Chapter 3: Literature Review

• A. Ephemerality and The Population of Sound Studies
• B. Digital Designs: the production and consumption of sampling
• C. Appropriation and Authenticity
• D. Sampling and Control
• E. Sampling and Copyright
• F. Rhythm Science
• G. Sampling as Techne
• "H. Is it Live?" (The Question of Aura)

As has been stated throughout the introductory and methodological chapters of Selected Sounds (Chapters 1 and 2), sampling is a concept that has appealed to many different analyses of musical communities and popular culture for at least the past 20 years. In attempting to develop a context for the interventions represented by Selected Sounds, I have developed the following review of literature produced in this field--classifying the various questions asked in articulating these works according to the subject-headings listed above. These questions have been developed through reflection upon the data gleaned through the interview process archived in Chapter 4/Appendix Appendix, but also in response to nearly seven years of questioning concerning what it means to "sample" sounds in the creation of "new" audio works. My convictions have changed remarkably over the course of this period, although a few notions have persisted--such as the belief that "sampling" is a remarkably useful concept for demonstrating the impossibility of separating practices from technologies of sound production. The following investigations attempt to chart the course of these fluctuating convictions, as well as the history of sample-based music more generally.

Alex De Jong and Mark Schuilenburg borrow the term "sonosphere" from R. Murray Schafer. They use it in the claim that "sounds and noises confirm the existence of the city and have a community-establishing quality" (De Jong and Schuilenburg 2006, 27). We are all at the center of our own "sonosphere," but there are just as many sonospheric centers as there are people in a particular soundscape. "Urban" musics like rap or techno participate in the delineation of the modern cityscape as much as do skyscrapers, concrete and commuter-highways. The presence of these musics in different environments, both interior and exterior, helps to extend the breadth of our modern urban experience.

This position is a welcome one, in terms of its serious consideration of the scope of the urban soundscape and how it impacts our everyday experience. It is remarkable that the authors refer to Schafer, however, for as Sophie Arkette has noted,

the objectivity of Schafer's enquiry [often] breaks down and gives way to what I will call urban prejudice: a point of view whereby industrial, commercial and traffic sounds are deemed sonic pollutants, and subsequently allotted to the garbage heap." (Arkette 2004, 161)

While Schafer's prejudice is against urban spaces, De Jong and Schuilenburg have the opposite affliction--a strong affection for the urban. This is well and good. I myself share a similar affection. But the population of this urban plane surprises me. It is not the same as the one I encounter everyday. It is filled with celebrities. "Urban" culture reigns where...

The street is the source of all wisdom, and the place where realness, trust, authenticity and credibility are still to be found. Not only does the street stand for 'the real', but belonging in this environment is a source of 'street cred'. 'I'm still Jenny from the block...I know where I came from (from the Bronx)!', Jennifer Lopez sings in Jenny from the Block. The identity of the star coincides with that of the 'gangstas', 'pimps', 'bitches' and other 'playas' of the cities of the USA. (De Jong and Schuilenburg 2006, 31-33).

For someone to be considered an expert, there must be standards by which to judge that expertise. Celebrities are appealing as subjects of analysis and participants in interviews making their public contributions readily accessible to many, thus suggesting a certain verifiability behind what the say. Such figures become the subject of analyses intended to reveal the hidden truths understood by spectacular musical scenes or subcultures. These analyses rely heavily on public documents for source material, occasionally proffering the odd statement gleaned through interview. These celebrity opinions and postures are accepted a priori as representative of the practices underlying the scenes from which they emerge--straight from the source wisdom, as it were. If actual interview opportunities are unavailable, then discursive analyses of the advertising, media and fashion icons associated with musical scenes are deemed sufficient to access the social hierarchies they putatively map out. Many of the authors addressed in the following pages are guilty of this sort of train-spotting.

When De Jong and Schuilenburg quote Snoop "Doggy" Dogg, Russell Simmons, P Diddy, Jay Z and Pharell Williams in their paper, one is supposed to nod one's head in recognition, feeling the authentic vibe along with the authors' obvious familiarity with some of the current kings of pop rap and r 'n b. When they later reference early Detroit techno pioneers Juan Atkins and Rick Davis or "underground" hip hoppers Mobb Deep, they continue to prove their credentials, citing the right names and places. The use of Schafer feels similar. Why not Hildegard Westerkamp, Andra McCartney, Tia DeNora, Sophie Arkette or a host of others who have written about sound, space, place, identity and/or soundscapes?

Tricia Rose does the same thing in Black Noise--an extremely important contribution to the analysis of hip hop and its foundation in Afrodiasporic musical priorities and practices (discussed in greater detail below). An early contribution to the field of sound studies more generally, the work is cited by many authors today, especially those interested in sampling. However, one feels the weight of the celebrity of those she quotes most heavily, Hank Shocklee and Chuck D.--the production team behind the hip hop super group "Public Enemy." And the situating of sampling so strongly within the history of black music makes those not of African American background seem a little out of place when sampling--as though we were stealing the technique, just as sample-based artists often "steal" the sounds they use.

The population of "sound studies,"¹, therefore, becomes an important question for those interested in sampling. Who are considered experts in this field, and for what reasons? Where do we draw the lines between producers, musicians, composers, listeners, writers and academics? Who holds the keys to the knowledge we seek to reveal?

Open Sound (the edited volume containing De Jong and Schuilenburg 2006) is a recent and self-consciously canonical contribution to sound studies, drawing together many disparate essays, photo montages and musical works into dialogue around the theme of sound in contemporary culture. Not every essay in Open Sound is guilty of the same fetishizing as De Jong and Schuilenburg's article, however. Caroline Bassett's stands out in particular in her use of De Certeau. Perhaps it is the everyday focus that is appealing, but more important, I think, is the applicability of her position to an ethics for research posited on the multifaceted-ness, the essential uniqueness of individual experience. Space, when understood as a phenomenal experience itself as opposed to a container for that experience, becomes extremely multilayered--incorporating all modes of feeling into its architecture. It also unites us in a community of shared, yet individual experience.

The spaces into which we shift our attention (and those from which we shift our attention) by way of mobiles [a.k.a. cell phones--the subject of Bassett's essay] are not purely technological spaces. To some extent they are imagined. This simple proposition is important. It means that the city streets and the auditory spaces within which we connect are technically achieved spaces, and as a part of this, spaces of the collective and individual imaginary. It means that these spaces are, in their technical iterations and in their imaginary formations, and in their political economy, connected social productions. This is not to say that they are not 'real'. Indeed, these connected productions (among others) help comprise everyday life. (Bassett 2006, 44)

I'd like to speak a little bit more about this notion of "connected productions" and how the ephemerality of sound and music add to their social articulation, the improvised composition we create in navigating the world around us everyday. It is this ephemerality that De Jong and Schuilenburg attempt to harness in their expansion of the concept of "urban" to include a cityscape's aural elements. Sound and music provide the soundtrack to our everyday life as a hybrid of the material and the imagined. This hybridity places aural phenomena into a paradoxical position vis a vis the history of Western metaphysics and the separation of the abstract and the concrete (or form and content, cause and effect, ideas and reality, etc.).

These considerations around the ephemerality of sound beg the question--what is the relationship between audio performance versus recordings of such performances, from the point of view of the academy as well as the individual experiencing subject? As Hannah Bosma has said,

women sound artists often become involved in intermedia projects that are performative and scantily documented. As a result, their work is ephemeral and does not so easily become a significant part of the public sphere. The same may be said of many community art projects. (Bosma 2006)

Bosma is speaking about gendered and socially-constructed experiences particular to her own work. However, in my own experience as a sound artist I have also found it, not harder, but simply "less obvious" to achieve recognition for creative/performative work within the academy. I think this has to do with precedent as well as the aforementioned epistemological and metaphysical hurdles set for those interested in studying and communicating through sound in the West. There is a reason why poets and musicians have no place within Plato's Republic. The establishment of the rule of abstract thought and a philosophical monarchy required the splitting of human experience into two ontological categories, "real" and "imagined". Before science displaced philosophy as the "highest" form of culturally-sanctioned inquiry (after Francis Bacon), the "imagined" (or "reasoned") held a loftier place than the "real." In neither instance, however, do we find sound or music privileged as forms of communication that articulate these two categories. On the contrary, sound and music highlight the fact that the separation of these categories is not absolute, requiring that advocates for aurality be dismissed as entertainers, interpreters or performers, as opposed to contributors to knowledge. At best we are granted the order: "If music be the food of love, play on."

Performance is an integral component of my own sample-based artistic practice as it allows for the construction of affective feedback loops between audiences, spaces and collaborators. The challenge as an academic is to create tangible documents that represent, not performances, but the phenomenal experience of these performances, as this is what is unique about what I do--the myriad different ways it is received by active and engaged audiences. Selected Sounds represents such a document.

