove is the underlying sex element of the record and we are afraid for U.K. Number Ones this can never be left too rabidly raw on the 7″ format. It upsets our subliminal national moral code. We can cope with smut but not grind.

America is a little looser in this regard, but raw beats still make many of my fellow white people anxious.

In the same way that our sexual fantasies change and develop, sometimes double back over a period of months, so do our dance floor tastes in groove. It is always on the move, searching for the ultimate turn on and when you are almost there it’s off again and you’re left looking for a new direction.

Black American records have always been the most reliable source of dance groove. These records down through the years have inevitably laid so much emphasis on the altar of groove and so very little into fulfilling the other Golden Rules that they very rarely break through into the U.K. Top Ten, let alone making the Number One spot. A by-product of this situation is that gangsters of the groove from Bo Diddley on down believe they have been ripped off, not only by the business but by all the artists that have followed on from them. This is because the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody; groove doesn’t even get a look in. If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody. If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself. Right the wrongs.

The best place to find the groove that 7″ single buyers will want to be tapping their toes to in three months time is to get down to the hippest club in your part of the country that is playing import American black dance records. The unknown track the DJ plays that gets both the biggest response on the floor and has you joining the throng will have the groove you are looking for…

If there is neither a suitable club or specialist dance shop in your part of the country don’t throw in the towel as this is where the dance music compilations we have instructed you to buy on Monday morning come in. Stick them on the record player, turn it up loud and get lost in the groove, leave your mind on the bookshelf where it belongs, feel yourself if need be but keep going until you “feel the force” and you are “lost in music”, when the only answer to the question “can you feel it” is “yes”.

Pure dance music, if it has any lyrical content at all, will only deal in the emotions experienced within the four walls of a club late at night; basically desire and, more importantly, that area which is beyond desire at the very centre of the Human Psyche. Everything else is meaningless. Any creator of pure dance music that is attempting to communicate any other subject should be treated with deep suspicion. With a danger of getting too carried away on our own pretensions we state that it is through dance music and dancing we are able to get momentarily back to the Garden. Of course, in the clear light of day this is all very silly.

Not so silly, to my mind.

After the groove, the next key structural element is song structure. Like groove, it acts on your unconscious powerfully.

As we have already mentioned, the Golden Rule for a classic Number One single is intro, verse one, chorus one, verse two, chorus two, breakdown section, double chorus, outro.

Each of these sections will be made up of bars in groupings of multiples of four. So you might have an intro containing four bars, a verse sixteen bars and a chorus eight bars. At times the first verses can be double length verses, or the second chorus a double length. These sort of decisions are not going to have to be finally made until you reach the mixing stage of the record, when the engineer will have to start editing the whole track to make it work in the most concise and exciting way possible within three minutes and thirty seconds.

This last part is no longer strictly true. Pro Tools grid mode and MIDI editors make song-structural editing as easy as editing text in a word processor. You can work out structure in the midst of the recording/songwriting itself.

Hopefully, at sometime over the remaining days of the week, you will have been able to get out to a club and found the groove you need, been able to buy it on vinyl and get it home. It has to be the 12″ version as this will have whole great tracts of raw groove where each of the component parts of the groove are broken down and left exposed for your engineer and programmer to study and imitate when it comes to recording your record.

Again, the computer makes this easier. You can effortlessy loop a bar or two of any recording. Dance mixes do make it easier to find loop-worthy grooves, though.

The next thing you have got to have is a chorus. The chorus is the bit in the song that you can’t help but sing along with. It is the most important element in a hit single because it is the part that most people carry around with them in their head, when there is no radio to be heard, no video on TV, and they are far from the dance floor. It’s the part that nags you while day dreaming in the classroom or at work or as you walk down the street to sign on. It’s the part that finally convinces the punters to make that trip down to the record shop and buy it.

In other words, the chorus contains the meme, the earworm, the mind virus. Your conscious mind is not your friend when it comes time to grow a new meme. You need to reach behind it, into the more evolutionarily ancient and intuitive brain systems.

So, slip on the 12″ or your dance compilation and sing along with the breakdown sections; any old words will do, just whatever comes out of your mouth. If you have difficulty in forming a tune in your head or you feel a bit inhibited, flick through your copy of the Guinness Book of Hits and pick any Top Five record that takes your fancy and see if you can sing the chorus of it along to the track.

