Ghosts in musical debris: an aesthetics of sampling
I've been thinking for a while now about what it is that I find so appealing, as a listener and composer, about techniques of sampling in music. Considering that sampling can be defined quite broadly – simply as the recording and then editing of sounds from one piece of music for use in one's own piece of music – it's interesting that the things listeners tend to identify as 'samples' (at least within experimental electronic music) often share quite similar aesthetic properties and cultural associations. The act of sampling does not in itself necessitate these particular associations and understandings.
In contemporary EEM, the typical aesthetic characteristic of the sample is the audibility of its constitution as a sample. The very fact that the sound has been taken from another musical piece is something the musician-as-sampler often either tries to communicate or does not cover up. This can be communicated within the track in a variety of ways. The sampled element could 'stand out' from the rest of the piece, by being made up of different frequencies such that it sounds, say, 'thinner' or 'more muffled' etc. than other elements of the track. The sample's appearance within the track could be accompanied by a 'click', thus implying its recorded nature. Background hiss could either be left in or added to the sampled sound (a now-classic technique from trip-hop through to dubstep's various incarnations and across much of today's dark ambient). What's often important for the listener above all is the sample being distinguished from the rest of the track in some way; this is what creates the aesthetic quality of 'obviously' being a sample.
The typical cultural association is on the face of it more complicated, but ultimately provides a way of understanding the continuity of samples' aesthetic qualities such that we see the aesthetic quality and cultural association as mutually self-constituting.
Contrary to a lot of common wisdom about the acousmatic nature of sounds and the precision of computer technology, a sample of a piece of music, when placed in another track, still carries with it sonic debris from its original source. This isn't quite the same as what I argued above about a sound element making audible its own sampled nature, though it is related. When a musician samples a slice of sound from a piece of music, that slice inevitably contains sonic information about its source. When you try sampling the vocal part from a piece of music, the musical accompaniment to that vocal comes with it. When you sample part of a melody line from a piano piece, the sustained echo from the part immediately preceding the part you're sampling comes along too, as potentially does the beginning of the next part. These aesthetic elements are not just complicit in the audibility of the sound's sampled nature; they are complicit in the audibility of the sound's actually having been taken from another piece of music.
Because these bits of debris from the source piece of music are often experienced as 'jarring' with the track into which the sample has now been placed – maybe the accompaniment to the singing isn't quite in the same key or tempo as the new track, or whatever – listeners come to terms with these sonic elements of the new track by conceptualising the sample as a sample. We make sense of the aesthetic nature of sound slice by labelling it 'sample'. In doing so, however, we as listeners are then faced with a dilemma. We've made ourselves aware through our listening & conceptual stance that the track is made up of samples from other musical pieces. Unless we recognise and thus can identify musical elements of the sample, though, there is no information embedded within the track we're listening to about the track from which the sample has been sourced. All else being equal – and assuming the composer hasn't deliberately picked an obvious piece of music to sample from in order for us to recognise it – it is a mystery to us as we listen to the track where the sample is from.
Assuming the source of the sample is unknown (and thus, through the track at least, unknowable) to us, then, we as listeners can't actually conceptualise the source musical piece. When we hear the vocal sample, we don't know how the vocal melody develops beyond the bit that's been allowed into the new track. We don't know from what part of the original track the sampled sound is from – is it from the beginning of a piece, or the end? Is it a relatively minor part, or is it the primary riff? While all experience of music relies upon listener memory – relating previous sections of the music to later sections, experience of time in the development of musical ideas and so on – these sampled sounds problematise this typical use of memory by provoking us to recall music we haven't actually listened to! All we can do as a listener is relate the sampled sound to those musical elements that comprise the new track into which the sample has been placed.
I argue that, as a result of our being unable to conceptualise the source music, that source piece never properly comes into existence for us as we listen to it. It is never fully actualised or performed in the way we presume was intended. Source pieces of music have a strange sort of half-existence for listeners; they are presumably full proper pieces of music that have been (to our ears) necessarily destroyed in order for another piece (the one constituted partly by samples) to come into existence. The sample, then, is a conduit to music that is never properly constituted for us. All we can do is try to imagine, when we hear the sample, how the source piece may have sounded. We also marvel at the seeming experienced coincidence of the sampled sound 'syncing' or interacting in aesthetically-fulfilling ways with the other elements of the track into which the sound has been placed. I suspect this is part of the appeal of sampling in tracks. I think we also get pleasure from hearing a sample that occurred earlier in a new piece of music sounding again but lasting longer or being allowed to play out longer, effectively allowing us to hear more of the source piece.