Sound is a subtle, powerful medium, and often-times overlooked (pun intended). The first step to becoming proficient at recording and mixing sound is to open one's ears, and start remembering the impact audio has on our lives. This suggestion, I believe, is at the heart of the awareness-raising articulated in the soundscape/soundwalking research spearheaded by Hildegard Westerkamp, Andra McCartney, Sophie Arkette, Murray Schafer and others. As McCartney states,

A soundwalker's engagement with the landscape is at once sonic, tactile, and kinaesthetic. It is defined through what is heard of others' sounds, through interactions with the surroundings, and by the recordist's own movements. Amplification translates the subtlety of touch into an audible play with surfaces and textures. In soundscape works, traces of tactility are embedded that help to link distant and everyday places. They explore auditory experiences and memories of natural and urban environments, and attend to and reflect upon the depth of daily rituals. (McCartney 2004, 185)

It is via this attention and reflection paid to daily rituals that the community of sound studies makes its strongest recommendation for the methodologies adopted in other realms of the humanities. This has to do with the recognition that producing media brings us into a much closer contact, connection and affective awareness with everyday life. Not the everyday life of certain privileged celebrities, producers, techno-magicians or even academic scholars, but our own everyday rituals. This has to do with the place of sound in society, a place too often overlooked. It is the capacity of sound to move seamlessly between the foreground and the background of our immediate, phenomenal experience that gives it its mysterious, otherness--but which also lies at the core of its power in terms of opening up new perspectives for critical inquiry into the construction of personal identity (and therefore culture more widely).

Digidesign, the company behind audio editing software Pro Tools, was launched in 1984 by Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks. These days Pro Tools is to digital audio production what Microsoft Word is to word processing. Their first product, however, was a line of EPROM drum chips called Digidrums. These computer chips contained digital "samples" of live drums and allowed musicians to replace the limited factory-installed sounds that came with most contemporary drum machines. Other historical examples abound which connect the phenomenon of sampling with other popular forms of digital audio technology. Just what sampling is, however, depends a great deal on who you're talking to: sound engineer, hip hop producer, music industry executive or average listener.

The same can be said of academic discussions of sampling. Most tend to view it as a production method used in various genres of electronic music such as hip hop or techno. More often than not such accounts end up glossing over the actual techniques, equipment and sound sources employed by musicians who sample. Instead the tendency has been to focus on politically-charged elements of sampling such as violations to established traditions of music making, not to mention copyright. Examples of such work include Rose's Black Noise which explores sampling strictly through its relationship to hip hop, or Paul Théberge's often quoted Any Sound You Can Imagine which understands the technology principally as a type of musical instrument (i.e., a form of digital keyboard). While these studies were ground breaking, they also tended to treat the phenomenon of sampling deterministically--i.e., where there are "samplers", there is "sampling". Moreover, they fail to address the technology as a multifaceted practice, choosing instead to focus on a limited range of case examples without conspicuously acknowledging them as such.

Sampling has continued to evolve since the 1990s, when much of the writing I am describing was produced. Its influence upon practices of music making and sound editing has been so great that these days one can no longer treat the technology as limited to one or two easily defined user communities. The challenge now involves approaching the question of sampling in a way that does not limit its sphere of influence, but which instead explores as many different uses and conceptions of the technology as possible. What is at issue is the construction of "sites of difference" (Grenier and Guilbault 1992, 213) as opposed to the assertion of identity.

While recent collections/books such as Greene and Porcello (2005), Braun (2002), Lysloff (2003), Taylor (2001) and Sterne (2003) explore the impact of technology upon the political economy of organized sound production (including its history, mechanisms of distribution, gender/ethnic/geographic biases, and social elements), very few authors discuss the phenomenological experience of contemporary digital composition. This is perhaps because it is difficult to speak in general terms about practices as hyper-personalized and context specific as individual styles of audio production. Moreover, digital audio technology has become affordable enough to allow for the development of high-fidelity home studios--sites of increasing significance to the world of independent audio production. These are highly idiosyncratic places, and the styles in which they are "employed" by their users/builders tend to be similarly diverse. The home studio is not a featured focus of any of the aforementioned publications.

Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures (Greene and Porcello 2005) provides an interesting point of focus for the claims made in the preceding paragraph. As a recent collection of essays, it represent a broad range of diverse and well-informed perspectives on the impacts of technology upon our cultural reception of sound. These perspectives tend to start with the identification of a specific community out of which the inquiry has been developed, principally through ethnographic, anthropological or historical research and writing methods. While some authors reference a specific social, regional, national or ethnic community recognized and situated in terms of sound technology such as Nepali or Native American pop musicians (Greene 2005, Diamond 2005), or Austin's music scene (Porcello 2005), others make do with musical categories such as "heavy metal" (Berger and Fales 2005), or "techno" (Fales 2005) in defining their research field. Participant observation around the use of sound technologies in these communities does not seem to be a conspicuous part of this anthology. The reference to engineering in the subtitle is interesting, however, as it points to one of Porcello's early interests regarding sound production. Porcello is a former "sound recording engineer and studio musician" (Greene and Porcello 2005, 284) and often focuses on the perspectives of this community in his research. It was not until I read his biography at the end of this volume that I realized this fact, however. Porcello does not speak of his own experience, but focuses on interviews with other engineers in much of his research. While the majority of contributors to Wired for Sound do not speak specifically about communities of "sound engineers" per se, much of Porcello's vocabulary is embedded in the assumption that sound mixing expertise is the role of trained professionals who work in commercial studios....

In many ways,...[the contributors to Wired for Sound] argue for a shift in scholarly focus from the examination of the products of sound engineering (for example, musical or other sonic texts) to these processes of engineering as a vital aspect of contemporary cultural life. These processes can be engaged in by industry professionals... (see the chapters by Diamond, Meintjes, Neunfelt, and Porcello) but just as importantly by consumers in their daily listening or reinterpreting practices (see the chapters by Berger and Fales, Fales, Greene, Taylor and Wallach). In this approach, technology is seen not just as a tool but as a critical means of social practice. (Porcello 2006, 269)²

This is wonderful, but it is also terribly reductionist. Perhaps this is a pitfall of "Afterwords" to edited volumes. What about the space in between production and consumption of recordings? Moreover, how is technology "seen" as a "critical means of social practice" in the essays? Aren't there as many different means identified as case studies contained in the volume? In what ways are these means social? In what ways are they practices? Are technologies means of achieving practices, or practices in themselves?

Rose relies heavily on interviews with Chuck D and Hank Schocklee of hip hop super group "Public Enemy"--demonstrating how their musical practices were both at once "avant-guard"--pushing the limits--but also reminiscent of other types of musics that can be found within the black diaspora such as rhythm patterns from African drumming practices, little attention to Western, i.e., "white", prescriptions for the formal structure of "good" music, etc. Mixing practices are featured heavily as a site of difference. She points out (with the use of selective quotations from her interview subjects) that hip hop engineers don't pay attention to/are not cognizant of a lot of the rules developed through the 60s, 70s and 80s regarding how multi-track recording should take place, and how "cleanliness" and low signal-to-noise rations should be pursued at all costs. She mentions many examples of hip hop producers pushing things "into the red" and thereby creating noisy collages from the works of others, mixed with apocalyptic pronouncements of the end of observance of musical, political and social limits to the freedom of expression.

Théberge's book, on the other hand, looks at an alternative angle, articulating a position on sampling technology as a practice integrated into an increasing number of studios through conspicuous examples of production and consumption. Théberge focusses on how sampling was constructed discursively in the 80s and 90s within the commercial literature and discussion forums published principally for the work-a-day musician/performer/engineer. His main thesis revolves around the fact that sampling allows one to consume sounds in a way that was formerly unheard of. From the moment Gotcher and Brooks started offering their Digidrums, it became possible for musicians to purchase libraries of various sounds to use in their instruments, their recordings. These sounds might be traditional instrumental sounds like piano sounds or violin sounds. But they could be just about anything else: rocket ships, drum beats, animal noises...you name it. This created a new niche market within the music community--a new economy of digital sound exchange--for those interested. Sampling found-sounds into the hardware, the bread and butter of hip hop and sample-based production, is relegated to an "exceptional" status.

I feel these approaches to sampling, as robust as they might be, are still incomplete. The examples given of sampling-on-the-ground: going to Hank Shocklee of "Public Enemy" and asking about sampling--searching in music engineering magazines for enough proof to determine how sampling is produced and consumed...these approaches limit the practice. For one, they situate it in hip hop geographies such as Brooklyn, N.Y., Compton, C.A. etc., or in professional music studios. However, the practice itself, from what I understand from my own experience, is much wider, vaster, and more grey than the stories told by Rose and Théberge, both historically and contemporarily.

I feel there is a wider story to be told--that these accounts confine sampling. I don't want to put any more limits on sampling. Quite the opposite, I would like to open it up and demonstrate it as a practice that is still developing. However, instead of making my research outrageously broad, I have limited it. This seems to me what sampling is all about--engaging with a form of constraint as a means to stimulate one's own creative ingenuity. "Any Sound You Can Imagine"--if this is really what sampling is about, then where does one begin? How do one start to compose if any sound is possible?

