And now we come to the end of the dissertation--the conclusion--the point at which all the loose (loop?) ends are to be tied up. Which feels somewhat disingenuous, given what was presented in Chapter 4/Appendix A--i.e., an archive/database of ethnographically-gleaned information regarding practices of sample-based composition and performance. Segueing into a summary conclusion of selections from this contribution vis a vis its relationship to the literature presented in Chapter 3, as important as this is to complete the interventions of Selected Sounds, represents, nonetheless, an ego-bound desire for closure.
In order to elude this push towards positivism, I will take refuge, once again, in the practice of sample-based music, as a methodological example for how to end a work that mixes together many different elements, including pieces of others' intellectual "property".
Although the sampler does indeed offer "infinite possibilities" for resequencing and warping...samples, most dance producers are constrained by the funktionalist [sic] criteria of their specific genre. Tracks are designed as material for the DJ to work into a set and so must conform in tempo and mood. Creativity in dance music involves a balancing act between making your tracks both "music and mixable" (as Goldie put it). Simon Frith points out that one of the defining qualities of digital music is the sense that this music "is never finished and...never really integrated" as a composition. It is precisely this "unfinished" aspect--the sockets, as it were--that enable the DJ to plug tracks into the mixscape. (Reynolds 1998, 48-9)1
I quote this text not as a backdrop to my taking refuge in the cliché that no project is every completed, only abandoned (although it would work well for that purpose). I'd like instead to use it in relationship to the format adopted for the rest of this chapter, which revolves around the final question asked in the Selected Sounds interviews--"What is sampling?". The seven different answers provided by each of the participants (myself included) are used as jumping off points below in developing an account of the multifaceted family resemblances (to quote the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein 2003)) between each of us in terms of practice, as well as the broader culture of sample-based producers more widely. It was from these seven answers that the seven keywords were derived for use in refining the database of answers provided in Appendix A.
The idea is to follow Goldie's suggestion, referred to by Reynolds (Goldie was a fairly well known sample-based producer in the late 90s, in part due to his relationship with Bjork), that one must balance between something that is "music and mixable" in the construction of work intended for DJs. I think this sort of dichotomy applies less and less in 2007, but Reynolds is right to suggest that much sample-based music is intended for listening and mixing with other musics. There are many different production practices that can be incorporated into one's compositions in order to help make them mixable for DJs or other producers. Locking tracks into specific four-four tempos throughout their length is one notable constraint followed in many different genres of electronic music, including hip hop, house, techno, drum and bass, etc. Another common trait of many styles of dance music (including "old school" genres like funk and disco) is a focus on layering sounds, riffs, or rhythms vertically at the same time as these "packets of sound" or "loops" are organized into chronological sequence.
Assuming that Chapter 4/Appendix A were successful in allowing the reader to develop her own layered accumulation of interview material, the following chapter should be read as a slow deconstruction of this accumulation, making room for the next mix. Each of the keywords featured in Appendix A will therefore be revisited in the proceeding text, with an ear towards demonstrating the applicability of these terms to wider arenas of academic discussion, debate and creation.
The conclusions contained in the following paragraphs should not be read as a series of pronouncements on the current state of sample-based music. They should instead be understood as starting points for conversations around seven keywords relevant to many different fields of study, namely technology, community, memory, listening, collecting, ethics and recording . Points raised below are also more than simply theoretical interventions, as they have implications in terms of an emergent methodology for research creation, especially where ethnography is concerned. Concepts raised in Chapter 2 of this dissertation such as friendship as method, the construction of community through research and the engagement with technology as practice within research-creation should be kept in mind throughout what follows, with an ear towards possible foreground and background articulations.
Sampling is an excellent example of "technology as practice". Owen Chapman
At the same time that almost all sample-based producers are aficionados of music technologies, old and new, the way each individual employs their gear is unique based upon their own experience with these and other forms of technology. The key to understanding sampling as practice is to be open to how the ways in which we use technologies are partially constitutive of their identities--recognizing these identities as snapshots of moments in a process, since ways for using things often change. Technologies are social constructs, on this account, as opposed to well-determined capacities.