My description of this kind of sampling could be characterised as ghostly – the sample seems to act as a connection between life (of the new track we're listening to) and death (of the source piece of music). This reminded me of a thread of argument in David Toop's latest book Sinister Resonance. Toop begins from the premise that listening is a kind of mediumship, that we tease out these things called sounds whose existence is permanently ambiguous. Sound, after all, is a “persistent fading”, coming into existence out only to inevitably decay. From this Toop reasons that sound, along with both music and silence, exists “uncomfortably close to death – a shocking and shaping of the air, then suddenly gone” (25).
If music is uncomfortably close to death, then sampled music is dead even as it is sounded (in the way that a ghost is presumably a person who is dead even as they appear to us). Because of our awareness of the sound's having come from another piece of music, we experience the sample's inevitable decay as something that has already occurred as part of the source music; what we're left with, in our experience, is a kind of reanimation of the sound in ghostly form. This ghostliness makes the intangible nature of sound the focus of our attention.
All of this helps to explain the continuity of sampling's aesthetic qualities. The specific typical associations we make with sampling are those that, to our mind, aestheticise sound's link with death. Thus aesthetic qualities such as being or mimicking a bad recording, 'drop-outs' in the sound, background hiss and audible editing (the latter occurring in Sylvian & Czukay' Plight and Premonition which I wrote about previously) are appealing to us as listeners because they highlight sound's intangibility and, ultimately, instability, something that makes a listener's experience of music exciting in its being irresolvable. The mystery of the sample's musical source for us evokes the mystery of sound's existence. This, I think, goes some way to explaining the appeal of what is admittedly just one type of sampling common in today's experimental electronic music.
This appeal is neither essential nor unproblematic, of course, as I think analysis of lots of pieces of music would demonstrate; but I do think there is something to this. Having made this case, I'm hoping to explore in future posts pieces of music, old and very new, which either extend sampling's relationship to death or play around with it in order to make music that's surprising and original.
In contemporary EEM, the typical aesthetic characteristic of the sample is the audibility of its constitution as a sample. The very fact that the sound has been taken from another musical piece is something the musician-as-sampler often either tries to communicate or does not cover up. This can be communicated within the track in a variety of ways. The sampled element could 'stand out' from the rest of the piece, by being made up of different frequencies such that it sounds, say, 'thinner' or 'more muffled' etc. than other elements of the track. The sample's appearance within the track could be accompanied by a 'click', thus implying its recorded nature. Background hiss could either be left in or added to the sampled sound (a now-classic technique from trip-hop through to dubstep's various incarnations and across much of today's dark ambient). What's often important for the listener above all is the sample being distinguished from the rest of the track in some way; this is what creates the aesthetic quality of 'obviously' being a sample.
The typical cultural association is on the face of it more complicated, but ultimately provides a way of understanding the continuity of samples' aesthetic qualities such that we see the aesthetic quality and cultural association as mutually self-constituting.
Contrary to a lot of common wisdom about the acousmatic nature of sounds and the precision of computer technology, a sample of a piece of music, when placed in another track, still carries with it sonic debris from its original source. This isn't quite the same as what I argued above about a sound element making audible its own sampled nature, though it is related. When a musician samples a slice of sound from a piece of music, that slice inevitably contains sonic information about its source. When you try sampling the vocal part from a piece of music, the musical accompaniment to that vocal comes with it. When you sample part of a melody line from a piano piece, the sustained echo from the part immediately preceding the part you're sampling comes along too, as potentially does the beginning of the next part. These aesthetic elements are not just complicit in the audibility of the sound's sampled nature; they are complicit in the audibility of the sound's actually having been taken from another piece of music.