The rest of this chapter explores the limitations on the practice, or lack thereof, postulated by a selection of other authors on sampling, with an "eye" towards demonstrating their ultimate heterogeneity and contingency.

Justin Clemens and Dominic Pettman assert that "appropriation" combines both an act of violence--"taking or annexing" something--with the notion of motivation, thereby allowing for a softening of the term's pejorative significance. For instance, "I appropriated this loaf of bread from my neighbor in order to feed my children...". Appropriation, they claim, has historically been linked to notions of authorship, uniqueness and private property. However, contemporary aesthetic production (i.e., the art of today) is now operating according to a "cultural logic" which has dissolved this link. It is time, on their account, to get beyond the categories of original and copy.

There are no materials that guarantee that a particular work is, say, jewelry - which can be made out of literally anything. Many [contemporary aural] works are composed totally of samples that have been taken as is, slowed down or speeded up, inverted or distorted beyond recognition. Sampling not only recomposes different elements, but different ways of recomposing elements; it is a very complex and labile procedure. In a way, sampling totally erases the distinctions between original and copy, artist and thief, the individual and the series - in fact, it renders these distinctions secondary if not irrelevant. (Clemens and Pettman 2004, 26)

Later on...

Whereas both allusion and appropriation connect to the legacy of genius, incorporating elements that come from both beforehand and elsewhere, sampling threatens to dissolve all distinctions between the work and the environment from which it derives. Tradition no longer holds a central place, and there is no canon which the audience, reader or listener is assumed to be familiar with. Suddenly, every work of art is sucked into the vortex of the public domain. (Clemens and Pettman 2004, 27)

And finally...

Post-modernity changes things again: there are no longer any ontological distinctions between matter, form, thought, etc. - there are just multiple processes, of no definite or particular value in themselves, and with no definite origin or direction. Hence the new priority accorded sampling, considered as inflection and torsion of multiplicity. 'Design' is the most prestigious name given to the varieties of sampling in the contemporary first world. (Clemens and Pettman 2005, 29-30)

There is a giddiness to these pronouncements that I find disquieting. When I began sampling from records in the late 90s, I assumed that issues around the appropriateness of this sort of appropriation were on the verge of resolution. However, even this book published in 2004 smacks of technological determinism. The historical fact that sampling has become increasingly multifaceted and commonplace does not entail a cultural acceptance of its legitimacy. Postmodern breathlessness aside, it just doesn't make sense to ground one's arguments in a futurist rhetoric pronouncing the end to ontological distinctions between matter, form, thought, etc. Even the madman featured in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra realized he had come too early with his pronouncement of the death of God. Sampling became more notorious with the arrival of the digital era and it is now quicker and easier to make and copy sound recordings than ever before (for those who own a computer). This does not mean that the cultural, ethical and aesthetic considerations underlying the differences between the terms "production" and "reproduction" have undergone a paradigm shift. To maintain this point of view, one has to ignore (for instance) the overwhelming quantity of ink that has been spilt regarding intellectual property law for media production, consumption and distribution in the 21st century.

The anxiety of influence has given away to full-blown panic - to what DJ Greyboy calls "dealing with the Archive" - and few artists work outside the pressure of this accumulation. In fact, this pressure may itself be the very condition of the contemporary work, like a fast-forward cartoon of carbon into diamond. Production and appropriation have become confused to the point of fusion, as have design and art. There is no distinction between designer and artists outside the social context of production. [p. 34]

Who feels this "panic of influence"--the pressure to "deal with the archive"? Musicians, DJs, sample-based producers....Or academics? Acts of allusion, appropriation and sampling can only be articulated one from another through detailed and subtle analyses of contexts. The public domain may be a vortex, but it is one in which most of us are strangely free of any feeling of vertigo. This is because we make a myriad of infinitely complex, contingent decisions everyday.

A variety of digital technologies now exist that can transform analog sound waves into binary code. Any sound can be sampled in this way: drum beats, field recordings, even live players using traditional instruments. Samples are then ready to be cut, copied, spliced, pitch-shifted, equalized, turned backwards, and/or passed through a myriad of different effects processors before being multi-tracked and layered into a final stereo mix. Once completed, tracks are easily converted to MP3 or burnt to CD-R for quick distribution. This "translatability" of audio in the digital era brings us back to the question of the malleability of sound and music (Miller 2004, 20) as well as accompanying issues of control.

While digital audio sampling has been possible for almost 30 years (starting with the Fairlight CMI in 1979), the technology has far from exhausted its potential for opening up new forms of cultural expression, social exchange and compositional practice. One of the major challenges facing communications scholarship in the digital age involves simply keeping abreast of the enormous variety of new forms of interaction that continue to emerge with the increasing availability of computer technology. In the field of audio production this increase has resulted in something that feels close to an irrevocable shift in terms of how recorded sound is produced, consumed and distributed, not to mention the way it is received or "felt" by the listener.

This point of view is very common within the literature on audio sampling, and is responsible, I believe, for the tendency to identify the figure behind the mixing console as the absolute center of digitally-assisted musical production. The technology involved in recording has become a tool so sophisticated that its only limit is said to be our imagination. But what is it that limits this imagination, if anything? Do the sounds we mix not require us to attend to their particular shape before we attempt to bring them into alignment with other sources? What techniques must we adopt to accommodate their particularities? What constraints were involved? And how were these sounds selected in the first place? Were they recorded "live"? If so, what procedures and equipment were employed? Were the sounds "sampled"? If so, how were they collected? What were the archives used?

Today is August 3rd, 2006. I write these lines while on a family vacation in Southern Norway, in a place called Strandfjorden near a town called Grimstad. It's right by a fjord. It's been beautiful here, sunny and hot, and we've been spending lots of time down by the water. Yesterday I bought a kite for my 3 year old daughter, Thea--which was perhaps a bit ambitious. She's had fun with the kite, but I'm actually the one who plays with it the most as I set it up for her before she moves on to another distraction, leaving me most of the time to work the string by myself. And it occurred to me today, while I was down by the dock, flying the kite, that there is something similar between kite flying and composing sample-based music. Simply put, the beauty of flying the kite really has to do with setting up the equipment, and then letting it go. You engage with the kite, as it's up there in the wind, but it's at a distance, and what you do to the kite through your control of the string is rather small compared with what the kite itself is capable of doing in concert with the wind. The kite and the wind are engaged in a duet--a dance, really. And I'm at once the observer of that dance, the audience of that dance, but I participate in it to a small degree in that I set it up. And I'm sort of in control, I suppose, of what the kite does, as I hold on to my string and pull this way and that way. But ultimately that feeling of control never results in a direct one-to-one relationship between what I do and what ends up happening on the other end of the string, with the kite and the wind. I can pull it this way and that, but really it's up to the wind and the kite to decide whether or not the kite falls into the water, or sails up high or not. If the wind dies, then the kite falls, and that's that for that--there's nothing much I can do.

Similarly, when I choose samples with which to start a piece, whether from records, or field recordings or whatever--I can set everything up, I can load them into the sampler, I can start manipulating, moving things around, mixing. But, really, the dance that occurs, the relationship that develops, is between the samples. My impact on this relationship can be heavy or light-handed. But in either case it's not me that decides the fate of the composition. It's the samples themselves that work together to create harmony or disharmony or what have you. You have to give away a certain amount of control if you really want to enjoy the musicality of the experience of playing with samples. It's about keeping yourself open to possibilities, waiting for happy accidents, allowing things to be revealed in their own time, as opposed to forcing or trying to place those samples, those sounds, into a tight structure built to contain them. I've always found that the more open I am to possibilities and experimentation, the more happy I am with the ultimate composition I end up producing. And sometimes it feels almost as though the samples are really guiding the process more than I am myself, and I'm just along for the ride, holding on to the end of the kite string as they dance their merry dance.

Daphne Oram preferred marine metaphors when it came to describing the feeling of working with electronic, recorded and constructed sounds...

I am hunting for some word which brings a hint of the skillful yachtsman in the fierce mid-Atlantic, guiding and controlling his craft and yet being taken along with it, sensing the best way to manage his vessel, freely changing his mind as unforeseen circumstances evolve, yet always applying his greatest discipline to himself and his seamanship. (Oram 1971, 13)

Andra McCartney's welcome discussion of Oram's work (McCartney 2006) outlines how this ground breaking, but historically-overlooked composer articulated an approach to working with sound (entitled "Oramics") that used graphic techniques to construct complex timbres through the translation of light into audio. McCartney cites Oram in demonstrating a historical willingness to dialogue with sound articulated by many female electronic sound producers, in contrast to the male-dominated histories pushed by many contemporary publications on the history of sound recording (see Chapman and McCartney, forthcoming). NB: A compilation of Oram's work entitled "Oramics" has been recently released on Paradigm discs (April 2007) - http://www.stalk.net/paradigm/pd21.html (features MP3 excerpts from the CD).