For Ursula Franklin, issues of justice come to the fore most strongly when technologies are employed in ways that dissuade us from considering their real-world impact. Whether we are dealing with weapons of mass destruction assembled by factory workers in Flint Michigan (such as those featured in Michael Moore's 2002 film Bowling for Colombine) or Pygmy "whindahoo" vocalizations lifted from jazz and ethnographic recordings by sample-based artists (Feld 1997), the capacity for technology to complicate ethical debates cannot be understated. One could also point to the whole file-sharing/downloading phenomenon that is threatening the stability of media conglomerates such as AOL-TIME-WARNER on this account. Absolute categories of right and wrong are extremely difficult to construct when every situation possesses its own unique circumstances, actors and objects of debate. An understanding of context becomes paramount under these conditions as each instance of practice is situated to some extent in its own moral universe. What is necessary to ensure just practices is a citizenry that can look at new situations of technological deployment in terms of how they relate to other previous contexts that we have judged fair or unfair. Ignorance is not a sufficient defense, in this case, as it is precisely this sort of apathy that leads to the concentration of power within the hands of those who produce and distribute technologies. While some might argue that this has been fine for musicians in the 20th century, thanks to an "invisible hand" at work in the competitive entertainment industry marketplace--creating an equitable relationship of supply and demand between composers/musicians and the industry that records and distributes their work--I find this argument simply untenable in 2007 (a position that finds support in Jones (2002), Charman and Holloway (2006), Clemens and Pettman (2005), Collins (2005), Miller (2004), Rodgers (2003) and many others, to varying degrees). A detailed justification of this point of view, however, falls beyond the scope of this chapter.
The term "techne" comes from Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology." It is an ancient Greek word--the root of our term "technology." Heidegger sees the Greek era as a time of balance and proportion when compared with our current race to extend our mastery over all aspects of the modern world.2 We need to reinvigorate this older conception of technology, he argues, if we want to protect ourselves from the kind of dehumanizing tendencies of modern technology outlined over 50 years later by Franklin--a time lapse that demonstrates the potential intractability of our situation. We need to rediscover the ways in which technologies are more than mysterious mechanisms for control over "natural" forces such as electric, combustive and kinetic energy. The most significant power of technologies such as sampling is their ability to reveal hidden features of our daily lives that we take for granted. Examples of the latter include phenomena such as sounds that go unnoticed by the human ear, the murky soup of radio static, or the mimetic relationships between drum breaks, bass lines and vocal phrases from "lost" vinyl records.
For researchers interested in technology, this suggests a certain push towards research-creation, as outlined in Chapter 2. Friendship-as-method is also an extremely useful approach in such an undertaking, as it can easily lead to a widening of one's own perspectives and array of practices (as has been my own case with Selected Sounds).
"...sampling in and of itself is just recycling, reusing an existing sound, but I think what's happened with sampling is that it's really been sort of a gateway to a whole new genre of sound creation." Jackie Gallant
Sound enhances community. In the same way that turning on a light in a darkened room enables one to see, sound in an environment piques one's aural senses. This is about the touch of sound. "Hearing is done not only with the ears, but also with every fiber of our beings, as vibrations of sound move into our bodies. Sound touches us inside and out". (McCartney 2004, 179) As vibrating air molecules, sound touches our eardrums, but also our bodies. We feel sound at the same time as we hear it. This physical phenomenon, however, is immediately transformed into subjective experience. "Music...is consumed in the very act of its birth" (Benjamin 1969b, 249)3 This is not true. Any sound, musical or otherwise, begins with energy causing vibrations in a physical substance (vocal chords, speaker horns, etc.), continuing through the medium of air molecules to our listening bodies, and finishing with those vibrations being translated once again back into energy, this time in the form of firing brain synapses as our nervous systems respond to the received information. This response is then "stored" in memory. This is all cognitive speculation, of course, but so is Benjamin's statement. Visual sensation based in the reception of light through our eyes follows a similar trajectory towards memory, however, physical objects such as paintings appear more durable than music due to the fact that the source of energy stimulating our optic nerves remains steady as long as we leave the light on. Sound works with time and memory with greater subtlety, as do moving images. However, one rarely gazes fixedly at a single object for very long, suggesting that the reception of visual stimuli may work similarly to the translation of sound into memory--in concert with our individual identities and the immediate context of our experience.
