Milo sent me an email discussing this J Stor article he found discussing the ethics of sampling from an engineer’s point of view. I decided to read it and see what I could find within it. Here are a few quotes.
Another common use of the sampler is to extract a fragment of sound from one context and place it in a new one, with no appreciable loss of sound quality over each generation of extraction and repositioning.
this is interesting as I definitely disagree, sampling and re-recording always have a level of sound loss and quality reduction. But the idea of samplers being able to take fragments is true and interesting that it’s considered fragments, it can also be huge chunks.
These three capabilities of the sampler – the mimetic/reproductive, the manipulative and the extractive – are crucial to understanding both the sampler’s popularity and it’s potential to disrupt the production process in the music industry.
so the fact does three things, the mimetic/reproductive, being that it can reproduce and copy works, then the extractive, meaning we can take parts that we like and then reappropriate these sounds. then the manipulative, which is directly editing the recording we take through other means.
Their cost has fallen dramatically over the years (making them relatively more available to a greater number of musicians and engineers)
I agree completely, something that has also happened with music and home studios is access to technology. How does that affect the usage of equipment? As well the industry, the music industry is benefiting from artists and the monopolisation that they own. How can underground artists break free from this chain?
Sampling has forced the music industry and the legal profession to ask who – if anyone – owns a sound, and as a logical extension of that question, is it possible to a sound?
These questions are important to ask, since the development of copyright law and ownership. We can really try to think about who owns what? What sound is owned by who, and why do they own that? Who says so?
The musicians position has been documented elsewhere, in both trade public and popular magazines, yet the engineers’ voices are strangely missing from the press. ‘Strangely’ because it is the engineers whose fingers are on the trigger, so to speak, pushing the buttons which create, manipulate, and re-place samples.
So the engineers sit in the middle, they are paid for services and typically receive no royalties for the work. How come we have ignored the engineers? This will focus on their opinion as they are the ones that hit the fire button.
If the sampler has the potential to rupture the discursive practices of the industry – as rap suggests it does
So the power of the sampler, to rupture practices of the industry is powerful, I like this aspect of it.
First, all the engineers do feel that there are certain uses of sampling which are undeniably unethical, and that sampling should not be a technological free-for-all.
It’s interesting because who can decide and draw the line in the sand between what is okay and what is not?
The engineers represented here were not in agreement as to when sampling begins to violate the ‘rights’ of the musician.
So they cannot agree, which further shows that sampling and its ideas are subjective.
Central to this discourse is not only the nature of sampling and copyright law, but a deeper issue of the creative role of the engineer in the process which begins with composition and ends with the published sound-recording.
I guess for me this is not that important, but I am also an engineer for myself.
If there is one point of agreement among engineers in the debate about the ethics of sampling, it is that sampling from pre-recorded materials is at the least unethical and, at worst, is outright theft. According to the engineers I spoke with, the type of lifting common in rap records, in which an entire phrase (usually verbal) is extracted from a pre-existing recording and repositioned in a new context, falls into outright theft category.
Theft? It’s interesting that they consider this theft, but making money from artists is not theft? Taking royalties is not theft? Interesting that they consider rap’s usage of sampling as theft, I am interested in the types of engineers they have contacted, is this because rap only needs engineers for their mixing, mastering, and vocal recording?
Creativity is embodied not only by composition, but by transposition of meaning and thus semantic – shifts.
So creativity is not just making but also moving things around, shifting this and putting that over here. Sampling is the re juggle of making music and taking parts into a new sound.
The engineers I spoke to did not agree with that view. The prevailing attitude was that such recontextualisation amounts to little more than theft:
Again this idea of theft from engineers is interesting as it poses a question of who is right and wrong? Perhaps it’s society again that is to decide for us, I fall into the other side, and see it as being creative and not theft.
In the previous section, we saw engineers falling into line with the legal precedents, but in the case of a sound being sampled live, no legal precedents exist, and the question of whether a sound can be a privately owned entity, or at what point a sound reaches a distinctiveness which makes it the unique property of its performer, is perhaps the greater point of contention among the engineers.
again style is something that is copyrighted not the chords, melody, or live recording. Who owns the style? The engineers in this journal are focused on the style of performance and the vibe of the artists being something they own, more than the music.
I would feel that if a sound could be recreated … in another studio, it would be kind of hard to say that you actually own that sound. That would steer musicians away from a tool that they could use. You know, ‘I’m sorry, but you cannot record this frequency with that texture …’ There will only be certain frequencies available to public domain. You can take it to its end result and see that there’s obviously going to have to be a lot of give and take …
Again this engineer is correct, imagine where certain frequencies were available to the public domain? We cant use that guitar as that is some other artists style.
The final product doesn’t end when you’ve got the sample. You play around with it lots. And even after you alter it, you’ve still got to work with it in the recording… It’s one thing to have a killer violin sample. It’s another thing to play it like it’s a violin. So there’s creativity going on right there. (Peirce)
Pierce is correct, it is creative, although I disagree again, artists such as Alchemist simply find the loop, and the loop finding is the skill within his work. But yes putting together fragments makes everything.
but when it comes down to legalities I think it’s true. If the engineer doesn’t push that button to make the sample, it won’t be done … The executive producer should be held ultimately responsible and get a longer jail term than the engineer who samples it. (Brewer)
Jail time for sampling, it’s interesting that some people are pushing for this sort of punishment. And that the engineer who needs to eat is to blame.
reminds us that the question of the relationship between art as a finished product and the materials which are employed to that end was problematised by members of the Dada movement in the early part of the century
Art as a finished product and the materials that were used to get to the end is something the Dada movement has been interested in. Something I need to do research on.
In one sense, the ‘revitalisation’ of popular music spoken of by rap producers amounts to little more than a rehashing of the Dadaist prob- lematic. Today it’s called post-modernism, but the question remains. If a text exists in some form in some public venue, as sound exists in air, are individual uses of that text unique creative acts?
again Dadaist? what is this, I should do further research. But yes it’s true, public ownership is difficult to argue with within sound.
Thus the reasons for likely development of copyright laws are not attributed as much to the theoretical issues of whether a sound is ownable, but to the realities of the music industry.
So again its more to do with the industry of music that is stopping sampling rather than the theoretical ideas of sound ownership and who can control what. it’s all to do with money. Not ideas.
Complicating this model is the role distinction between the labourer and the producer, between blue-collar and white- collar, between the hourly wage-earner (studio cat) and the professional who is on salary (the producer).
It’s true, the blue-collar vs white-collar, the creative vs the owner. The owner owns it, and the creative makes it. Without either party, it would not work.