Examining sample-based music as a practice in which one sacrifices a certain amount of self-control allows one to relate it more easily to other practices that it resembles or incorporates--such as collecting (this discussion is also taken up in the last two chapters of this dissertation). As collectors of recorded sounds and sound recording equipment, sample-based musicians are passionate about bringing studio artifacts into their art. Particular samples and pieces of gear become signature components of one's production style. This epitomizes the need for articulations concerning the forms and uses of these technologies to be constantly referred back to the communities and procedures that embody them and by which they are drastically and continually affected. Such considerations form the body of what I (following Schloss 2004) would like to call an "ethics" of audio sampling.

Most celebrations of enhanced aural control through digital audio situate the limits of the practice of sampling in the capacity of the technology used--usually understood in terms of computer memory and its corollary: sample length. A lot of this work was written in the 80s and 90s, so it must be added that in today's era of ever-multiplying megabytes, both in terms of RAM and hard drive space, the limitation to sound storage that coloured much early sampling practice has theoretically been overcome--thus providing even more evidence for those who believe that sound has become "utterly malleable." This over-simplification treats sampling as an easily-identified object instead of a fluid and dynamic practice. For instance, sample-based producers habitually seek out older equipment with limited sampling capacities (like the Akai MPC 60 or SP 1200) for the unique low-bit-rate edge or "dirtiness" they can bring to a mix. The limits of the practice of sampling are very different depending upon the perspective one adopts and relate to differing attitudes over what should be stored and transformed in the use of this specialized computer memory.

To return to Thomas Porcello's writing, "The Ethics of Audio Sampling: an engineers' discourse," appeared in 1991--a time during which the affordability of sampling technology did restrict it, somewhat, to the professional audio studio, thereby partially justifying Porcello's exclusive focus on the voices of professionally-trained studio engineers. Rap music being an important counter-example, Porcello is quick to mention its polemic aim towards exploding "the concentration of power and ownership in the [music] industry" (Porcello 1991, 70), but avoids an in-depth analysis of any actual hip-hop sample-based production.

However, these moderately contentious issues aside, Porcello's paper does offer something more than the usual control-obsessed account of sample-based music--i.e., his suggestion that there is an ethics at work in the practice of digital sampling as it is pursued amongst professional audio engineers. Porcello focuses his paper on intellectual property, claiming that "[s]ampling has forced the music industry and the legal profession to ask who--if anyone--owns a sound, and as a logical extension of that question, is it possible to ascribe ownership to a sound?"(Porcello 1991, 69).

Briefly, Porcello goes on to state that among his informants, sampling an "intact phrase" from previously-published material is theft. This is also the reigning opinion in legal circles (Porcello 1991, p. 72). However, taking what Porcello calls "just a sound" from a pre-existing copyrighted sources is less clear, ethically speaking. A broad range of practices is involved here (unlike with rap music, on Porcello's account)--including sampling both previously recorded "sounds" as well as "sounds" made by live players who are paid for their services. The length of samples becomes particularly important, on this account (although this is shaky ground--just think of any micro-second sample of James Brown). Porcello also suggests that differing ethical standards exist at various levels of the music industry hierarchy, and that informal practices of quite-open sharing generally operate among groups of work-a-day musicians and engineers.

In the end, however, Porcello extracts 4 elements from his informants' discourse around the ethics of digital audio sampling: 1. Ethics do count, 2. they're under debate, 3. one should avoid prosecution by paying attention to their mandates , and 4. the fate of the live session musician is important to consider. (Porcello 1991, 71)

Now, what interests me about this research is not so much these four conclusions, but the very fact that sampling-ethics are being considered and debated at all in an academic treatise. Hip hop has a fairly well established oral-ethical tradition--one which allows for the discrimination of "flipped" or authentic uses of samples from derivative or "bitten" practices, even though this music thrives on re-using material that is owned by others. This ethical tradition relies upon "ingenuity" as the locus of originality within hip hop musical production--if I use a sample without adding my own creative twist to how I sequence it--described as "flipping" or "freaking" the sound--I can be guaranteed that my music will attract few "props" from true-school hip hop heads. This attitude has also extended itself into new realms of sample-based music not easily describable as hip hop, but which are nevertheless deeply indebted to the techniques pioneered by early hip hop acts such as Public Enemy or Grandmaster Flash (just think of your favorite "electronic music" group in this instance).³ This flipping involves a dialogue--samples are played with until the most interesting series of edits and processing is discovered.

I would like to raise a concept that I have been having a certain amount of trouble naming--i.e., the role of "the sampled sounds themselves" in the process of sample-based composition. I will illustrate this concept with a couple of quotes from some well-known sample-based musicians who reside in Montreal, if only to demonstrate that the agency articulated by the Selected Sounds participants vis a vis their chosen sound sources in terms of creating sample-based mixes is not particular to this constructed group of Montrealais.⁴

'I'm not going to be a rapper, I'm not going to be an old blues guy because I don't come from that time or social situation. I can't do something with any integrity on that level. But what I can do with samples is I can take, not influences but the actual things I love, the actual singers, the actual guitarists and I can do something that I feel has some kind of relevance to me and the time and place where I live.' [Montreal-resident and sample-based composer Amon Tobin as interviewed by] (Ostroff 2002)

Tobin recognizes the samples he selects as "the actual singers, the actual guitarists" he loves. He "takes" these sources in order to recontextualize them into his own rhythms. But Tobin himself has already been "taken by" these sources—their notability to him is manifest in his having selected them. Using them to make music has more integrity than simply copying the style they demonstrate since sampling makes no (disingenuous) claim to be original in terms of source material. Tobin's influences are not subsumed into his own style of personal expression, but are instead allowed to collaborate together in his mixes.

Indeed, newly discovered samples can guide a mix as much as or even more than one's own preconceived intentions. Eric San (a.k.a. Kid Koala):

I found this sample where this elevator operator is yelling 'first floor, second floor' and I used that as a springboard to piece together a little ditty about a guy trying to pick people up in an elevator....[I]f you listen to the track, he's actually only going up and down one floor....That as a concept was funny to me, to have an elevator operator and there's somebody who just hangs out in there with him working on his pick-up lines. Such a stupid idea that I thought, 'Okay, let's go with it.' [Montréal-resident and sample-based composer Kid Koala as interviewed by ] (Dix 2003)

Sampling involves an enormous amount of listening. Records (or field recordings) are brought home on the hunch that they will contain a notable sample or two. These excerpts, however, can only be uncovered through patient linear playback and aural note-taking. The moments of revealing that occur while listening bring on compositional flashes or "eurekas". These moments of elated surprise are what drive many a sample-based composer. One can describe these moments in different ways. But to describe this process of revealing as a "science" effaces the give and take central to sampling's ethical dimensions. This suggestion is discussed in greater detail in the following section.

The turn of the century has seen an interesting evolution in the role of the media-savvy academic. Research-creation is on the rise. Ethnography can now be openly pursued through a participant observation of one's own technological and artistic practices without sacrificing one's research "integrity." An emergent social niche has appeared, that of the media producer/critic/performer. I include myself in this category, along with participants in Selected Sounds such as Anna Friz and Bernadette Houde--also graduate students in Communication Studies. One figure in particular, however, has managed to found a career on his credentials as a DJ and critical theorist--Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. Miller has been writing on sample-based music and postmodernism since the late 90s, but it is in his first book Rhythm Science (Miller 2004) that one finds the most succinct statements of his point of view, if you can call them that.

Rhythm Science is a print-based multi-media work. Formatted as a book, the author cited on the cover is Paul D. Miller. However, the design team COMA has had a major role in shaping the experience Rhythm Science provides. The physical construction itself entices one's imagination in a way reminiscent of LP album covers. The book is printed on two-sided paper (rough/smooth) and is pierced by a hole running through to the last page where a CD lies waiting for the curious browser. Pages alternate between text and graphic collage, becoming something hybrid in the process. While Miller provides the words, music and many of the incorporated visuals, the success of the mix is due mainly to COMA's deft visual and tactile manipulations. The volume is printed in brown and green ink, however, full use is made of the white paper stock to add a third colour to the designers' palate. Similarly, the work is divided into three parts: an "A side" (pp. 3-106), "B side" (pp. 107-128), and "C side" (the CD). Working in threes is meant to exemplify the spirit in which Miller creates music. To paraphrase his own statement, "all it takes is a DJ and two turntables to create a universe" (Miller 2004, 127). But what does it take to create a DJ?

We learn that "DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid" began as a conceptual art project for Miller while "floating" in New York after having finished a philosophy and French literature degree in the mid-90s. Miller made it a habit of distributing the question "Who is DJ Spooky?" on stickers accompanying mix-tapes he would record and pass out at parties. As the tapes were copied and redistributed, that question created a space for Paul D. Miller to occupy as a DJ, sample-based composer and writer. Spooky's notoriety preceded him in the true sense of the word.

