As you may have worked out by now – I haven’t been writing about writing my dissertation because …I have been writing my dissertation. So, a quick update: it’s going well enough. It will get done. It won’t be amazing – no groundbreaking discoveries made or anything, but it should be adequate. Woohoo, aiming high!
When it’s done, I’ll get back to writing about music I like and how much of an idiot I was 17. If anyone cares to read about that kind of thing…
Posted in Dissertation Files
In which I try to remain focused while describing my difficulty remaining focused.
Experience has taught me – and everyone, I suppose – that the freedom of choice is a double-edged sword. The more choices you have, the sharper those edges get. Faced with two or three possible flavours of ice-cream, making a choice is usually quite stress-free (you obviously choose to have a scoop of each). However, given a selection of 31, things get a lot trickier. Even after you eliminate the ones you have no intention of even sampling, like banana (something that should only ever be consumed as an actual piece of fruit, never a flavour), you still end up torn between a few great possibilites: ones you’ve had before and know you like, or ones that look/sound so good you’re sure you’ll love them.
What you want to avoid, at all costs, is that regret: thinking that, okay, this flavour is pretty good, but what if another one would have been better? Like the one my friend got instead. The one I am now enviously coveting.
I imagine people might go through a much more intense version of this when faced with decisions of considerably more importance than dessert, such as choosing what house to buy, or whether or not to get married.
The decision I had to make was probably a lot closer in weight to the dessert choice than marriage – what topic to select for my dissertation. The range of options I had were vast, though. Of course it had to be related to digital media in some way, but that could have been any of hundreds of things.
As it turned out, however, the decision was a lot less difficult than I’d expected. This topic stood out, well above the other possibilities, dwarfing them as they futilely attempted to compete for my attention below. For possibly the first time in my life, I was able to choose a topic of coursework for myself that I had a truly immense interest in, something I was highly passionate about.
There was only one edge to this sword! The good edge, too! Or so I thought…
I have since discovered that there is a downside to working on something you find incredibly captivating: It is incredibly captivating.
Over the last few of weeks I have been ingesting so many books, articles, interviews, essays and videos on how copyright laws and digital sampling technology affect creators and consumers of art and it’s all just so fascinating.
That sounds like a wonderful thing. It certainly sounds a lot better than slogging away at a project or essay about something you find unendurably tedious. But is it really? I know that boring material can drive us to external distractions, but usually you’re able to pull it together and get the thing done, even if you don’t enjoy the process.
Here, I find myself getting almost hopelessly distracted by all these things that are actually relevant to my end goal.
Well, I suppose that sentence is a little misleading. A lot of the problematic, distracting material isn’t wholly relevant. It’s just that it is very very closely related (with a few measures of relevance mixed in) – and hence crops in almost all of the same books, articles, videos, etc.
I’m talking here about things like piracy, peer-to-peer file-sharing, record industry associations suing dead grandmothers for downloading music, how the industry in general reacts to possible cases of copyright infringement (including sampling in music), etc.
But, David, all those sounds like things that you should be researching, aren’t you going to include that kind of stuff in the dissertation?
Yes and no. Really, the difficulties with choosing to do a paper on something you’re really interested in aren’t the direct result of it being interesting, it’s that the format of this project has limitations.
The dissertation has to be 12,000 words. When I first learned of this, I found the idea of writing something of that length incredible daunting. Again, because I had done exactly zero essays in my undergraduate studies. I still find the idea of writing 12,000 words on this topic quite daunting, but it’s because I have to squeeze all these ideas into just 12,000 words. With that limitation, I had to narrow it down. And because so much existing literature concentrates on corporations battling average consumers, Internet piracy and so forth, I chose to focus mainly on how sampling affects the artists themselves.
Hmm, perhaps I should start imposing word limits on these blog posts in order to force me to be more concise; get to the point a bit quicker. That said, I’ve probably made my point in this one already – and I’m under 780 words so far. Shortest post yet! Go me!
…and now I’ve gone over that.
I did want to say something about Lawrence Lessig, if only to justify the pun in the title.
I’ll let his official site’s info page tell you who he is, if you’re unfamiliar. I first encountered him when I watched RiP: A Remix Manifesto (which you can freely watch or download), a documentary-ish film about copyright which will most likely end up in my dissertation’s bibliography. He also features in Good Copy, Bad Copy, another film I will inevitably be referencing.