But the quote from Gallant above goes beyond sound's relationship to community in the sense of physical proximity, and speaks specifically about a "whole new genre of sound creation." To say that sampling is "just recycling, reusing an existing sound" betrays a modern tendency to view a copy as derivative of an "original." However, after effectively apologizing for this aberration from tradition, Gallant immediately makes reference to a threshold, or "gateway" enabled by sampling--a gateway that anyone can ostensibly pass through and thereby enter a playing-field with new horizons for sound creation and creativity. The contemporary arena for this type of creativity involves digital sound technologies, but one could equally point to traditions of lyrical "borrowing" in hip hop, r'n'b, rock, and other pop music vocals, as well as earlier analog recording manipulations by the likes of Pauline Oliveros, Hildegard Westerkamp, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henri and others. Schaeffer attempted to unite those interested in working with previously recorded sounds with his Solfège de l'objet sonore (Schaeffer 1967); however this interesting print/audio recording, while notable for its self-conscious integration of the two media, draws lines in the sand. As a "Solfège" the work smacks of exclusion in a realm that relies upon the multiplicitous well-spring of recorded/recordable sound as its greatest resource.
Gallant's point of view is an inclusive one, informed as it is through her own perspective as a drummer who "discovered" sampling many years after establishing herself as a performing musician. An entire world opened-up for Gallant in terms of new sources of inspiration and new mixing practices vis a vis her own former experience (see Chapter 4). For other younger collaborators in the group, such as Moskos, sampling is not so much a "new" genre as it is a familiar creative companion. Either way, sampling in 2007 still marks one as participant in a game with slightly different rules in the same way it did in 1997, 1987, and 1967. The significance of the construction of community as a research method is underscored via such examples, as it is only through an articulation of points of difference, identity and neutrality amongst a researched group that meaningful claims can be made about the practices. During the final meeting of the Selected Sounds project (the point at which each participant was able to hear what the others had done with the samples), we discussed how each of us had responded to the samples selected by the group. The following statement by Friz summed up the feelings of many.
I felt like they were really indistinguishable by the end - in everything, a lot of the samples. There were some samples that I assumed that other people would take more advantage of--'Oh probably someone who thinks in a certain way will use this drum break or will use this melodic bit. I could see how I would use it even though I'm not going to', etc. But in the end no one actually did this the way I anticipated.
One of the biggest surprises throughout this project for almost everyone has been discovering how a group of their peers, friends and vague acquaintances from Montreal's experimental sound scene react when presented with the same set of constraints. The entire transcript of our final discussion as a group (including our reactions to each other's pieces) has been included in the appendices to this dissertation (Appendix C).
"I think it's an artistic practice, it's a musical thing, it's an art, it can be done well, it can be done badly." Alex Moskos
The biggest difference between light and sound has to do with our receiving apparatus. The ears are omnidirectional, and are always "on," whereas the eyes are more narrowly focused, and can be turned "off" with the flick of a lid. We understand this difference intuitively, as it has been with us from the moment of our first awareness inside the womb. The mother's heartbeat and other internal "musics" can be described as life's first sensations, along with the physical closeness of the womb and the nourishment provided through the umbilical cord. The intimacy of these shared feelings unite mother and child. I believe that we carry with us the reminiscence of this sonic proximity. We feel it every time we use sound to locate the presence of those around us without the use of our eyes. We also depend on this primal instinct when we assume that people hear us when we speak, as long as they are in close enough proximity. And lastly, this responsiveness to shared vibration is what draws us together to listen to sound and music.
The introduction to the score of Hildegard Westerkamp's piece "Moments of Laughter" (first composed in 1988)4 provides a similar articulation of these feelings around sound and motherhood. Performing this piece involves developing a series of vocal improvisations in response to an audio tape prepared by Westerkamp.