Take for example:

“That’s the way a-ha, a-ha I like it a-ha, a-ha That’s the way a-ha, a-ha I like it a-ha, a-ha”

by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. That one usually works and should get you going in the right direction but there are hundreds to choose from.

The lyrics for the chorus must never deal with anything but the most basic of human emotions. This is not us trying to be cynical in a clever sort of way when we say “stick to the cliches”. The cliches are the cliches because they deal with the emotional topics we all feel. No records are bought in vast quantities because the lyrics are intellectually clever or deal in strange and new ideas. In fact, the lyrics can be quite meaningless in a literal sense but still have a great emotional pull. An obvious example of this was the chorus of our own record:

“Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, in the Tardis Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who”

Gibberish of course, but every lad in the country under a certain age related instinctively to what it was about. The ones slightly older needed a couple of pints inside them to clear away the mind debris left by the passing years before it made sense. As for girls and our chorus, we think they must have seen it as pure crap. A fact that must have limited to zero our chances of staying at The Top for more than one week.

Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7″ single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over – the Number One position was guaranteed:

“I’m never going to give you up”

It says it all. It’s what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:

“I’m never gonna let you down I’m never going to fool around or upset you”

GENIUS.

Michael Jackson may be the biggest singing star in the world. Sold more L.P.s than any other artist at any time in the history of pop but he has had very few U.K. Number Ones. If he would like to make amends on this front he should start co-writing with the SAW team or read this manual. He has quite a bit to learn about the opening line of a chorus.

Did these guys just compare Michael Jackson unfavorably to Rick Astley? Did I really just get rickrolled in a book written in 1988? That takes chutzpah.

We are afraid you can’t just go down to the local supermarket and listen to the check-out girls’ talk and hope you can pick up the right line before Waterman gets to it. The line has to come to you and when it does you’ve got to grab it. Mindlessly singing along to the 12″ groove track you have is the best way.

The routine practice now is to record this mindless improvisation into the computer. If something valuable tumbles out, you can easily grab it, copy and paste it and build the song around it.

You must be worrying by now how you, or if not you, who on earth is going to front this record! If you already think you are a great singer and a well happening front person, then we have a problem. It means you will have the sort of ego that will render it totally impossible for you to be objective about everything else that has got to be done. Singers have historically made the worst producers of their own work. The reason for this is simply that singers have to become so emotionally involved in their performance it cancels out any sort of over view. At the very least they need a musical partner that can give them some direction. If a singer was able to have this calculated view of their own work the end product would undoubtedly come over as cold and empty.

This is profoundly true. Singers like to mix vocals way out in front, with the instrumental track as a distant accompaniment. This sounds super corny and dated. Cool music puts the beat up front.

The club D.J. (like his forerunner the dance band leader of the thirties, forties and fifties) realises that the most important thing is keeping the dance floor full and the thing that keeps the dancers dancing now (as it was then) is the music with its underpinning groove factor. Singing throughout has always just provided a distraction from the main event – what is happening on the dance floor and not on the stage.

Music that’s meant to be listened to alone can be lyrics-oriented and built around a vocal sound. But social music needs to center on the beat.

For the majority of people the sound of the vocals and the words that are being sung throughout the verses just merge into the over all sound of the track. The words that are being sung could be any old gibberish, only the words to the chorus have any real importance. Of course there are the exceptions when the classic narrative song breaks through and storms the Number One slot These can never be planned and I’m sure the performers of these freak hits are as surprised as anybody when it happens. So unless you want to risk everything on some bizarre tale you have to tell, stick with us.

Michael Jackson’s lyrics are usually totally incomprehensible, which is no obstacle to their enjoyment. It’s nice to have a blank slate to project your own imagination of the song onto.

So now you can tackle the construction of the verse without worrying about singers.

Using the basic groove you have decided upon you are now going to have to choose a bass line that will work as the basis for the whole song, or at least the verse sections. We take it there is no point in us trying to describe what the bass line is in any great detail, but it’s the bit in the record that throbs and keeps the flow going. In days gone by it was provided by the bass guitar player, now it is all played by the programmed keyboards. Even if you want it to sound like a real bass guitar, a sampled sound of a bass guitar will be used, then programmed. It’s easier than getting some thumb-slapping dick head in.