I’m currently reading his latest book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Unlike most of the other books I’m looking at for this paper, I’m not scanning it, hunting down the most relevant snippets of info. No, I’m actually reading it. Because the man writes well. And he’s persuasive. I sometimes feel like I’m nodding along as I read, as if he were in the room talking to me. Maybe I am actually nodding. But that would make reading text a bit tricky, so I’d have noticed if I was.
Lessig’s all about balance. Unlike some of the activists in this area, who are fighting for its abolition, Lessig believes that copyright is a good thing. There’s just a (significant) lack of balance in its current implementation. His aim is to strike that balance: between protecting authors of works, while allowing others to reuse, reinterpret and remix those works without fear of being sued.
To that end he (co-)founded Creative Commons, “a nonprofit organization that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.” Creative Commons offers licences, which artists use to let people know what rights they have in relation to using the work. The default one is the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence, which allows the public to share the work and to remix it, provided they attribute the source, do not sell it and share any remixes they make in the same fashion. At first glance, it sounds like a something only nerdy amateurs would be messing around with. But some nerdy famous folk have been at it too. And with rewarding results.
Creative Commons will definitely feature if/when I discuss alternatives to copyright in the dissertation, so I may end up writing more about it here. Or not. Time is of the essence and these blog posts, while helpful (for me at least!), are obviously not as high on my priority list as the paper itself!
I shall leave you with Lessig’s 2007 TED talk. Enjoy! [it seems Universal Music Group doesn't want people embedding this in blogs - how hilariously apt! You can watch it on Youtube here.]
(He also did one last year. It is here.)
What I learned from reading (select chapters of) a book. That introductory sentence probably wasn’t necessary. That explanatory one probably wasn’t either.
Mark Katz is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, according to its back cover, “explores how recording technology has encouraged new ways of listening to music, led performers to change their practices, and allowed entirely new musical genres to come into existence.” I took this book out of the college library in mid-November, but didn’t open it until a few days ago. Yes, I have renewed it.
I was mostly concerned with the seventh chapter of the book, entitled “Music In 1s and 0s: The Art and Politics of Digital Sampling”. The chapter actually addresses a significant portion of the questions my chosen topic raises. Possibly too many?! I have some worries that this particular may become a crutch of some kind. I’ll definitely have to prevent any reliance on it.
Katz introduces the concept of digital sampling with the example of Clyde Stubblefield’s drum break in James Brown’s 1970 song ‘Funky Drummer, Part 1 and 2′, which is supposedly the most sampled break in popular music. He says the break “enjoys a promiscuous, chameleonic existence”, appearing in quite a wide and varied range of songs, having been manipulated using digital technology. “In each example … something of the original sound is maintained, yet its meaning changes in every new setting.”
Stubblefield is also one of the subjects in a documentary called Copyright Criminals, which I will inevitably draw on while doing this dissertation. Although his performance has been appropriated so frequently, he apparently has yet to received any credit or compensation for any of these samples. What’s interesting is that this isn’t because all these artists have used the sample illegally – though I’m sure some have, it’s because Stubblefield was just a hired hand in the studio. James Brown is credited as the composer of the song, including this drum solo. So, even if every one of these cases of sampling were all “legitimate”, the credit and the cash would be heading to the James Brown estate, not the actual performer whose performance is being used. As such, it would be disingenuous to claim that the samplers are somehow depriving Stubblefield from potential revenue – a kind of argument oft used by proponents of strict copyright laws and protection.
Anyway, back to Katz!
He goes on to describe what digital sampling is, namely “a type of computer synthesis in which sound is rendered into data, data that in turn comprise instructions for reconstructing that sound.” He likens sampling a jigsaw puzzle: “a sound is cut up into pieces and then put back together to form a digitized ‘picture’ of that sound.” In this process, the sound is not captured in its entirety. Instead, at a certain rate (e.g. 44,100 times a second), the amplitude of the sound rate is measured, with this measurement stored as a number. In order to reconstruct the sound, “sampling can … be fast and fine enough so that the human ear perceives a continuous and faithfully rendered reproduction.”
When a sound is captured like this, it can then be altered and shaped in many different ways. This is the advantage of digital sampling.