Miller began publishing academic articles on DJ-ing, sampling and sonic collage during this same period (in venues like The Village Voice, Artforum and Parkett). The style employed in these early pieces reappears in Rhythm Science and is strongly reminiscent of DJ mixing and sample-based hip hop production. Miller frequently jumps from one theme to the next, often relying on poetic turns of phrase to convey connections difficult to express deductively. At other points these cuts are more jarring and one is left to ponder the meaning of his juxtapositions. Ideas are layered on top of one another as much as they are strung together. Writing is treated as a musical endeavour:

There's a reflexivity that comes with having to compose and letting language come through you. It's a different speed, there's a slowness there. And I'm attracted to writing's infectiousness, the way you pick up language from other writers and remake it as your own. This stance is not contradictory: Dj-ing is writing, writing is Dj-ing. Writing is music, I cannot explain this any other way. (Miller 2004, 57)

While phrases such as "Check the flow" (p. 8), "Feel the frequencies" (p. 28) and "Do you get my drift?" (p. 92) repeatedly entreat us to accompany him on this text-mixed adventure, it must be admitted that many of Miller's philosophical speculations are difficult to follow. The autobiographical material that makes up the other half of the writing, however, provides insightful commentary on Dj-ing and remixing from an artist who is aware of the social and historical significance of his chosen technology (the turntable and sampler). The CD has also been skillfully constructed and is mostly made up of rare vocal recordings by authors like Antonin Artaud, e.e. cummings, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamps and Gilles Deleuze mixed with ambient electronic beats (although the CD bears little explicit relationship to the text).

Rhythm Science's multimedia and autobiographical tactics reflect the direction of Miller's recent online and installation work (see http://www.djspooky.com/). The ideas, thinkers and artistic practices he articulates are inevitably discussed from his perspective as a contemporary (and prolific) sound (re)mixer. First person passages are used to contextualize these opinions in an attempt to render them more universal. A case in point:

[W]hen I first got to New York, I had started Dj-ing in the same spirit as I'd done the Eclectic Jungle [radio] show in college. My style was an experiment with rhythm and clues, rhythm and cues: Drop the needle on the record and see what happens when this sound is applied to this context, or when that sound crashes into that recording. The first impulses I had about Dj culture were taken from that basic idea - play and irreverence toward the found objects that we use as consumers and a sense that something new was right in front of our oh-so-jaded eyes. (Miller 2004, 45)

This is an interesting inversion, as much popular and academic literature on DJ-ing and/or sampling places these practices outside of the realm of everyday experience, limiting their significance to the nightclub or hip hop recording studio. This sort of experimentation sounds far from scientific, however. Nevertheless, Miller develops the metaphor as an heuristic device for understanding our common postmodern condition. In a society saturated with reproduced information (sounds, images, texts), the individual is forced to select from these sources according to her own tastes, beliefs and motivations. DJs and sample-based musicians simply make their choices public. Miller explains,

A deep sense of fragmentation occurs in the mind of a Dj. When I came to Dj-ing, my surroundings - the dense spectrum of media grounded in advanced capitalism - seemed to have already constructed so many of my aspirations and desires for me; I felt like my nerves extended to all of these images, sounds, other people - that all of them were extensions of myself, just as I was an extension of them....By creating an analogical structure of sounds based on collage, with myself as the only common denominator, the sounds come to represent me. (Miller 2004, 21, 24)

Elsewhere Miller claims that "[s]ampling plays with different perceptions of time" (Miller 2004, 28). The gist is that remixing music from previous recordings employs editing and filtering mechanisms similar to those we unconsciously use when making sense out of the cacophony of reproduced sensory inputs we receive in the course of a regular day. Rapid cuts, incongruous blends and unexpected juxtapositions are as commonplace as a television in a crowded café or a flip through the radio dial.

Broadcast sounds and images shape our private spaces of mental contemplation. We are never passive receivers, however. Sensations are mixed and remixed as our attention flows. It is this process of continuous and shifting interaction that constitutes self-consciousness. DJing and sample-based music celebrate this phenomenon of affect (Chapman 2001, 2005). As such these pursuits exemplify the conception of technology as a fusion of "arte, techne, and logos - a melding of the Greek words for art, craft and word. Rhythm Science imposes order upon skill and the ability to deploy them both in electro-modernity's sociographic space" (Miller 2004, 72).

In the end, Rhythm Science reads best when approached as a springboard from which to launch one's own mental musings. While the CD and fancy design artfully propel the book into the category of "seductive theoretical fetish object" (Miller 2004, 125), the work's lasting value resides in its capacity to (re)introduce its audience to the phenomenological experience of reading in itself. It is through experiencing the production of others that our own thoughts, memories and feelings are born. This is what Rhythm Science makes transparent: "We're in a delirium of saturation. We're never going to remember anything exactly the way it happened. Memories become ever more fragmented and subjective. [The question remains:] Do you want to have a bored delirium or a more exciting one?" (Miller 2004, 29).

To this question, Selected Sounds responds with a resounding "Yes!" (thereby sidestepping the liberatory rhetoric) as sometimes it's exciting to feel bored, as this leads one to rattle the cage. There is also another reason to reject such prosthletizing--it feels self-justifying. It's one thing to engage in participant observation around sample-based practices. It's quite another to suggest that sampling is the only way to deal with "electro-modernity's sociographic space." Selected Sounds seeks to reveal some of the tactics engaged by sampling without insisting upon their universal applicability. Chapter 4's interview database is especially relevant in this regard. The last two sections of this literature review address the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin in relation to sampling. These theorists have been especially formative in my thinking on the subject (in this I am not alone), although of late I have found myself disagreeing with many of their points of view (Benjamin's relationship to sound and music in particular).

The question "What is sampling?" has haunted this project since its initial stages. I'd like to begin addressing it now before coming back to this point repeatedly in the next two chapters. Part of the reason I decided to approach other sample-based composers for their input and collaboration was due to my feeling that a single perspective on the practice was insufficient. And while there are numerous academic treatments of sampling already written, the majority suffer due to the limited viewpoints they offer. To be frank, most scholarly writing on sampling packs it in with other discussions, and a researcher looking to focus on the practice in depth is forced to piece together fragments of text that are embedded within treatises on other themes (not unlike the production of sample-based music itself). Some of these perspectives are open-ended and fascinating, asking more questions than they provide answers. Others contain the practice of sampling through speaking to examples that are exclusive to certain genres of music (like hip hop, techno or "electronica"), certain subcultures (DJs, sound engineers) or certain cultural traditions (the African diaspora or the history of the avant-garde).

For instance, Tim Taylor has recently argued that "hip hop musicians sample music of their own past, music they like, music from their parents' record collections", whereas the electronica artists that he is more interesting in (ambient, world beat and goa trance) get their samples from "all-over," irrespective of the "meanings" these samples might hold or be capable of creating--beyond colour and ornamentation for their beats (Taylor 2001, 152-3). This is an interesting point of view. However, the process involved in creating "meaning" through sampling is left unexplored. Taylor's fascination lies in how his research subjects both treat and create "strange sounds"--sounds considered other to them. Following (Feld 1997), Taylor's work charts the thin line that musicians who sample often weave between appropriate use of the sounds they uncover, and appropriation.

Taylor's book also looks at music concrète, the lounge-music revival, and the future-oriented "space" music of the 50s along this axis, plotting the position of these "fringe" musics within a history of sound recording technology that professes to be anti-determinist and yet not wholly social-constructivist (Taylor 2001, 32, 37). This is to say that technologies are always caught up in social constructions that determine in part how they are used, and yet these structures are themselves shaped by other technologies upon which we have come to depend. We allow our behaviours to be modified to suit the needs of new technologies that we find useful, but technologies are also regularly used in ways that did not occur to their inventors. "Any music technology, then, both acts on its users and is continually acted on by them; MP3s--or any software or hardware--have designed into them specific uses, which are followed by listeners, but at the same time, listeners through their practices undermine, add to, and modify those uses in a never-ending process." (Taylor 2001, 38)

Taylor advocates a "practice" theory of technology when approaching the history of sound recording, one that he develops from the actor-network theory associated with of Bruno Latour and others. (Taylor 2001, 34). However, while Latour and his colleagues from Science and Technology Studies (STS) focus on the pre-cognitive network of artifacts, institutions, people and practices that structure our experience, concluding that human and non-human entities must both be understood as "acting" within this ever-shifting network, Taylor is reticent to ascribe agency to objects, and concludes that "people and music" are more interesting "than gadgets." Preferring to talk about "structures" over "networks," Taylor follows Sherry B. Ortner and others in claiming that "[a]gency, for my purposes here, refers to an individual actor's or collective capacity to move within a structure, even alter it to some extent." (Taylor 2001, 34) Technologies are structures, on this account, and affect the practices they are associated with by providing frameworks with which to engage. Such structures are never static, however, and are responsive to the agents that put them to work, changing over time as the practices they enable evolve.