Moments of Laughter is dedicated to my daughter Sonja whose voice forms the basis for this piece. Her voice has accompanied my life for many years now and has brought me in touch with an openness of perception, uninhibited expressiveness and physical presence that I had long forgotten. I have made recordings of her voice since she was born and from the age of four on, she has made her own recordings of stories and songs. Moments of Laughter utilizes these for the tape portion of the piece, tracing musically/acoustically the emergence of the infant's voice from the oceanic state of the womb: from the soundmakings of the baby to the song and language of the child. According to Julia Kristeva, moments of laughter are those moments in infancy and early childhood in which the baby recognizes the "other" as distinct from the "self". They are the first creative moments that speak of recognition of self and place. The child expresses these moments with laughter. (Westerkamp 1988)
The communities brought together through sound are fascinating, in part since what is experienced is physically fleeting, yet strangely tangible in memory. We experience sound and music in constant relation to what we have heard before. This is how we develop an archive out of which to establish a practice of listening. We develop our collections as we develop our own voices, our own identities, from out of the "oceanic state of the womb." Coming together to listen to each other's music brought about many moments of laughter for the Selected Sounds group (see (Appendix C), as have private listening sessions before and after.
Tia DeNora writes,
Music moves through time; it is a temporal medium. This is the first reason why it is a powerful aide-memoire. Like an article of clothing or an aroma, music is part of the material and aesthetic environment in which it was once playing, in which the past, now an artifact of memory and its constitution, was once a present. Unlike material objects, however, music that is associated with past experience was, within that experience, heard over time. And when it is music that is associated with a particular moment and a particular space, music reheard and recalled provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, its dynamism as emerging experience. This is why, for so many people, the past 'comes alive' to its soundtrack. (Denora 2006, 144)
The call to notice everyday sounds advocated by acoustic ecologists and soundscape composers such as Westerkamp is simply an extension of the type of attention we pay to musical sounds most of the time (Muzak notwithstanding). The development of affective relationships to songs can only happen in the realm of memory, where those songs are compared and contrasted with previously heard material, as well as the innumerable other mental musings that enter into a moment of attentive listening. And this is where Moskos' comment as to sampling being "done well or done badly" comes to the fore. These sorts of judgments are ultimately extremely subjective. Every time someone tries to set up rules or ethical codes for sampling, these barriers are subsequently broken, if they ever applied at all (one could easily criticize (Rose 1994) and (Schloss 2004) on this account, as well as (Miller 2004) for the opposite affliction--claiming the only rule to be "anything is possible"--a statement contradicted during every instance of decision-making in the course of choosing source-files and processing-sequences for a sample-based piece). The only arbiter of determinations such as "done well" or "done badly" is the listening subject--a listener who's past can come alive with every musical experience.
"...working with... not over long... pieces of sound, using that as your raw material... prerecorded, whether by you or [whomever]....Then focusing really heavily on the mix." Richard Williams
Sample-based music involves a relationship to sound that is more about attentive listening than control. There is a prevalent tendency in many cultural studies of music to treat listening as the more or less passive reception of sound. It matters not if these sounds come from recordings or live players. What is significant is who caused these sounds to be, and why. Henceforth the myriad of writings, both in cultural studies and different types of musicology, that focus on the human agents involved in the rise and fall of various musical movements or genres. One finds authors like Joan Peyser outlining The Music of My Time (Peyser 1995) around the life histories of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Varèse and their respective followers. T.W. Adorno was also infamously attracted to discussing the differences between these first two composers, finding in one the evolution of musical concepts and styles which were historically and dialectically appropriate given the crisis to "tonality" brought about by Wagner, while the other he saw as a despicable return to the Romanticism Schoenberg nobly repudiated (Adorno 1973). In discussions such as these the composer is isolated as the appropriate focus of debate surrounding what has constituted music throughout history. Music-making is equated with the act of inscribing one's mental musings into some sort of "permanent" material form--whether this is through writing a musical score, splicing tape (see Blomster 1977, Jones 1992) or even copying and pasting waveforms via mouse clicks (see Szepanski May, 2003) The point that such analyses forget is that making music meaningful is as much about listening as it is about inscribing. Even the image of the classical composer at work with quill and paper is essentially incomplete without the accompanying figure of the piano upon which possible arrangements are sounded-out.