Tempo and pitch can be increased or decreased in any increment, and the two can be manipulated independently… Sounds can be reversed, cut, looped, and layered; reverberation can be added; certain frequencies within a sound can be boosted or deemphasized. Noise can be removed to make an old recording sound pristine, or even added to make a pristine recording sound old, as can often be heard in recent popular music. All of these manipulations can be visited upon any sound, musical or otherwise, and on any length of sound that can be recorded. A sample can be a fraction of a waveform, a single note from an instrument or voice, a rhythm, a melody, a harmony, or an entire work or album. Although sampling, particularly when done well, is far from a simple matter, the possibilities it offers are nearly limitless.
Katz explores the roots of digital sampling, “as a form of musical borrowing.” He cites various instances of such borrowing over the last millennium: medieval chants borrowing earlier ones; Liszt and Rachmaninoff using ‘The Day of Wrath’; Bach reworking Vivaldi; Gounod reworking Bach; etc. Then he asks:
Yet isn’t there something fundamentally different between such traditional acts of borrowing and digital sampling? It is sometimes said that while a quotation is simply a representation of another piece, a sampled passage of music is that music. But that depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.
As we saw above, after sampling a sound, one is left with but an approximation or ‘picture’ of the sound, not the sound itself. Okay, so the approximation might be one so good that a listener may not be able to distinguish it from the source – but it is an approximation nonetheless. So, “if sampling represents sound, we cannot say that a sampled passage of music is that music.”
However, this representation is in a completely different league from those historical examples. Gounod certainly wasn’t able to capture the sound of the air in the room when Bach was composing his Prelude in C Major, whereas a digital sample of Stubblefield’s drum break can recreate, in great detail, how the space in which he was drumming sounded. Rather than borrowing just a piece of work, sampling allows us to borrow “a unique sound event”: a specific performance.
Katz uses three case studies to examine different uses of sampling. The first is Paul Lansky’s ‘Notjustmoreidlechatter’, a piece built from samples of his wife reading Jane Eyre. The piece is quite startling. You can clearly tell the sounds are that of human speech, but it is nigh on impossible to pick out what words or phrases the sounds have come from. Indeed, the chances of someone oblivious to its origins listening to it and picking out the text that was used would be nil. If, instead of taking a novel from the public domain, Lansky had used a contemporary, copyrighted piece of writing, I would find it hard to believe that its author would accuse him of any kind of theft. Have a listen and see if you agree (headphones advisable):
Of course, the question I’m asking is: what if it were a copyrighted piece of music?
The second and third case studies do use audio resources, in different ways. Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’ centres on the unaccompanied vocal part that opens of Camille Yarbrough’s ‘Take Yo’ Praise’:
Wait, unaccompanied?! Yes, this surprised me too. I had assumed the vocal and piano were from the same source. Admittedly I never gave it a very close listen – and hadn’t listened to it for a long time. Listening now, with that knowledge, it seems obvious. But back then, Norman Cook had 15-year-old me completely fooled. I suppose it helps that the opening of the song (the piano and vocal) is so clearly distinct from what happens when the whole thing kicks off a minute into it. Also, I was probably distracted by the Spike Jonze video.
But what effects do/did Cook’s sampling have on the original recording and its performer? Some argue that the sampling “neuters Yarbrough”, “changes [her] voice in such a way that it is less nuanced than the original” and eliminates the original’s eroticism, rendering her voice asexual. Katz goes on to offer “another possibility, perhaps not mutually exclusive … that Cook is disempowering Yarbrough, erasing her history, identity, and vitality.” Similarly, one could argue that this is “just another example of a white musician appropriating and denuding black culture for profit and fame?”
However…
It turns out that Yarbrough was actually “pleasantly surprised” when she first heard the song. She was pleased that Cook had sampled the hook from ‘Take Yo’ Praise,’ which she considers the emotional core of her song, with an important message to offer… Yarbrough also feels that the gospel quality Cook lent the sample was appropriate, and brought out the spirituality of her song, at least in the opening of ‘Praise You.’ … And although Yarbrough seems ambivalent about what she calls the ‘dance hall’ sound of the remainder of the song, she does not feel that it in any way devalues her work. After all, she points out, ‘I can still do that song as I do it. And so what he did, thats’ on him; what I do, that’s me.’
Cook also gave her a co-writer credit and a considerable 60% of the royalties. Is this Cook being fair? Generous? Or perhaps he wished to avoid a repeat of when Pete Townshend “was given sole composer credit … and 100 percent of the royalties” of an earlier song in which he sampled (a cover of) The Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’.