Much of the aforementioned sporadic literature on sampling technology (especially work that comes out of cultural studies and ethnomusicological traditions) views the phenomenon in this way. While technical manuals, popular sources and how-to guides abound which treat the practice deterministically as circumscribed by the processing capacities built into the black boxes used to sample, these other more sophisticated accounts acknowledge that technologies can be taken up in unexpected, "revolutionary" pursuits that permanently alter the way in which the very tools used are conceived, consumed and discarded. The social construction of the arenas in which new technologies are introduced must always be accounted for.

Taylor references Martin Heidegger on this account, as have others (see (Sterne 2003), (Mudede 2003), and (Chambers 2001). Heidegger's essay "The Question Concerning Technology" is a notoriously obtuse work, and has confused many who seek to use it to justify alternative conceptions of technological causality. Most, including Taylor, get stuck on Heidegger's claim that "the essence of modern technology lies in Enframing" (Heidegger 1977, 25). Moreover,

Enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. (Heidegger 1977, 27)

While Taylor acknowledges that Heidegger advocates understanding technology as "revealing," he does not unpack this claim, and goes on to tie in Heidegger's account with his own view of technology as neither completely socially-constructed, nor entirely determined by its materiality. But Heidegger's position is much more radical, and cuts right to the heart of our Western tendency to place subjectitivies into the "driver's seats" of culture and human civilization.

The German philosopher Heidegger once wrote that the essence of a tool (like a hammer) is only noticed when it is broken. If a hammer works, then it is nothing more than an extension of your hand, but if it breaks you notice its 'hammerness.' This is close to what I mean by repurposing;...A repurposed turntable brings out a turntables' turntableness. (Mudede 2003)

Often quoted by writers on new media, Heidegger is seen as heralding a new, ethical call to reinvigorate our control over technology, instead of its control over us. We must rediscover the "toolness" of our tools--re-conceive them in a way that guarantees our mastery over them. Repurposing the turntable for scratching records demonstrates how we were formerly Enframed to consider the turntable as a playback device integral to the consumption of recorded music (i.e., gramophone records).

What's strange about these theoretical appropriations is that Heidegger almost never wrote about music(Lacoue-Labarthe 1994). However, he did write about technology. And what he did say was far more subtle than the use of his work cited above suggests:

Refusing to think technology separately from the question of human destiny, Heidegger's thought always hovers around two conflicting impulses in the technological world picture: first, the tendency towards "enframing" by which the dominating impulse of contemporary technology pirates the human sensorium on behalf of a globally hegemonic technical apparatus; and, second, the tendency toward "poeisis" by which an art of technology, variously expressed in language, poetry, the visual arts, speed writing, an aesthetics of digital dirt, and new media art could draw out of the world picture of technology as destining a different future for techne, a future in which technology once again has something to say, to "unconceal," about the relationship between technology and alethia (truth). (Kroker 2002)

"Technology", claims Heidegger, stems from the Greek word techne, and refers not only to craft, but also to artistic creation. "Techne...belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poietic" (Heidegger 1977, 13). Technology is never simply a thing, or type of thing, it is also a practice. This practice, however, is not defined exclusively by the will of the craft- or artisan. In the notion of “bringing forth” lies an attitude common to all Heideggerian questioning: a fundamental respect for the role of matter (for him, this is Nature) in determining the finished product of any crafting. Technology-as-practice involves the juxtaposition or unification of “objects” from different ontological domains (like the material chosen by a sculptor and the ambition or idea she brings to the moment of sculpting) with the intent of revealing.

This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house [for example], with a view to the finished thing envisioned as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction. Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. (Heidegger 1977, 13)

By making choices and gathering certain types of things over others, I show that I am at home in my work. As revealing, however, techne realizes that moments of linking—of unifying what has been gathered—are often unpredictable. Outcomes are rarely exactly how we expect them to be. This older conception of technology combines crafting with a knowing which gathers “objects” together in advance according to an intuition as to what will be brought forth. Control is not the issue. Nor is it simply about using old tools in new ways (as with Mudede's repurposed turntable example). It's about approaching matter--sound, wood, leather, water, stone, ideas--as participant in the greater coming to be of existence itself. "Being" is always about "becoming."

It is through such an account that the artistry of sample-based music becomes apparent. Technology, in this case, is not simply a tool. It is the medium in which samples are brought together in order to collaborate. It is the practice by which they are joined. It is the network through which their further revealing is already possible. Sampling technology turns sound into what Heidegger would call "standing reserve." This is what a turntable does when it "turntables".

However, if the technology of the turntable or sampler reveals sound as standing reserve, it equally enframes the sample-based musician as "master" of this reserve. As more powerful effects and methods of sound manipulation are developed alongside the ever-increasing speed of micro-processors, books like How to Get the Sound You Want appear, that claim,

When it comes to music, tomorrow is a deliberate destination and we can quite literally take steps to get there. Thanks to all of the clever and relatively inexpensive digital technology out there, the spatialised musical future is open for inspection and interaction in real time. The very ability to speculate and conceive of implications and their possible resolution, to desire a shape for that which is yet to be, means that thinking about any musical future inherently assumes some form of control. (Prochak 2001, 30)

The future of electronic music is fundamentally up to composers and recording engineers, on this account. The horizon of possibility is about the purposeful development of aural control.

All of this, however, only makes sense when the studio-composer is conceived as the one who gives the orders. The essential act of listening back to experiments within studio-sessions fundamentally disturbs this hierarchy. Moreover, the rhetoric of omnipotent sound manipulation being the desirable future for studio music doesn't ring true. Bacterial cultures remain tied to the laboratory in which they reside. The "aural cultures" of sample-based music extend from the dusty crates of records pulled from countless basements and thrifts shops, to state of the art bedroom studios, to the urban, rural and radiophonic soundscapes of everyday life, to our memories of the music we heard as children. This is not about control, but about coming together. Or better still, becoming together. The interconnectedness of all things--what Heidegger refers to as the Beingness of beings--this is what sample-based music helps to reveal. It is through engaging with (and not controlling) their structure, their identity, that matter is revealed to us as purposeful. It is overflowing.

The Summer 2006 issue of Musicworks magazine features a discussion by editor David McCallum focussed on "the liveness of live," as he calls it, and the challenges that have been presented to contemporary electronic/experimental musics vis a vis the deep integration of recording technologies into their creation. The question really revolves around which is more interesting--the live performance, with all of its contingency, versus perfect studio constructions consigned to "immortal" media such as CDRs or digital file formats such as .wavs, .aiffs or .mp3s.

This question is particularly relevant for sample-based music, since so much of it is studio music. It is often programmed/sequenced/mixed in a studio, not in real-time, without it being necessary to actually record any instruments or even make use of a microphone. Maybe one plays a keyboard a little bit, but often you're just hitting one or two keys in order to "trigger" samples through MIDI, and then recording these new sequences. The studio, often a "home studio," is the place where composition takes place, and where a lot of the experimentation and happy accidents I was just mentioning occur. McCallum quotes a visitor to the Music Works office,

Lamenting the rise of DIY recording [do it yourself recording--i.e., home studio recording], the visitor thought it was wonderful that artists were being empowered with the means to create and disseminate their works easily and cheaply, but that the art of making a recording was dying. The visitor explicitly stated that most of these DIY recordings were technically bad, and, therefore, artistically bad. I thought these complaints particularly strange in light of my own pursuits with improvised electronic music. My whole purpose in pursuing the live realm was to escape the staleness of the studio, and hopefully not agonize for a half-hour over 5 seconds of music. But the escape from studio staleness also meant sacrificing the cleanness and precision afforded by studio production. My interests in DIY, retro, and lo-fi also led to an abandonment of the concept of the "perfect" sound. Cleanliness is an impossible, and possibly ridiculous pursuit. The corollary to that, with the lust for all things retro, is that dirty is good and should be embraced, not avoided. The entire evolution of music in its recorded history has been the embracing of qualities that were previously considered unappealing, be they harmonic or timbral. (McCallum 2006, 4)

I think this is of particular relevance to sample-based composition, because (as I've said before) it is only in the pursuit of new explorations, new possibilities that such music unfolds. For instance, if one loads a bunch of samples up into the sampler (such as the Ensoniq EPS 16+ --the model of hardware sampler I started with--released in the mid 90s) one can easily get overly concerned with trying to control the sounds, placing them into a tight organization and forcing them into the shapes that you want them to be. I've always found such processes to end with much less satisfying results than if you give the samples room to move, so to speak. And this really means embracing chance, mistakes, dirtiness, glitches, all those types of things. I think that the work produced for Selected Sounds really embraces such a practice of revealing and demonstrates it as a key feature of sample-based music (along with an accompanying lack of concern over signal-to-noise ratios).