The groove might already have a killer bass line in there, making the whole thing happen and to remove it and exchange it for another might destroy what you have already got. There are plenty of monster bass lines out there to try. You will know them, they are the ones that you can almost hum. The great thing about bass lines is that they are in public domain. Nobody, even if they do recognise it, will seriously accuse you of ripping somebody else’s bass line off.

Michael Jackson, who we cited earlier on for not being that adept at coming up with the killer Number One hit choruses, CAN come up with the bass lines. “Billie Jean” was the turning point in Jackson’s career. That song, on his own admission, took him into the mega stratospheres where his myth now reigns. The fact is, “Billie Jean” would be nothing without that lynx-on-the-prowl bass line; but he wasn’t the first to use it. It had been featured in numerous dance tracks by various artists before him. Jackson and Quincy must have been hanging out around the pool table in their air conditioned dimmed light atmosphere, L.A. studio one evening wondering: “What next?” when one of them came up with the idea of using the old lynx- on-the-prowl standby. Without making that decision back in 1981 there would have been no Pepsi Cola sponsored jamboree in 1988.

We are not trying to deny any of the very real talent that Jackson has, just trying to emphasise the possible importance of the killer bass line.

Serious groove merchants hate it when a song has a dynamite bass line for the verse and then when the chorus comes the chords change, dragging the bass away from its “bad self” into having to follow those limp wristed chords. For them the whole movement of the song is destroyed for the sake of some nursery rhyme element they would rather see dumped.

Somehow these two important elements are going to have to be made to work together without the power of the chorus or the propulsion of verse bass riff being destroyed. Ideally, when a song hits its chorus it should feel it’s the natural thing to happen, a release from the tension of the verse. By the end of the chorus you must feel like nothing is desired more than to slide back down into the vice-like grip of the bass line.

Some groove merchants have a talent for getting it all their own way by coming up with a bass riff that never shifts from the beginning of the song until the end: intro, choruses, verses, breakdowns, outro all fitting around the same bass riff. For a song to sound like this and work away from the confines of the dance floor, it is going to have to be a real mutha of a riff. There must be some pretty insistent action going on on top of it to keep the casual radio listener interested. Even on “Billie Jean” they moved off the bass riff for the chorus.

Actually, the prechorus. But point taken.

Drummond and Cauty have a ton of other good songwriting advice. Like, don’t use a bridge, use a breakdown section instead. This breakdown section should be just the rhythm tracks with some ambiance on top, not a solo, because:

Nowadays, solos either get in the way or have to be fabulously stunning at the same time as being able to fit in with the studio sculpting that is going on around it. Having some guitarist give you his interpretation of what a really good guitar solo should sound like is totally out of the question. Guitar solos only work in modern pop records when they are over the top things full of hideous histrionics and lacking in any emotional depth whatsoever. This type of guitar solo is one of the very few things that heavy metal has given back to Top Ten chart music. Yet again, Jackson’s name comes in here. It all started when he used Eddie Van Halen on the “Thriller” L.P. So unless you have a mate that can play just like Eddie – forget it.

The only other reason for having a meaningless solo on your track is to give the record some instant profile upon the record’s release by making it known in the media that it features a boring but sainted muso, thus giving it some fake cred. The tried and tested guest soloists of the late eighties are: Miles Davis on trumpet, Courtney Pine on saxophone and Stevie Wonder on harmonica. Untried possibilities that might create some interest would be Jimmy Page or Junior Walker. But really we would recommend you don’t bother – unless you can get Jimi Hendrix to do it.

Finally, here’s a perfect description of how the production process feels at its best:

From now on in you will begin to feel the inevitable pull of the unseen life force of the record you have allowed to be created. It will be as if you are in a sailing boat and suddenly from nowhere a wisp of wind fills the sails. Your job is to hold onto the rudder and at all times never lose sight of the harbour lights. Let the crew bail out the water. Let the crew trim the sails. Let the crew man the galley. Remember, if you ever leave go of the rudder to help the crew all hands may be lost – along with any chance of ever hearing your record being played at five minutes to seven on Radio One on a Sunday evening.

Very zen. Very true.