Sample-based composition has its own purpose for the keyboard: it is a commonly used means for developing sample-playback patterns. These riffs can then be layered over top of one another in a process called sequencing. Sequences of keyboard-coordinated drum beats, bass lines, string and vocal loops are mixed with cut and pasted copies of "wave forms" (visual representations of digitized sounds) in programs such as Cubase, Pro Tools, Soundforge, Ableton Live (plus many others). The sample-based artist selects, effects, and mixes these components together, but without listening to versions of tracks as they are in the process of being composed (through earphones or studio monitors), this practice is next to impossible to pursue.
Listening is central to sample-based music and this becomes apparent upon numerous levels. Another of these is in record collecting, where listening is key to finding potential sample-sources as well as developing a repertoire of "influences." But serendipitous aural moments have also played a central role in the history of the turntable and sampler discussed by authors like Rose, Théberge, Mudede and Eshun (see Chapter 3).
"One Day in '81 or '82 we was doin' this remix," says DJ Marley Marl in Tricia Rose's book Black Noise (1994), "I wanted to sample a voice from off this song with an Emulator and accidentally, a snare went through. At first I was like 'That's the wrong thing,' but then it was soundin' good. I kept running back and hitting the Emulator. Then I looked at the engineer and said. 'You know what this means?! I could take any drum sound from an old record, put it in here and get the old drummer sound on some shit. No more of that dull DMX shit.' That day I went out and bought a sampler." (Mudede 2003)
Another aural anecdote: in order to save memory on early, limited-RAM samplers, producers in the 80s and 90s would habitually record drum breaks into their machines with record players set at maximum speed (the highest pitch adjustment) on 45 rpm. After fixing a key on the keyboard to play their sample back at this "Alvin and the Chipmunks" speed, any keys lower or higher than that key would cause the sample to play through either slower or faster than the recorded rate, allowing one to move down a few keys to the original pitch as it would have played at 33.3 rpm. The sampled sound-file itself remained saved at the faster speed, making it a shorter, less memory-intensive file. However, it has become the practice in certain sample-based genres, notably drum and bass, to sequence such breaks at the new, faster speed (higher pitch). One break in particular has become infamous for its ubiquitous reception of this treatment: the "Amen break", taken from the "Amen, Brother" track by the Winstons (1969) and now widely downloadable over the Internet. The rhythm of the drum in this case lends itself extremely well to sped up recombination. Knowing drum and bass means knowing this break. Dr. Noh, a Montreal-based live drum and bass group, would mimic the effect of the sped up Amen break with the use of two drummers. Dr. Noh are no longer together, and one of these drummers has moved on to provide the back-beat to the semi-famous Canadian rock group "The Stars" as the evolution of the Amen break continues....
In Richard Williams' case, the sample-based explorations that led me to ask him to be a part of the Selected Sounds group have given way to a return to his drum-playing roots. Williams is now a part of the experimental post-rock noise group "Triceratreetops", with fellow former Media Studies students Robyn McFadden and Charlotte Scott. Williams has adopted a "free-jazz" style with his drumming, at once explosive and improvised at the same time as it features virtuosic ability. Williams grew up playing the drums as a youth, something he mentioned in the interview for Selected Sounds--although I had no idea as to his level of experience. What is interesting about Triceratreetops is how the drumming, bass and keyboard atmospheres they develop are reminiscent of sample-based musical structures, such as the afore-mentioned focus on vertical layering and the deconstruction of beat-based grooves into component patterns.