This ties into Rose's thesis--i.e., that hip hop production is about "working in the red" (Rose 1994, 74), causing distortion, using sounds that formerly would have been considered unpleasing to the ear, and making them sound musical, making them work in new contexts, thereby opening up new possibilities for others who want to follow in those footsteps. Not to talk too much about hip hop--the same things could be said about early techno and house music production. The types of machines used during sampling "Golden era" (the 1980s and 1990s) had "mechanical" or "digital" noise integral to them, and that noise ended up becoming a part of the early sounds of electronica. These machines (such as the Roland 808 drum machine--see Chapter 1) are still very much sought after today as a guarantor of authenticity.

All this makes for an interesting segue into Walter Benjamin's work. For instance, his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Benjamin 1969b) has been quoted by innumerable writers on technology, music and media. And this essay really is an investigation of authenticity and/or "aura" in the face of what (during Benjamin's time) were analog mechanisms for copying images, in particular. Benjamin speaks about the visual--photographs and moving images such as early cinema. The question is posed "What happens to the concept of the original art object when it suddenly can be replicated extremely easily, and made ubiquitously available at great distances from where that object happens to be? Consider a painting such as the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre gallery. Formerly the only way to experience this work was to go to Paris and be in the presence of the object itself. These days one can find the Mona Lisa's image on everything from t-shirts to coffee mugs. So what happens to the original Mona Lisa? What happens to the significance of the original art object when it can easily be witnessed anywhere other than where it happens to "really" be? With music you have the added "problem" of a time-based medium. Music happens in a particular time and space, and then it's gone...nothing remains, beyond the memory of having been there in the presence of those sound vibrations. We can re-member music, but we can never recreate a musical performance in all its particularities. All we can do is replay it in a new context, and thereby have the experience be slightly different.

Music, in one form or another, is part of the fundamental human experience of all times and all places, even among people whose language may not include the particular Greek-rooted term music. It is irrevocably connected with another most ambiguous phenomenon, time--because music can be experienced only at the moment of the listener's immediate present. One primary human characteristic is the desire to come to know oneself and the world around, and through the known to connect with the enormously vast unknown surrounding us. The known we have learned to put into words. Art and music (as well as time, truth, beauty, and love) belong in the unknown category. The urge to connect with the unknown elevates the human experience to its highest, hence our unspoken connection with art and music. (kasemets 2006, 11)

The question of aura and authenticity is put into stark relief when dealing with music. I come back to these questions in Chapter 5's conclusions, but at this point I simply want to highlight these issues in relation to live versus recorded music. kasemets' point above (from another recent issue of Musicworks) also supports the significance of these concerns.

The division between recorded and live music stems from the historic division of composition and performance: the separation of music as a performed experience versus music as a careful set of instructions for performers. (McCallum 2006, 5)

As we've progressed in our technological means for creating music, this issue of live performance versus pre-programmed composition within the studio has become increasingly problematic. More specifically, audiences are now faced with perennial questions such as "Is it live?", "Does live performance matter any more?", "Where does sample-based music fit in terms of live performance?" Given that sample-based music is a studio music, what happens when you bring it onto the stage and try to perform it live. It is commonplace to go to a performance of a famous sample-based producer such as Amon Tobin, DJ Shadow, Bonobo, etc., and to witness them mixing records(which can be quite disappointing). Their music cannot be created in real-time, it can only be created through sequencing and programming. But this question is becoming increasingly complex, as the aura of the DJ has started to wane in popular music in 2007, in favour of indie-rock stylings. I think we are witnessing a turn away from programmed mechanisms for creating music (i.e., no more "Kraftwerk") towards an embracing of live performativity, or a rekindling of interest in live performance and the musicality and virtuosity that goes with it. And imaginative electronic artists are surviving, it seems to me, through the use of ingenious ways to create "live" sample-based music, whether this is through turntablism, or interesting new software applications such as Ableton Live, two technologies that do allow for real-time manipulation of samples. But fundamentally the question remains, can sample-based music be a live music?...

Allowing all possible optimism, electronic music might restore to art the authenticity, the loss of which Benjamin traces through increased mechanical reproduction. Precisely because the electronic composition experiences absolute re-realization in each playing of the tape, this authenticity could be of highly positive consequences for the relation of art to society in the technological age. (Blomster 1976, 70)

With the introduction of the phonograph, the aura of the musical performer had shifted to the record, but through the development of media technology, it now resides in multiple locations simultaneously. Within the pop culture apparatus, these locations are designed to exchange and share energy: a network of aura. For example, when Madonna releases a new CD, a song from the album (the single) is played on the radio, the music video is broadcast on cable television, articles and advertisements appear in print media, music retailers prominently display and sell her CDs and Madonna performs concerts for stadium-capacity crowds. Through the deft interconnection of cross-promotional tie-ins, give-aways, sneak previews, advance copies, e-mail lists, websites, and down-loadable MP3 files, this promotional engine is tuned to produce demand. (Cascone 2002, 54)

Benjamin has a hostile relationship to sound and music (as mentioned in Chapter 1). Understood in relation to ideas of uniqueness and authenticity, Benjamin's concept "aura" is a priori conceived as standing outside the realm of that which is technically reproducible (Benjamin 1969b, 220). Since sample-based music incorporates technical reproducibility at its heart, one would assume aura to be outside of its dominion. Nevertheless, as is evidenced in both citations above, aura is a concept than many want to continue to be able to associate with music--whether this is based on recorded-music's ability to perfectly re-realize a composers original intent upon playback, or the development of ubiquitous, global rock-star presences via savvy systems of sound and image distribution. In the first case the question of authenticity is raised and answered. In the second it is (apparently) superseded.

According to Benjamin, the modern invention of technologies of mass reproduction has eliminated the necessity that a work of art's mediation between form and content be contained within a unique object and the specific traditions that object happens to have encountered. Reproducibility being integral to the form of works produced via modern technologies such as photography and film, apprehension of their artistic content changes with these mediations from an encounter based in personal, individual experience, to one of mass exposure and potentially ubiquitous contact. This results in a translation of the place of the work of art in modern society from the aura-invested plane of exhibition to the aura-devoid realm of politics (Benjamin 1969b, 225).

As an example of how "authenticity" in art is positively mocked by reproductive technologies, Benjamin describes the studio editing technique of cutting:

[I]n the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. (Benjamin 1969b, 233)

Affecting how we actually perceive our world is put forward as the most interesting accomplishment of film as well as that which guarantees its historical appropriateness since it allows for the representation of the fragmentation which is endemic to modern life—a fragmentation brought about due to "the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment" (Benjamin 1969b, 234). Reality is no longer what we witness—it is what we watch. Photography and film have changed our relationship to the real by providing us with a source of new perceptions (slow motion and time elapsed film, freeze-frame photography, montage, etc.), but also through changing the type of perceptual experiences we have come to expect. In the land of technology, immediate reality is something we do not see. Authenticity is beyond our concern. The contrived sonic-realities developed through cutting and pasting of waveforms are equally significant, on this account, to "real" listening experiences. Just so long as our dollar can guarantee we get a piece of "Madonna".⁵

Benjamin includes aural recording in his treatise, but unlike photography and film, the practice is attributed no revolutionary potential. While it must be acknowledged that audio recording technology during Benjamin's time did not allow for the same type of cutting and splicing we take for granted today (after the advent of magnetic tape and digital recording), the author claims, nevertheless, that recording technology participates in the creation of reproducible, non-existent (aura-devoid) spaces within sound films, thereby trivializing authenticity and the notion of the original work (Benjamin 1969b, 232). Nevertheless, sound recordings as a source of new perceptions—as active in altering the aural experiences we expect to have—this theme is not developed in Benjamin's texts. Strangely, in his article on electronic music (quoted above), Wes Blomster attempts to overcome this limitation in Benjamin's work, not by focussing on the similarity between studio music and film (which would give electronic music some revolutionary clout), but instead through advocating the electronic composition as an aura-filled artifact susceptible to tests of authenticity:

In electronic composition, notation is by-passed; the composer in his studio works in the manner of the painter before his [sic] canvas; the compositional intention is realized in the very act of composition. Production and reproduction merge into a single action. This, it seems to me, is the most unique aspect of electronic music. The entire realm of interpretation is eliminated. It is as though Beethoven--rather than committing himself to posterity through the manuscript of his final piano sonata, opus 111, which will ever remain the victim of the inadequacy of keyboard performance—had been in a position to offer one single aural realization of this work which would exist for all time, never subject to repeated interpretive performance. Thus, he might have guaranteed the authenticity of his work. The abyss between intention and realization is eliminated; a work is created of which there is only one realization and all who experience the work will encounter it in this single imprint....It would appear that a musical work has now been achieved which is vested with the same authenticity as the original oil painting. (Blomster 1976, 70)

Like Benjamin, Blomster locates in "aura" a spiritual elevation—a guarantee of authenticity which snaps us out of our modern, technologically induced inattention and focuses us on our history, tradition and the place of a given work of art within these spheres. However, music, Blomster admits, presents a problem when it comes to aura because, as Leonardo put it, "Painting is superior to music because, unlike unfortunate music, it does not have to die as soon as it is born....Music which is consumed in the very act of its birth is inferior to painting which the use of varnish has rendered eternal" (Benjamin 1969b, 249--also mentioned in Chapter 1). Musical performances cannot possess aura, claims Benjamin, since the performance itself does not persist through time. But electronic music fixes all that--as a realm antithetical to interpretation. On this account I believe Blomster to have misinterpreted Benjamin, and to have attributed to him too much sympathy with regards to music. Many other writers on sample-based music also fall into this trap, assuming that Benjamin would be equally committed to sound-objects as he was to other dusty historical artifacts like rare books. But, as he says in a letter to T.W. Adorno regarding differences in their points of view, "it is not to be assumed that acoustic and optic perceptions are equally capable of being revolutionized" (Benjamin 1999, 139).