Because these bits of debris from the source piece of music are often experienced as 'jarring' with the track into which the sample has now been placed – maybe the accompaniment to the singing isn't quite in the same key or tempo as the new track, or whatever – listeners come to terms with these sonic elements of the new track by conceptualising the sample as a sample. We make sense of the aesthetic nature of sound slice by labelling it 'sample'. In doing so, however, we as listeners are then faced with a dilemma. We've made ourselves aware through our listening & conceptual stance that the track is made up of samples from other musical pieces. Unless we recognise and thus can identify musical elements of the sample, though, there is no information embedded within the track we're listening to about the track from which the sample has been sourced. All else being equal – and assuming the composer hasn't deliberately picked an obvious piece of music to sample from in order for us to recognise it – it is a mystery to us as we listen to the track where the sample is from.
Assuming the source of the sample is unknown (and thus, through the track at least, unknowable) to us, then, we as listeners can't actually conceptualise the source musical piece. When we hear the vocal sample, we don't know how the vocal melody develops beyond the bit that's been allowed into the new track. We don't know from what part of the original track the sampled sound is from – is it from the beginning of a piece, or the end? Is it a relatively minor part, or is it the primary riff? While all experience of music relies upon listener memory – relating previous sections of the music to later sections, experience of time in the development of musical ideas and so on – these sampled sounds problematise this typical use of memory by provoking us to recall music we haven't actually listened to! All we can do as a listener is relate the sampled sound to those musical elements that comprise the new track into which the sample has been placed.
I argue that, as a result of our being unable to conceptualise the source music, that source piece never properly comes into existence for us as we listen to it. It is never fully actualised or performed in the way we presume was intended. Source pieces of music have a strange sort of half-existence for listeners; they are presumably full proper pieces of music that have been (to our ears) necessarily destroyed in order for another piece (the one constituted partly by samples) to come into existence. The sample, then, is a conduit to music that is never properly constituted for us. All we can do is try to imagine, when we hear the sample, how the source piece may have sounded. We also marvel at the seeming experienced coincidence of the sampled sound 'syncing' or interacting in aesthetically-fulfilling ways with the other elements of the track into which the sound has been placed. I suspect this is part of the appeal of sampling in tracks. I think we also get pleasure from hearing a sample that occurred earlier in a new piece of music sounding again but lasting longer or being allowed to play out longer, effectively allowing us to hear more of the source piece.
My description of this kind of sampling could be characterised as ghostly – the sample seems to act as a connection between life (of the new track we're listening to) and death (of the source piece of music). This reminded me of a thread of argument in David Toop's latest book Sinister Resonance. Toop begins from the premise that listening is a kind of mediumship, that we tease out these things called sounds whose existence is permanently ambiguous. Sound, after all, is a “persistent fading”, coming into existence out only to inevitably decay. From this Toop reasons that sound, along with both music and silence, exists “uncomfortably close to death – a shocking and shaping of the air, then suddenly gone” (25).
If music is uncomfortably close to death, then sampled music is dead even as it is sounded (in the way that a ghost is presumably a person who is dead even as they appear to us). Because of our awareness of the sound's having come from another piece of music, we experience the sample's inevitable decay as something that has already occurred as part of the source music; what we're left with, in our experience, is a kind of reanimation of the sound in ghostly form. This ghostliness makes the intangible nature of sound the focus of our attention.
All of this helps to explain the continuity of sampling's aesthetic qualities. The specific typical associations we make with sampling are those that, to our mind, aestheticise sound's link with death. Thus aesthetic qualities such as being or mimicking a bad recording, 'drop-outs' in the sound, background hiss and audible editing (the latter occurring in Sylvian & Czukay' Plight and Premonition which I wrote about previously) are appealing to us as listeners because they highlight sound's intangibility and, ultimately, instability, something that makes a listener's experience of music exciting in its being irresolvable. The mystery of the sample's musical source for us evokes the mystery of sound's existence. This, I think, goes some way to explaining the appeal of what is admittedly just one type of sampling common in today's experimental electronic music.
This appeal is neither essential nor unproblematic, of course, as I think analysis of lots of pieces of music would demonstrate; but I do think there is something to this. Having made this case, I'm hoping to explore in future posts pieces of music, old and very new, which either extend sampling's relationship to death or play around with it in order to make music that's surprising and original.
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