Different practices are adopted by different people depending on their backgrounds and the resources they have available to them. Assertions about individual identities being at the center of the selections made within sample-based music misrepresent this process of give and take. So also do claims regarding the perceived authenticity of the use of certain sounds (such as the Roland 808 kick-drum sound discussion in Chapter 1) or techniques that can be traced back to New York and sampling's "genesis" in early turntablism (see Mudede 2003). What is necessary for those looking to analyze the current multifaceted state of sample-based music is a means of access to the dialogue that takes place between sample-selectors and their recording selections. Mixing with records, for instance, involves mingling as much as it does consuming. It is in this sense that listening becomes a means of exploration and interaction. Record collection for many is not simply about possession of the right kind of stuff, but what vinyl and turntable technology can do. This is foremost in the mind of the collector as she finds herself coming home with increasingly esoteric records containing children's songs, linguistic exercises, bizarre sound effects and the voice of elevator operators. It should not surprise us when these affective gems reappear bricolaged into new analog/digital/mnemonic/improvised hybrids during acts of musical creativity and production.
..."it's capturing a portion of something...out of the context that you found it in and then putting it in either a sympathetic context or a completely radically different context." (Anna Friz)
"[W]hat are the politics of recontextualizing a sound source into a new sonic environment? The initial selecting of source material to be sampled, much like (and often one and the same as) a DJ's practice of 'digging' for vinyl records, entails an ongoing and circuitous archeological process in which the producer hunts and gathers sounds." (Rodgers 2003, 313-320)
"The other day my girlfriend and I went to IKEA. We're having a baby in a month, and are in the process of trying to find ways to organize our impossibly large field of belongings. I bought a new bookshelf for my records. My ever growing collection has overgrown the few crappy shelves I had, thereby rendering the dual-functionality of my studio as a guest room laughably out of the question. As we put together the new possession and started filling it with disks, my girlfriend asked, light-heartedly, if I ever planned to stop coming home with new armfuls of dusty vinyl? How could I ever possibly listen to or use all this music anyway? Didn't I have enough?" (Chapman 2003)
Will Straw has characterized record collecting as a predominantly male pastime. However, the record collector, he suggests, can be understood as conflating both stereotypically masculine and feminine attributes:
Record collections are seen as both public displays of power/knowledge and private refuges from the sexual or social world; as either structures of control or the by-products of irrational and fetishistic obsession; as material evidence of the homosocial information-mongering which is one underpinning of male power and compensatory undertakings by those unable to wield that power... one might [also] note, for example, that collecting is about the elaboration of a domestic context for consumer goods; that within collecting, the values of consumption come to assume priority over those of production; and that, in the collection, an immediate, affective relationship to the object takes precedence over collective, spectacular forms of cultural involvement. (Straw 1997, 4)
Given this dichotomous essence, Straw chooses to understand the record collection as a highly complex site of divers articulations as opposed to a fairly static testimony of subcultural affiliations, identifications or classifications. It is the juxtaposing which occurs upon a record-collector's shelf that is interesting and not so much the individual value (monetary, or otherwise) of each unique element. The record collector's ability to weave a narrative which links these separate essences together becomes the locus of a certain cultural capital. This narrative both stems from and at the same time feeds the particular historical identity of the narrator. Straddling the space between hipster and nerd, master and slave, the record collector's affection for scratched vinyl disks is recognized as a power and a curse. One only has to watch five minutes of the documentary Vinyl by Alan Zweig, in which head-case after head-case is interviewed inside their Toronto apartments overflowing with crates, shelves, closets and ovens stuffed with records, to understand how the desire to lay "a template of symbolic differentiation over a potentially infinite range of object domains" (Straw 1997, 6), can lead to madness (or, at least, perpetual singledom).