There is, however, an "aura-filled" quality to the experience of watching a good DJ work--especially a scratch DJ. One has the feeling of witnessing the expression of a unique gift, and the product of a dedicated amount of practice as well as a serious investment in equipment and time spent listening to records. The feeling is similar when one is allowed into the studio and musical practices of a sample-based composer. The authenticity of their work comes out of the way they relate to sound samples--as partners in a joint venture. The relationship to tradition is something a sample-based composer develops together with her sample-library (records, .wav files on hard drives, etc.). It is in the double act of revealing and concealing through selection, through gathering, that art is in this case created via bricolage. Sound objects/samples are allowed to maintain their own identity, all the while contributing in their own particular way to the communally-developed mix. This mix becomes more than the conjunction of its parts.

Hannah Arendt's compilation of essays by Benjamin, Illuminations (Arendt 1969), has a section in its introduction entitled "The Pearl Diver"--where she characterizes Benjamin as a collector, par excellence...both in terms of his own self-professed bibliophilia and his habit of carrying little black notebooks with him,

in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection. And in this collection, which by then was anything but whimsical, it was easy to find next to an obscure love poem from the eighteenth century the latest newspaper item, next to Goecking's "Der erste Schnee" a report from Vienna dated summer 1939, saying that the local gas company had "stopped supplying gas to Jews. (Arendt 1969, 46)

As more or less a series of anecdotes and musings concerning Benjamin's life and work, Arendt's essay reflects Benjamin's own collector's method. There are pearls aplenty in this introduction for someone doing work on Benjamin, not the least of which is Arendt's assertion of a similarity between Benjamin "the collector who gathers his fragments and scraps from the debris of the past" and Martin Heidegger--a thinker of new thoughts with "deadly impact" (Arendt 1969, 46). But it is to Benjamin's own views on collecting that I will turn in concluding this chapter.

In gathering what others have made scraps and debris, the collector is not only indulging a personal fetish, but is also committing a tactical maneuver. For Benjamin,

Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books! (Benjamin 1969a, 63)

I can relate to this notion of discovering a city (I find the use of the word "capturing" a bit disarming here in its suggestion of domination and control) through rummaging through its "stuff depositories"--thrift shops, "used" stores, pawn shops, bazaars, auction-houses and the like. On a recent trip to Fredericton NB, I returned with 40-some used soul records purchased for $1 a piece in the town's only pawn shop. For a sample-based musician like myself, old r+b records are like gold when I'm sifting through my collection for funky drum beats to sample. They also often provide sure-fire dance tracks useful for DJing. Fredericton has less people like me combing through its used record archives than Montreal. I'm aware of this and look forward to each trip there and to other smaller cities like it for the opportunities of acquisition they provide.

As a collector and admirer of quotations, Benjamin's ultimate ambition was to create a work which would consist of nothing but citations--with all need for interpretive, articulating text having been eliminated through judicious selection and arrangement. Reading from his little black notebook, instantiating his personal literary juxtapositions in the time and space of an aural utterance, Benjamin's nerdish pastime in this case demonstrates the truth that each collector knows in his or her heart: that treated simply as recordings of times, thoughts, and moments passed, the objects of a collector's passion are dead. It is in our sharing them--bringing them forth and revealing them to others--that they are brought to life and are transformed from debris into pearls.

In "On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man," Benjamin states,

it is very conceivable that the language of sculpture or painting is founded on certain kinds of thing languages, that in them we find a translation of the language of things into an infinitely higher language, which may still be of the same sphere. We are concerned here with nameless, non-acoustic languages, languages issuing from matter; here we should recall the material community of things in their communication. (Benjamin 1986, 330)

Material production, far from engaging in the deconstruction of aura, is understood here instead as a mechanism for subjectively-mediated "communiqués" from the secret world of objects. In the role of translator ("revealer"?), the artist attempts to open up a discursive space for the mute language of things. She "canonizes, freezes, an original and shows in the original a mobility, and instability, which at first glance one did not notice."(de Mann 1986, 82) This appreciation of mobility, however, is an ironic discovery. For what the artist "discovers" in translating Being is that ultimate distance which stands between the collector and her chosen object's unspoken essence. A translation can never be an original presentation. Its derivative and secondary nature only highlights the ultimate in-explicitness of its references.

This leaves us with a choice. Either live, breathe, write, create and die in a world of phantasmagoria (reified, fluctuating object-illusions), or continue on at the never-ending task of the translator and/or curiosity/quotation collector in the hope that piling others' thought-fragments one on top of another will eventually allow for the presentation of the "unsayable."

Or perhaps there is a third, musical option...

Contesting the apartheid of memory, and the agents of oblivion seeking to consign the past to the conspiracy of silence, music sustains an ethical resonance that permits us not so much to fully capture and comprehend the past as to recover fragments of its dispersed body. (Chambers 2001, 119)

Listening to music involves a sort of writing, or rewriting within the realm of memory. One could equally use the sample-based musical term "remixing" here. The listener is never a "tabula-rasa", unencumbered by previous moments spent listening. Both in rhythm, through which memory is engaged via the use of repetition and suspense, as well as in melody, which references previously heard motifs if only to distinguish itself in some way as different or "new," music allows the past to come forward into the present free from the burden of establishing lineage. A mobility is opened-up which doesn't immediately institute a distance, but instead involves a coming together. Mental links are created in listening that conform to Benjamin's dream of a citation-only text. The record (or sound) collector who uses his or her collection puts this ethical dimension of listening to music into effect. The sample-bank understood as a resource base from which a collector, DJ or composer can draw examples via which to punctuate his/her own testament to the nobility of listening, becomes the highly-prized earth upon which one builds a world of associations. The practice of developing such a library is distinct from Benjamin's book collecting and becomes more like the gathering-revealing we find in Heidegger. The bringing together of world and earth is what defines the work of art according to Heidegger. (Heidegger 1971) To quote Chambers again: "To cite the past is to resite the present and reveal in it the instance of contingent paths that lead us back while taking us forwards." (Chambers 1971, 113). As the source of such potential citations, my sample-archive becomes a work of art, a paradise for time that has passed, a savior of debris. By sharing in the sample-based practices of others, Selected Sounds makes its primary contribution to knowledge through its demonstration of the myriad different ways there are to study and love sounds "as the scene[s], the stage[s] of their fate" (Benjamin 1969a, 160).

Notes

¹--a term used by Jonathan Sterne (Sterne 2003) and others to indicate the disparate, emergent, and yet burgeoning field of literature devoted to studying various elements of our cultural experience of sound, including its historical, technological and ideological dimensions.

²For example, Diamond's article (Diamond 2005) focuses on actual studio production practices for four different case examples as well as the various negotiations involved in the selection, development and implementation of these practices. Citing a surge in Native American recordings since the 1990s, Diamond points to intersecting causes such as increased production, marketing and distribution opportunities available to Aboriginal artists (for instance, the Aboriginal Women's Voice program at the Banff centre, internet and satellite communications, as well as new prominent national and international award ceremonies or categories in established "competitions" such as the Junos). Nevertheless, she claims, there has not been a parallel increase in the "visibility" of these recordings--meaning that they are often "positioned ambiguously between traditional, world and popular music genres" and are therefore difficult to locate in many large retail chains such as HMV(Diamond 2005, 120). In examining four Canadian case studies (all recent recordings by Aboriginal musicians/communities), Diamond muses with the question of what "social action" a recording might be capable of? This position fits extremely well with the perspectives articulated in Selected Sounds as it supports the argument that recordings are not passive objects which, once sampled, are rendered "utterly malleable".

³These hip hop concepts of flipped and/or bitten practices are similar to a certain aesthetic argument made in electro-acoustic music, where sounds must be manipulated in order to be yours. As Andra McCartney has pointed out, this attitude has a tendency to place soundwalk recordings on the outside, as though one were simply "biting the landscape" (see McCartney 2006). Hildegard Westerkamp has also mentioned similar frustrations with the attitude of electro-acoustic musicians who write-off soundscape composition as a (redundant) subcategory of musique concrète (see Westerkamp 2002).

⁴More information about Kid Koala, Amon Tobin and their record label Ninja Tune can be found at http://ninjatune.com.

⁵(Miller 2004) and (Mudede 2003) also make similar claims around "realness" and our contemporary over-saturation with reproduced media.