Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Recently, I was on Connecticut Public Radio’s Colin McEnroe show, talking about the culture and history of the mashup. I gave my usual enthusiastic endorsement of the practice. My friend Jesse Selengut, an ace jazz trumpet player and all-around music master, had some responses.
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged appropriation, capitalism, collage, Composition, copyright, dj earworm, hip-hop, jesse selengut, mashups, memes, Music, ownership, production, Recording, rolling stones, Sampling
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This post is longer and more formal than usual because it was my term paper for a class in the NYU Music Technology Program. 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 [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Key Musicians, Music, Music Business, Politics, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged ableton, afrika bambaataa, amazing grace, amen break, authenticity, bach, beatles, beyonce, biz markie, brian eno, classical, compulsory licensing, copyright, danger mouse, david shields, dj, dj earworm, dj premier, double dee and steinski, entropy, Evolution, fairlight cmi, fugees, girl talk, grandmaster flash, harold bloom, hip-hop, informationtheory, jay-z, jesse walker, john coltrane, jonathan lethem, linkedin, looping, marcus boon, mashups, memes, midi, missy elliot, mohawks, nas, nyu, originality, plato, plunderphonics, questlove, reason, Recording, remixes, richard dawkins, Sampling, sasha frere-jones, stravinsky, theodor adorno, walter benjamin, william gibson
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Saturday, October 8, 2011
The human brain isn’t “more” evolved. It’s just differently evolved. Our intelligence has its obvious advantages, but it carries some significant costs. Like Joshua Engel says, the big brain is metabolically expensive. It makes childbirth much harder for humans than for other mammals, too. Human babies have to be effectively born prematurely in order to [...]
Sunday, September 4, 2011
The phenomenon of annoyingly persistent earworms is a great introduction to the meme theory: the idea that songs (and all other forms of cultural expression) are self-replicating informational “viruses” that use the mind as their host, the way DNA viruses use living cells and software viruses use computers. The best overview of this theory is [...]
The defining musical experience of my lifetime is hearing familiar samples in unfamiliar contexts. For me, the experience is usually a thrill. For a lot of people, the experience makes them angry. Using recognizable samples necessarily means having an emotional conversation with everyone who already has an attachment to the original recording. Music is about [...]
Filed in Emotion, Evolution, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged beatles, beyonce, chi-lites, elvin jones, Evolution, grateful dead, jay-z, john coltrane, manu dibango, mashups, memes, michael jackson, monkeysphere, pop, radiohead, remixes, sample maps, Sampling, sarah mclachlan, soul makossa, tribe, zap mama
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“The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by James Brown and the JBs is one of the most-sampled recordings in history. “The Funky Drummer” is a cornerstone of hip-hop and other sample-based electronic music, but for the first decade after its release it was an obscure tune. It’s a nice groove, but as a song, [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Evolution, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged algorithms, audio editing, black thought, copyright, digging the crates, eminem, freestyle, funk, funky drummer, godel, hip-hop, james brown, looping, memes, mos def, Music, programming, recursion, remixes, rnb, Sampling, soul
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Friday, February 20, 2009
Sampling, remixing and mashups make some people angry. A lot of people think that repurposing existing ideas is bad, that it’s lazy, or a form of stealing. We value originality highly. Should we? My own experience of music making is that there are no original ideas. There are novel combinations of old ideas, but it’s [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Evolution, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged beatles, composing, copyright, creativity, jonathan lethem, memes, Music, remixes, Sampling
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