The image Hannah Arendt evokes of Walter Benjamin is once again called to mind, that of an anxious writer "pearl diving" through his waking life collecting quotations in a little black book. This was a tactical maneuver--Benjamin was saving these quotations as the fundamental substance of the book that was to be his life's work--the book that would be nothing but quotations. But sampling the passages into his own narratives apparently caused Benjamin a certain amount of anxiety. The perfect book would have no exegetical text. However, the problem with this plan is that what strung these pearls together was Benjamin's connection to them, his practice of collecting, his re-membering of their significance through reading and writing. Benjamin could not remove himself entirely from the work without it becoming an empty shell. But he could not simply abandon his collection either. His "magnum opus" was therefore never finished, in part because he could not succeed in sufficiently excising his own presence, his own reflections, from the text. Benjamin's manuscripts were scattered with his suicide, brought about partially, Arendt speculates, due to his having lost his personal library to the Parisian gestapo in 1940 (Arendt 1969, 17). The compilation of scraps and thought fragments now known as The Arcades Project (Benjamin 2002) is the reminder of this attempt at anonymous "remixing." It's as though Benjamin's fascination with varnish in painting extended to his treatment of quotations - the only way to properly respect the aura of the ideas contained within a text was to come as close as possible to their "original" historical "utterance"--i.e., an appearance in a rare book. Collecting was not so much about remixing after all, in this case, as it was about organization.
The record collector who uses a collection in the development of his or her own narratives (or mixes) puts this ethical dimension of collecting into effect. Studying or loving "objects as the scene, the stage of their fate" (Benjamin 1969a, 160) should involve setting them free, so to speak, and not fretting about this independence. The quotes from Friz and Rodgers at the top of this section point towards the manifold ways in which samples retain elements of their context of discovery--making their introduction into new contexts a political act. This is not a new observation; however, the recognition that this politics applies to every instance of sampling, even field recording, represents an important step "forward" for those looking to understand the practice more completely. This politics is not simply, or indeed even most significantly affected by the legal structure of copyright and intellectual property law. In the end it is more a politics of identity that is at play wherein samples are highjacked for their affective and aural potential in the telling of one's own stories. "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 2001, p. 113). As the source of such potential citations, my record collection becomes a work of art, a paradise for time that has passed, a savior of debris. But it's a big pile of heavy, unrecycle-able plastic if I don't listen to it.
"Fundamentally I think it's taking something that previously existed and then re-using it, because it can be a lot of things. But, it's funny because I guess the line between sampling and plagiarism, in that context might be "does it have to be transformed"? I don't know." Bernadette Houde
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 artists from the electronica genres he is more interested 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). An interesting point of view. However, the process involved in creating "meaning" through sampling is left unexplored. Taylor's work centers on discourses surrounding "strange sounds"--or sounds considered "other" to their users. Following Steven Feld (Feld 1997) and others, Taylor's work charts the thin line that musicians who sample weave between appropriate use of the sounds they uncover, and appropriation. This debate is taken up with great frequency in academic treatments of sampling. Intellectual property right is an extremely hot topic currently. At the root of this debate lie concerns, I believe, with the power of technology to rob people of essential experiences, variously understood as aura, authenticity, justice, even life itself. This (modern, postmodern?) anxiety has been well documented by too many thinkers to mention. Sampling is not unique, in this regard. Perhaps, in a way, it is our familiarity with this refrain that made it so easy for the public to appreciate how sampling could steal, as opposed to how it pays homage and/or helps in the creation of unique and inspiring works of art--often without "stealing" at all.
Houde's statement is very apt. Sampling can be a lot of things. Rarely in 2007 is it simply a case of grabbing a catchy loop from someone else's past hit record. The question of plagiarism within music will likely continue to concern academics and others for a long time. So long as aural "texts" are compared to written "texts," through the vehicle of recordings or otherwise, the practice of working with these texts in moments of musical performance will remain anathema, as these instances will rarely include legally-rigourous citations and will be so mixed and mashed with other heterogeneous materials as to represent a Gordian knot for the would be un-raveler of violations. This is not to say that ethics never apply. They hold sway in this arena as much as in any other political domain (see Chapter 3). Ethics in sampling boil down to individual beliefs and acts which promote or detract from those beliefs. Plagiarists are rarely innocent of their actions, and most sample-based musicians do not consider themselves plagiarists. "Thief" is a different sort of title, one that I, among others, am happy to adopt. Sample-based producers steal from the void of ignominy. The past is kept alive via a pushing forward of listening into the future through the vehicles of performance, recording and remixing.
