Every semester, I have my music technology students do a project using found sound. They record environmental sounds with their phones, and then they create tracks that incorporate those sounds somehow. The only rule is that they have to use at least one found sound–it doesn’t have to be their own. Otherwise, they can use whatever other audio, MIDI or loops they see fit. The project satisfies several pedagogical goals. Students get a taste of field recording, and they start thinking about ways to use “non-musical” sounds in musical contexts. Also, because their phone recordings are usually of poor quality, they have to get creative with audio effects. I like to walk the class through my own approach to the project as well. Here’s what I came up with for my current Montclair State University students:
https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/higher-energy-so-hard/
You can download the Ableton session here. I did some of the work before class: downloading a bunch of students’ sounds, identifying the best parts of them, and finding a good breakbeat to put underneath. I did the bulk of the production during class, with feedback from the students. Then I figured out the structure and applied some polish afterwards.
Sometimes when I do this project, I challenge myself to use the students’ found sounds and nothing else. This time, though, I made it easier on myself by putting in a breakbeat to tie everything together:
The panning on this break is very odd, so I used the Ableton Utility plugin to make it (almost) mono. Then I transposed it down one semitone so it would match one of the student samples. I also made a sparser variant on the break by manually deleting about half of the drum hits in Arrange view, like so:
Finally, I added a little Drum Buss and the Forest Floor reverb preset for extra vibe.
Everything else in my track is a student’s found sound. I list them below in order of appearance. Click their names to hear the original source recordings.
This was chronologically the last sample I added, but it ended up being my main hook. I was intending to use the piano, but I didn’t feel like trying to fit it into the track’s tonal center, and meanwhile, that one spoken phrase is so great. I used iZotope Nectar for the auto-tuning and harmonizer, plus some Saturator to make it pop out.
I did a little warping and quantizing, but I kept most of the natural timing intact. For spatial vibe, I used the Analog Triplet Dub preset on Ableton’s delightful Echo effect.
I used the flute recording for two different tracks. First, there’s a short fragment repeated through the Blues Drive preset on the Amp plugin, with delay and Forest Floor reverb. I also put the flute into a Simpler instrument and jammed around on segments of it. The best part of my jam involved big pitch bends, so that’s what I kept. There’s some compression and delay on that track as well.
I used the same approach as the flute sample above: loaded it into Simpler and improvised around with it on the Push, though this time in Classic mode rather than Slice mode. I also put some compression and delay on it. The inherent rhythm of the ringtone interacts nicely with the overall groove of the track, and the note layout on the Push makes it really easy to play fourths chords.
This was the most challenging sample to use, because it’s mostly just low-frequency digital clipping. My solution was to pitch it up an octave and pile on gate, phaser, saturator, delay, and the Large Space Chorus reverb preset.
The best part of this recording is at 4:11, when someone directs a string of profanity at Mario Kart. In class I looped the whole outburst, F-bombs intact, to everyone’s amusement. Beyond the comedy, though, I was trying to make a serious point. If you’re making music for the club, the lyric-writing process is very different from writing songs for seated listening. Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen don’t work in the club, but “dumb” songs like Daft Punk’s “Around The World” work great. I like the KLF’s pop song chorus writing method: put on a beat, sing “That’s The Way (I Like It)” on a loop, and then use that as a basis for scat-singing and word association until you have your hook. The goal is to quiet your prefrontal cortex and let your instinctual brain take over. This is a difficult state of mind for most Americans to attain. Profanity is a useful way to shortcut the thinking brain. (The chorus to Chic’s classic “Le Freak” was originally “Awww, fuck off!”) David Byrne’s method of using found/nonsense phrases is another good method. In electronic music, you can use looped samples of speech or fragments of singing–the repetition makes the familiar strange, and it makes the strange familiar.
Entertaining though the profanity sample is, I wanted to be able to play this track around my kids, so I edited it down to a PG version. I used the same iZotope Nectar auto-tuning and harmonizing that I put on the “higher energy” vocal. I also transposed the samples so that they would interact with the pitch correction to produce a melody.
There are a couple of appealingly rhythmic segments of this recording, including a clicking turn signal. As with the chopping onions sample, I only partially quantized the driving samples to preserve some of their natural rhythm. Then I put on compressor, gate, and the Dub Syndicate preset on Echo.