Gould liked the studio better than the concert hall because he felt that recordings created more opportunities for a two-way conversation between performer and listener. From the book Wondrous Strange by Kevin Bazzana:

He extended his belief in creative freedom to its logical limit, advocating the direct participation of the listener in the creative process, through the intercession of technology. He believed that the modern listener had the same right to tinker with the recording artist’s work as the performer had to tinker with the composer’s. “Dial twiddling is in its limited way an interpretive act,” he noted, and the hi-fi listener was by nature a creative force: even to adjust volume, tone and balance on a crude home stereo of the 1960s was to impose oneself creatively onto the work. “I’m all for the kit concept,” he said in 1968. “I’d love to issue a series of variant performances and let the listener choose what they themselves most like. Let them assemble their own performance. Give them all the component parts, all the component splices, rendered at different tempi with different dynamic inflections, and let them put something together that they really enjoy — make them participant to that degree.” [...] But even without the “kits” he envisioned, recording, Gould said, “compels the performer to relinquish some control in favor of the listener, a state of affairs, by the way, which I find to be both encouraging and charming, not to mention aesthetically appropriate and morally right.”

I’m totally on board with this idea. Classical music concerts are soul-deadening, even when the music is exciting. You have to sit silently and motionlessly. The performers’ faces rarely register emotion, much less their bodies. You can’t even clap between movements. Alex Ross tentatively proposes a relaxation of rigid concert etiquette to make the experience less tedious. That’s fine, but it doesn’t change the basic fact of the forbidding cliff between performer and audience. I’m not suggesting that classical concerts need mosh pits, but it flies in the face of our basic humanity to ask us to not participate in music bodily.

Glenn Gould was prescient in his insistence that music is all about participation, not spectating. There’s a direct line from Gould’s kit recording concept and musicians who release remix-friendly a capellas, instrumentals and separated stems. I’ll bet Gould would have been delighted to play around with Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” stems. I’m hoping he would have approved of my mashup, too:

Gould Lockdown

Me vs Glenn Gould vs Kanye West

mp3 download, ipod format download

I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.

Recording to a single-track tape from a single mic was the only way to record music until 1955. In the single-track era, music was recorded more or less the same way it was performed for an audience. There was a single mic in the middle of the room, and everybody played into it simultaneously. The only “mixing” was done by placing quieter instruments closer to the mic and louder ones further away. Recording as an art form unto itself came into being with the invention of multitrack tape, which made it possible to record different sounds non-simultaneously.

Multitrack is an enormously big deal for recorded music. It enables you to capture ideal performances more easily, since you record each voice or instrument in isolation from the others. An error on one track can be fixed while leaving the others intact. Multitrack also opened the door for mixing, since you can manipulate the volume and tone of each sound independently of the others. This might not seem like such a big deal, but that’s because we’re all so used to spectacularly high-tech sculpting of sound. When I listen to old jazz records, the bass is a vague muffled presence buried in the murk of the low end. It took until the sixties for recording engineers to really figure out how to make the bass jump out of the speakers; now we take for granted that it’ll be as crisp and defined as any other sound.

Even with all the flexibility it offers, tape recording is still relatively unforgiving. I recorded a few songs on tape with my first band in college. Correcting mistakes was tedious and took considerable skill and timing on the engineer’s part.

Since 1997 or so, everything I’ve recorded has been on the computer. There are some pros and cons. The major con is sound quality. Tape is analog. The waveforms it captures are infinitely smooth and continuous. By converting the continuous electrical signal from the microphones or instruments into digital files, you necessarily sacrifice some signal quality.

So that’s the bad news. For me, and for most recording musicians at this point, the good news enormously outweighs the bad news. Digital recording is cheap and constantly getting cheaper. Good quality audio tape is expensive; hard drive space costs next to nothing. A computer costs a heck of a lot less than a decent tape recording console and you can use it for other purposes. But cost is only the tip of the iceberg. The really big deal with the computer is that it visualizes music, turning it into screen objects that you can drag, drop and otherwise manipulate the same way you’d manipulate words in a word processing document. For a visual thinker like me, this is a transformative and revelatory change. It’s radically easier to do complex edits on the computer screen than keeping track of a bunch of pieces of identical-looking tape.

The other big deal about digital audio is perfect copying fidelity and endless editing. Every time you copy a tape, the sound quality degrades a little. Also, as tape ages, it chemically degrades. Digital audio files are highly robust. They’re just long lists of numbers, so you can copy them flawlessly and endlessly across any data storage medium. You can edit digital audio non-destructively, so you can try out ideas to your heart’s content without ever harming or losing your original tracks. Digital audio is also nice and portable. You can lay down basic tracks in your basement, overdub more sounds in someone else’s bedroom and then mix and master in a million dollar studio. And while there’s no undo with tape overdubs, you can effectively undo anything you do on the computer.

