04 – sampling and sequencing

"...a sample is both ghost and slave"

Simon Reynolds “Retromania” 2011.

"Until Thomas A. Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, sound had only been accessible in the moment of its creation.  If a sound was to survive, it needed to be described in words or made again by the moving bodies that created it the first time.  Today, we rarely think of sound as a passing, one-off moment because we can record, store and manipulate it so easily.  However, the impact recorded sound has made on our approach to listening is deep; we now think of sound as solid and repeatable rather than transient and ephemeral."

Raffaseder and Parker “Interrelation: Sound-Transformation and Remixing in Real-Time” 2008

Sampling, what is it?

–       An alternative to synthesising sound

–       Rather than wavetable synthesis where a small table is scanned, sampling “synthesis” scans a large wavetable of several seconds of sound (Roads, 1996)

–       Exciting possibilities because sound from the real-world (concrète) is dynamic and generally varies constantly over time

–       The idea of taking sound from the real-world, manipulating it and playing it back is not new. Étude aux chemins de fer (Railroad Study)(1948) by Pierre Schaeffer is an early example of the musical re-ordering of “recorded sound”, or this from the slightly later Symphonie pour un homme seul (Symphony for One Man Alone, 1949-50) by Schaeffer and Pierre Henry:

–       There is a rich history across the 20^th century of machines developed especially to play real-world (concrete, sampled, recorded) sound back

americanhistory.si.edu/press/fact-sheets/early-sound-recording-collection-and-sound-recovery-project

irene.lbl.gov/ – non-damaging optical scanning of early recording media “audio reconstruction from mechanical recordings”.

www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php

This page shows examples of some of the very first recordings ever made of the human voice.

Technologies of frailty and failure make us hear recordings differently. Each performance of a wax cylinder and to some extent an LP is different and bears the marks of its life as an artefact in the world on the skin of its sound: www.alexruthmann.com/blog1/?p=459

sbkwmusic.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/edison-cylinder-recording-session.html

Listening to some of these early sound recordings of the voice, I’m reminded of Peter Ablinger’s “Speaking Piano” 2009; ablinger.mur.at/speaking_piano.html

ablinger.mur.at/video/god_small.mov – Declaration of the International Environmental Criminal Court

–       A famous pre-digital sampler is the Mellotron (Roads, 1996, p. 120);

–       Storing digital audio Rapid storage and access of digital audio gradually became more feasible as memory became cheaper.

–       See the Fairlight CMI (computer music instrument) 1979;

Which is, of course, much cooler when Herbie Hancock uses it on Sesame Street:

–       Don’t forget the E-mu Emulator (1981);

(Alan Wilder from Depeche Mode)

The consequences of sampling

–       Exciting and various sound sources instantly accessible

–       In live contexts, it can be used to echo, repeat with variation or augment a statement made in the real world. Samples can be used as incomplete references to something, but may appear complete in their representation.

–       Despite sonically exciting time-varying sound, it is still “fixed” to some extent and bears little relation to the real-world sounds that might have been sampled originally. This is especially the case with sampled instrument sounds – the sound has actually become another thing entirely, more of an object or symbol that stands in for what we remember as being the thing.

–       Extreme precision is possible in fixed media formats such as film, electronic composition and live performance etc.

–       Changes in culture are linked to technologies of mass production.

Musical instruments produce sounds. Composers produce music. Musical instruments reproduce music. Tape recorders, radios, disc players, etc., reproduce sound. A device such as a wind-up music box produces sound and reproduces music. A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist who plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle as a plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not reproduced - the record player becomes a musical instrument. A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument, is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device, in effect reducing a distinction manifested by copyright.

John Oswald, 1985, “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Perogative”

–       Plunderphonics : John Oswald (1985)(“p l u n d e r p h o n i c s,” accessed 30 -9 – 2010.) www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xnotes.html

Read this: www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html

–       Early Hip Hop / scratching / beatboxing and sampling cultures, new instruments and modes of expression, using recent culture to reference and take ownership of old attitudes, to debunk them, or to nostalgically create a reference point to a shared moment in time.

"From the late eighties onwards, a crate-digger culture gradually emerged: beat prospectors in search of obscure raw material.... auteur crate-digger-figures like Prince Paul, Premier, the RZA, DJ Shadow - was not just locating those secret record spots... it was the acute sensibility that enabled them to spot a potential sample that others wouldn't notice... The parallel for this new form of phonographic artistry was photography, specifically the techniques of cropping and enlargement. With sampling, the detail that's zoomed in on and 'blown up' is not spatial but temporal. A moment that would otherwise just be lost in the forward flow of music is arrested and stretched by looking, allowing the ear to linger lovingly on it, INit." [emphasis author's own]

Simon Reynolds, pg. 322 “Retromania”, 2011.

Here’s Marley Marl explaining how he made the beat for ‘The Bridge’ with MC Shan (1984) and describing the dangers of leaving your tapes around in studios…

DJ Shadow talking about records he made with records in the 2002 film “Scratch” by Doug Pray;

–       youTube, a generation where the primary mode of expression the presentation of the work of others. A living reference that tells us a great deal about how we think and feel now and it will be different tomorrow.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GO5W6FRZPM

Some technical issues

• Looping is good, but it is a machine that’s doing it. Are there any loops away from mechanisation?
• Looping – not easy to get a sensible section of audio to loop
• ADSR attack, decay, sustain, release, sustain section is the place to find loop points, the whole ADSR is known as an envelope. This is both a thing that can describe the trajectory of an extant sound, or something that’s imposed upon a sound by a synth / sampler.

• Pitch shifting (playing back samples at different speeds is gritty, inaccurate, charming…

Current technologies

–       Software samplers, hardware samplers

–       MAX MSP |PURE DATA – the home-grown sampler… potential to be very interesting, but what would you do to a recorded sound that you can’t already do with something off the shelf?

Bibliography