As well as receiving money from the sales and licensing, Yarbrough has benefited from Cook’s song in other ways:
‘Praise You’ has brought a good deal of positive attention to Yarbrough and her music, leading to the re-release of her 1975 album The Iron Pot Cooker; two remixes of the song, and a reevaluation of her place in popular music by the press. Cook may have ‘chopped chunks’ out of Yarbrough’s song, but the result hardly seems to have been disempowering.
The third case study is of Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power‘.
The backing track of ‘Fight the Power’ contains dozens of samples, most of which are less than one second long. These individual fragments are “chopped, looped, layered, and transformed” to create a complex, polyrhythmic sound which has a “dizzying, exhilarating, and tantalizing” effect. The sampling also reflects the political message of the lyrics. Chuck D. raps about important black figures’ lack of recognition in America, while accompanied by “samples, literally in the form of digitized snippets, of the work of [Public Enemy's] underrepresented heroes”.
One of my favourite parts of this section is where Katz dismisses the possibility of this sample-based music being replicated live:
…it would be extraordinarily difficult, perhaps impossible, to reproduce the dense polyphony and distinctive timbres of the rhythm track without digital sampling. Even if the sampled musicians were to perform their chopped and looped parts in concert (an unlikely prospect!), they themselves could not exactly reproduce the original. It is not simply their voices or their playing that is important, but specific and well-known performances as mediated through recording technologies and heard on discs of a certain vintage.
Katz closes the chapter explaining how, instead of requiring traditional forms of notation and people to perform, “composers who work with samples work directly with sound, thus becoming more like their counterparts in the visual and plastic arts.” With that, ”sampling has transformed the very art of composition.”
Right.
So, almost everything in this chapter directly relates to issues I want to address: what sampling is; how it can be used; how sampled artists react to, may benefit from and/or may suffer from having their work sampled; if sampling can be original or creative; and so on.
The chapters either side of this one were also of interest. Chapter six spoke about turntablism. This clearly has parallels with digital sampling, as turntablists use their equipment and skills to “[alter] existing sounds and [produce] a wide range of wholly new ones.” And, among the community, originality is of the utmost importance, however, it “is not judged on the source of the raw materials, but in their selection, juxtaposition, and transformation.” This chapter also really made me want to re-watch Scratch.
Chapter eight tackled the issue of online peer-to-peer file-sharing, the implications of which (with regard to copyright) definitely relate to my chosen topic.
Alas, I have gone on a bit. And I really need to focus on (so many) other sources of information. But hopefully this has given some more insight into what I’m researching.
As I mentioned on the About This Site page, I have to write a dissertation (officially a “research paper”) for my master’s degree. This paper, which should have a length of about 12,000 words, is due to be submitted on 4 March – a scarily short two months from now.
In this series, I will write about the reference material I’ve been going through, as well as my progress with the paper. This first post outlines the topic I’ve selected and what issues I plan to address.
At the end of November, I had to submit my research paper proposal. This was its introduction, which ended up being the bulk of it:
At 10:21 on 15 November, 2010, Gregg Gillis used his Twitter account to broadcast the following message: “Anyone want to hear my album right now?“ Within fifteen minutes, the album, entitled All Day, was released as a free download on the Illegal Art label’s website.
All Day was the fifth album to be released by Gillis under his pseudonym, Girl Talk. His previous release, Feed the Animals, was his first after quitting his day job as a biomedical engineer. It, too, was made available to download for free. Feed the Animals was later included in Time‘s list of the Top Ten Albums of 2008.
The most interesting aspect of Gregg Gillis as a modern artist is not that he releases his work for free, nor is it that he utilizes social media networks as a platform for promotion. It is the nature of his music itself: Though his albums feature vocals and a wide array of instrumentation, Gillis does not sing or play an instrument. Instead, he makes mash-ups: pieces comprised of samples taken from existing recordings.
Oxford defines a mash-up as “a musical track comprising the vocals of one recording placed over the instrumental backing of another”. While many mash-ups are of this simple, “A vs. B” format, Gillis’s work is far more dense: Feed the Animals is a 54-minute piece (divided into 14 tracks) consisting of samples from approximately 320 popular songs. All Day is 71 minutes long and features audio cut from over 370 songs.
