Sampling The Past

There are plenty of ways to add depth and colour to your music productions; using your own field recordings are a safe bet from a copyright point of view, but it is also possible to create an entire album from samples…

Risky Business

As you may be aware from a number of high profile plagiarism cases over the past few years, blatant sampling or repurposing of another artist’s material can prove costly – though to be honest, this is likely to only be of concern to musicians who are already well known globally and making a healthy living from their work.

The realm of sampling is full of legal grey areas, and most brief snippets or sounds that are incorporated into a genuinely new piece of music are unlikely to attract any litigation. In fact, taking a sample and moulding it into something quite different (and possibly unrecognisable) from the source material can be a very entertaining form of production.

With this in mind, it is possible to dig up some interesting sources of audio that delve back into times before sampling was even practially possible.

In this collection via Open Culture, you can find a huge archive of wax cylinder recordings from the 19th century, courtesy of the University of California-Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive. With 10,000 recordings ranging from Vaudeville music to home vocals, there’s bound to be something of interest for budding investigators here…

Beat Yourself Up

If sampling isn’t really your thing, an alternative to playing a musical instrument is to use sensor technology to interpret physical movements and convert them to sound. This sort of concept has frequently been used in live settings by artists such as Laurie Anderson, but more recently Yamaha have been using an AI system to help convert a dancer’s movements into sound. See for yourself in the video below…



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