Noise makes great percussion–snare drums and cymbals are basically just tuned noise. I put a segment of the noise into a Simpler instrument, set a short decay time, and played it back on the Push using lots of note repeat. Then I overdubbed another pass on the Push, not playing any notes this time, just twiddling the Sample Start and Sample Length knobs. Finally, I put on saturator, compressor and delay.
So what is the point of all this?
I said above that I want my students to do field recording, to use “non-musical” recordings to make music, and to use audio effects as an avenue for creativity. In part, the point is to put technical concepts into a practical creative context. But I also have a philosophical agenda. At Montclair State, most of my students are classical musicians. They might get some exposure to musique concrète in a history class, but they don’t learn about sampling or sound design in dance music and hip-hop contexts. A rap producer might be using some of the same methods as Karlheinz Stockhausen, but the expressive goals are not the same at all.
Dance music is more concerned with timbral and spatial effects than the pitches and harmonies of interest to Western musicology (Butler, 2014). If you’ve been training your whole life to think about the notes on the page, it’s an adjustment to consider twisting the cutoff knob on a virtual synth as musicianship. Beyond that is the even-more-troubling idea of using pre-existing recordings rather than live performance as the basis for creativity. This is why it’s so important to me that classical musicians experience the scavenger ethos of hip-hop. I want them to hear the potential in even the most unpromising raw materials. Using found sound that they record themselves is a gentle conceptual warmup to the more fraught practice of sampling commercial recordings. And it’s important that they apply these ideas to groove-based music, not just the intellectual abstractions of electronic “classical” music.
The centrality of “the break” within [hip-hop], and the subsequent refinement of cutting and mixing techniques through digital sampling which took the form far beyond the competence of hands on turntables, mean that the aesthetic rules which govern it are premised on a dialectic of rescuing appropriation and recombination which creates special pleasures and is not limited to the technological complex in which it originated (Gilroy, 1993, pp. 103-104).
I want my students to attain ”DJ consciousness” (Sinnreich, 2010, p. 202), to start listening to recorded sound as one giant sample library. Theodor Adorno dismissed pop music because you can so easily decompose it into a series of catchy hooks without any larger structure. However, “it is precisely this discrete, modular quality which facilitates the fluid, referential exchange that fuels [popular] music” (Tignor, 2018, 158). Thinking of music as a catalog of inviolable works inhibits your DJ consciousness. If you can hear the modular potential in a song, then you start to experience being immersed in an ocean of preexisting recordings stops as liberating rather than oppressive.
Sample-based musics represent a collapse of the dichotomy between musical ideas and their expression (Katz, 2010, p. 156). There is some similarity between composing variations on a melody and flipping a sample, but they do not have the same meaning.
Riffing on a melody written by someone else using a saxophone or piano is a fundamentally different process than chopping up a recording of someone else’s rendition of a melody and then resequencing it to produce your own melody using computer software. To be sure, the sense of cultural give-and-take, of participation in a larger dialogue, remains. But a vital degree of abstraction—a buffer, if you will, between the participants in the dialogue—has been removed. The locus of action is no longer limited to the idea of the music, located within conceptual mechanisms such as melody, chord changes, or composition. What is acted on in these new practices is the musical expression itself, the indexical codification of sound waves in a fixed medium (Sinnreich, 2010, p. 74).
One or two students always record their own playing for their found sounds. This is pedagogically useful, because then they can start to see their performance as a source of samples, a beginning of the creative process rather than its end product. This shift in thinking is a big one, not just for classical musicians, but for pre-electronic pop musicians too. Paul McCartney describes this shift taking place in his experience of collaborating with Kanye West in 2014 (Heath, 2018). McCartney spent his sessions with Kanye mostly talking and hanging out, and doing a little casual playing and singing, all while tape rolled. He left thinking that they hadn’t accomplished anything, but then he started hearing samples of his jamming in Kanye’s next few releases. In other words, Kanye used the recording session to create an “ingredient pool” for sampling, rather than writing songs in the way that McCartney is used to.
Eno (2004) describes how multitrack tape gave rise to “in-studio composition, where you no longer come to the studio with a conception of the finished piece. Instead, you come with actually rather a bare skeleton of the piece, or perhaps with nothing at all. I often start working with no starting point” (p. 129). Eno’s method was unusual in the 1970s, but has become mainstream popular music practice in the decades since. When you expect to spend your studio time creating raw material rather than finished products, it makes recording less stressful. Rather than feeling pressure to deliver perfect performances from top to bottom, you are free to relax and be present in the moment. Sample-based recording is like shooting an arrow and then painting the target around it wherever it happens to land.