In light of numerous high-profile legal disputes over the unsolicited appropriation of copyrighted recordings, one might wonder how Gillis was able to secure the permission of so many artists and record companies to use their material. As it turns out, he did not even attempt to clear any of the 690+ samples used. The New York Times refers to the music of Girl Talk as “a lawsuit waiting to happen”.
Yet, Gillis has yet to be sued. He has not received any cease-and-desist orders, like the one Danger Mouse received from EMI when he sampled The Beatles without permission to create The Grey Album. Some of the artists sampled have even spoken favourably of Gillis’s work.
So yes, the dissertation is about mash-ups. Well, in particular, it’s about sampling.
Now I could try and make some kind of claim that I’m completely objective when it comes to questions about sampling in music, but it would by a big fat lie. People who know me are probably quite aware of my huge love of mash-ups and Girl Talk. On 15 November, I downloaded All Day within minutes of its release. Like many fans, I tweeted about it. Heck, when Gillis performed at the 2009 Summer Sonic festival in Osaka, I was one of the volunteers who danced on stage for the duration of his set!
But the whole point is to approach the subject without bias. So that will be one of my main challenges: making sure I examine all sides when tackling my research question. What question? Oh…
Should artists who find their work sampled see themselves as victims of copyright theft and pour effort into fighting those who appropriate their work? Or, should they embrace and encourage sampling, remixes and mash-ups of their work?
Which is basically a wordier way of asking: “Is sampling good or bad for the musicians who are sampled?”
Of course, this leads to various sub- and related questions. I did a draft chapter outline a couple of weeks ago and included some:
Chapter 1 – The Technical Details
- What is sampling? What is a mash-up? What is a remix?
- How has sampling been used?
- How do artists approach source material?
- What technologies and techniques do they use – how have these developed over time?
Chapter 2 – Aesthetics/Originality
- How has sampling been received among the critical and musical community? (e.g. Famous recording engineer Steve Albini has described sampling as “extraordinarily lazy” and “cheap and easy”.)
- How have sampled artists themselves reacted to derivative works, in terms of their quality (as opposed to reactions regarding intellectual property theft/copyright)?
- Have they been flattered/honoured? Are they indifferent? Do they feel the sampling has impacted negatively on the integrity of the source material?
- Does sampling render a resulting piece unoriginal?
- Can/Should mash-ups be deemed original, valid works of art?
- How does sampling in music compare to appropriation in other media (e.g. Andy Warhol painting soup tins) – or even other forms of “borrowing” in music (e.g. Classical, Blues)
Chapter 3 – Ethics/The Law
- How do current copyright and intellectual property laws class sampling?
- What precedents have been set by past sampling lawsuits? (e.g. Grand Upright vs Warner Bros. Records – the Biz Markie/Gilbert O’Sullivan case)
- What are the current laws meant to protect?
- Do these laws impinge on artists’ abilities to work (through sampling) or strangle entire forms of expression? (the RZA: “Right now, without sampling in hip-hop, it’s really a soggy- ass form of music. The art form of hip-hop—the sound that attracted us to it—is diminishing. It’s becoming just another form of pop music.”)
- Should all sampling be treated the same? Does it matter if/how much a sample has been altered/processed?
- (How) can one determine if a work is “transformative” or straight “theft”?
- What alternatives to copyright are there? (e.g. Creative Commons)
Chapter 4 – Economics/Money
- Are mash-up artists making money?
- What overlaps exist between the effects of sampling and those of piracy?
- Does sampling result in a loss in revenue for the sampled artist?
- Have any artists benefitted from having their work sampled? (e.g. increased exposure to wider audiences)
- What effects are seen by artists who actively encourage sampling and remixing of their work?
- Could the examples set by artists such as Nine Inch Nails be business models of the future?
As you can see, there is a fair bit to keep me busy.
I will probably have to revise that structure. It might make more sense to group the legal questions with the technical ones. These two are related in the sense that they relate to the capabilities of mash-up and remix artists: What do current technology and current laws allow them to do? How do they work within these constraints?
The actual benefits or harm that can be caused by sampling fall more in the aesthetic and economic categories: the artist benefits financially; the artist loses revenue; the sampling results in a significant work of art; the source material diminishes in some way.
I’m sure this will all evolve over the next few weeks. Hopefully into something interesting – and something that gets me that degree, of course!