To write about ethical sampling is to emphasize the complex decision making processes that underscore each instance of selection in sample-based audio composition. But it also requires reflection upon how sampling as a practice represents an ethical response to the over-saturation one may feel as a denizen of the contemporary mediascape (Miller 2004). Simply insisting on the sanctity of copyright law as the only mechanism for resolving conflicts around what is appropriate in sampling flies in the face of what is a very natural response when one is addressed through sound--i.e., answering back.
"Recording a sound from a source like, interiors, exteriors, electromagnetic currents, then playing them back in a particular sequence to create something entirely new." Jennifer Morris
In this final section of this concluding chapter, I would like to address the thesis introduced in the introduction to Selected Sounds--namely, that "sampling" in 2007 is a term with the same breadth and applicability as "recording." While the two words are often used to connote different, even diametrically-opposed practices, this discrepancy in attitude is rarely distinguishable in the studio. In fact, the original dichotomy introduced in Chapter 1 was really more of a false abstraction (useful rhetorically). What we are speaking about here is more like a vast network of possibilities. Conceiving of sampling as technology, community, memory, listening, collecting, ethics and recording represents but one attempt amongst many possible alternatives in terms of mapping out this network.
Morris' quote above exemplifies this reality nicely. When asked to describe what sampling "is", the first word she utters is "recording". Would a "traditional" musician ever describe what they do in the studio as "sampling"? I think the answer today might be "yes" more than one might assume, but there is still a certain semantic hesitation on the part of many to go so far. The choice of analog over digital devices provides an avenue for one type of authenticity for many "indie" bands today. However, more often than not this "choice" simply reflects the nature of the constructed signal chain used in the generation of source material. Recordings are still digitally mastered and produced on CD in these instances, and often touched-up at this stage, if not before (for a slightly dated account of this dynamic, see Jones 1992).
Perhaps it is the notion of "recording a sound from a source" (Morris) that distinguishes sampling. Although this argument doesn't feel very strong (what recording doesn't have a "source"?), the focus on the original moment of inspiration to record is indicative, I believe, of a openness to possibility shared by many sample-based musicians. While I might take issue with Morris' suggestion that the goal becomes "to create something entirely new," the discovery of "fresh" sonic possibilities through recording technologies is vital to sampling's history and future.
But what does it do to suggest that "sampling" and "recording" have become synonymous? For one thing, it effaces the hierarchy of "originality" that many have tried to assert between the two practices--i.e., that sampling is somehow parasitic upon the archives of recorded history not to mention contemporary practices. And it also points towards the historical intermingling of the two pursuits throughout the 80s and 90s. Finally, stating simply that "sampling=recording" in 2007 tends to get people interested in what one has to say about other matters (such as technology, community, memory, et al.). I have mentioned many contemporary examples throughout this dissertation of technologies/practices that defy tidy determinations in terms of being sample-based or not (such as turntablism and soundscape composition). I used to think that embracing the digital placed an artist into the camp of sample-based musician. I realize now that the truth, if it can be called that, is a more subjective matter. Whether or not I view myself or another artists as "sample-based" has to do with my own self-determined mechanisms for distinguishing sampling from other related practices and concepts.
Not to take a final refuge in relativism, but just what sampling "is" cannot be determined. It is too multifaceted a practice. Perhaps its very nature as a "practice" makes it so. In any event, even if I were to manage to define sampling at this point in time, things would be different next week. As I have suggested above, the only "limitation" to the practice that seems appropriate is the notion that sample-based producers share an admiration for adventure and play with sound. To proclaim that sound, for the sampling musician, is "an utterly malleable material" (Miller 2004, 20), well...that's just a "crock of crap." Technology does not make us omnipotent, as much as many have wished it did. Besides, where is the social creativity in realizing only your own fantasies? Far from being a solipsistic activity, sample-based musical composition articulates technologies, memories, communities, ethics, collections and innumerable moments of listening. It is as social, political and creative an act as speaking a language and has catapulted the history of sound recording into the limelight of contemporary debate over intellectual property in our hyper-mediated age.