Incorporating samples into your music is one thing, but looping them is another. You can deal with the philosophical aspects of sampling by making musique concrète, but when you introduce endless looping, you introduce another dimension of musical transformation, one that inevitably moves you toward the cyclical aesthetics of the African diaspora.
[L]ooping automatically recasts any musical material it touches, insofar as the end of a phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with its beginning in a way that was not intended by the original musician. After only a few repetitions, this juxtaposition, along with the largely arbitrary musical patterns it creates, begins to take on an air of inevitability. It begins to gather a compositional weight that far exceeds its original significance (Schloss, 2013, p. 137).
I want my students to learn to listen for a particular kind of sample: “an internally complex percussive cell, a fragment and memory trace of the history of the track known as the break” (Toop, 2000, p. 104). If you can learn to hear the groove possibilities in turn signals and knives on chopping boards, then you can start hearing it in your “real” music too.
Trained musicians tend to regard sampling as a form of laziness or desperation. I want to push back against that belief.
[S]ampling, rather than being the result of musical deprivation, is an aesthetic choice consistent with the history and values of the hip-hop community (Schloss, 2013, p. 21).
Rap fans and detractors alike tend to frame the music in terms of deficit narratives, telling a story of poor young people in the Bronx using turntables and samplers because they were too poor to be able to play “real” instruments. This narrative does not withstand scrutiny. Prince Paul argues that the use of samplers and turntables was a deliberate aesthetic choice, not an act of desperation.
You know, everybody went to a school that had a band. You could take an instrument if you wanted to. Courtesy of your public school system, if you wanted to. But, man, you playing the clarinet isn’t gonna be like, BAM! KAH! Ba-BOOM-BOOM KAH! (quoted in Schloss, 2013, pp. 28-29)
We need to learn to see hip-hop as a form of cultural wealth rather than an expression of cultural (and/or financial) poverty.
It isn’t just self-described musicians who can attain DJ consciousness. Anyone with a computer or a smartphone is equipped for sample-based production. Sinnreich asks why we use the term “some kid in their bedroom” as the generic term for amateur music production, the electronic equivalent of the garage band. He attributes the significance of the proverbial bedroom to its universality: “we all have bedrooms, and in a configurable technological environment, we are all producers to some extent. In short, ‘some kid’ isn’t just a convenient rhetorical device; it’s us” (2010, p. 122).
Computers make it easier to compose, perform, and record music. But the real significance of the digital studio is that it affords another mode of creation, namely, production. This mode incorporates elements of composition, performance and recording, but it is more than the sum of those parts. Musicians like Brian Eno were doing production with multitrack tape, but that was expensive and difficult. Computers have brought production to the masses, and in doing so, have opened up a new set of understandings of what musical creation can be.
The ultimate consequences of DAW technology for musical practice and sound remain to be seen, but it seems fair to expect changes of the same magnitude as those surrounding the introduction of notation to music’s digital aspects. That notation, of course, affected not only the sound and structure of musical works but also the social and economic structure of musical life at large (Danielsen, 2010, p. 228).
The real goal of my music tech classes isn’t to convey what EQ and compression are; it’s to help my students see the liberatory potential of the devices in their pockets and bookbags. I’m hoping to turn these young musicians into producers.
References
Butler, M. (2014). Playing with something that runs: Technology, improvisation, and composition in DJ and laptop performance. New York: Oxford University Press.
Danielsen, A. (2010). Musical rhythm in the age of digital reproduction. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Eno, B. (2004). The studio as compositional tool. In C. Cox & D. Warner (Eds.), Audio culture: Readings in modern music (pp. 127–130). London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. New York: Verso Books.
Heath, C. (2018, September). The untold stories of Paul McCartney. GQ.
Schloss, J. G. (2013). Making beats: The art of sample-based hip-hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Sinnreich, A. (2010). Mashed up: Music, technology, and the rise of configurable culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Tignor, C. (2018). Listening through popular music. Princeton University.
Toop, D. (2000). Hiphop – Iron needles of death and a piece of wax. In P. Shapiro (Ed.), Modulations – A history of electronic music: Throbbing words on sound (pp. 100–113). New York: Caipirinha Productions.