Music is intellectually a lot easier than it looks. The big challenge for me, and for most would-be musicians I encounter, is anxiety. We have a crippling fear of being judged, and when we’re doing a recording, the panel of potential judges is enormous. Digital recording has done a lot to reduce my anxiety in front of the microphone. Knowing that nothing is carved in marble takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m much likelier to lay down a perfect take or a cool new idea if I’m feeling relaxed, and recording in my apartment on a computer is as relaxing as it gets.

I’ve been recording an acoustic singer-songwriter’s album for the past year. Aside from the vocals and guitar, everything on the album is fake: the bass, the drums, the percussion and keyboards. The vocals and guitar are processed using Auto-tune, digital EQ and reverb and compression, and various other tricks. The “performances” are stitched together from many different takes, with sections repeated and individual notes corrected for timing and volume and decay. None of these techniques are unusual in the age of computer recording. Some people feel that the computer is harming musicianship by making it so easy to sculpt a flawless performance. My feeling is that the computer just shifts the locus of creative work from the original performance to the editing process.

After doing enough of my own projects using the full digital toolkit, I started questioning the wisdom of recording instrumental performances at all, when it’s so much easier to use sampling and synthesis. The turning point came while working with a soul/R&B band called Love Child. The singer and I were writing and arranging songs using samples, drum machines and all the other hip-hop tools. We gave these tracks to the band to teach them the parts. I made charts too, but the tracks were better for conveying the vibe and nuance we were after. We had a bunch of ace musicians in the band, but they never sounded as good as our sample-based tracks. We’d meticulously sequence a bassline, and then the bassist wouldn’t play it exactly. He’d do variations and little improvs, the usual embellishments that musicians add almost unconsciously. The problem wasn’t his ideas, they were all good. The problem was that by straying away from the extremely sparse parts we were writing, he was deflating the tension, turning our hip-hop feel into a generic-sounding funk.

So it went with all the musicians. Also, it was a logistical nightmare getting everyone together, and it cost a fortune. Eventually we asked ourselves, why are we doing this? The songs sound better on the laptop, why don’t we just commit ourselves to life in electronic world? So we started doing gigs with just the laptop and singers, and it sounded terrific. I feel bad for contributing to the rapid drying up of gigs all musicians are facing in the computer era. But meanwhile, we were going for a sound, and the human beings weren’t giving it to us.

Samples and loops give you a lot of freedom. They also carry their own constraints. When you use, say, two bars of a Miles Davis tune in a particular scale with particular chords to a particular beat played on particular instruments, that forces you to fit the rest of your musical elements to fit. This constraint is a stupendously valuable songwriting tool. Repeating the loop identically is easy and varying it is hard. So by default, sample-based music uses a lot of repetition, and you have to justify each variation because it takes so much more effort than another copy and paste. You’d think this would be true with live musicians too, but it’s not. Getting a band to play a loop without variation is just about impossible. I’ve tried many times, everyone gets bored or feels the need to express themselves. We in the western musical tradition undervalue repetition, and having the computer encourage it has improved my writing and arranging enormously.

Sampling is such a useful framework for structuring musical ideas, now I take a sampling approach to live recordings of instruments whenever I can. If I’m doing a rock track with Barbara Singer, we’ll record a take of her flailing freely away at the guitar over a beat, and then find the best bar or two and loop them. If we need a variation or another section, we’ll use the second-best bar or two, and maybe the third. The less material we use, the better it sounds.

In the future I would wish for a more porous barrier between the recording artist and the listener. It’s been a bottomless source of pleasure for me to remix and mash up other people’s recordings. With all due respect to my fellow musicians, I know what I like better than they do. For the vast majority of recordings I have, I’d rather hear the key musical ideas repeated identically in groups of four or eight over hip-hop beats. If recording artists don’t want to oblige me by structuring stuff that way, I can just edit their music to suit myself. It would be a lot easier to do this if I had access to the individual tracks. A few, very few, artists release tracks with the stems separated out. I wish for the day when it’s standard practice.

Update: for hilarious insight into the process of making a top ten hit in 1988, don’t miss the KLF’s Manual.