Do samples kill the *real* electronic music?

[melomood]

Ok now I'm going to get technical with you now

Samples are single cycle wavs that have busted out of their oscillators so they could grow big in the wild & evolve into magical creatures

[fmr]

If we're taking the post hip-hop definition of sampling, sure. But then there are countless examples pre-Schaeffer in the form of sound effect and novelty records. The word "sampling" directly implies digital capture (storing as 'samples', as in sampling rate). This is the earliest work I know that meets both definitions (and AFAIK the first to use digital sampling full stop.)

How can this be pre-Shaeffer? Do you actually know the work of Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry? Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concr%C3%A8te

"Countless examples pre-Shaeffer"? Shaffer started working on this in 1942... When exactly did happen those "countless" pre-Shaeffer examples?

This is way before the example you posted. And yes, it can be considered the first usings of "samples" and "sampling". The word "sample" pretty much defines itself. You take "samples" of sounds, and you assemble and reassemble them, using several techniques. Basically everything that came after Musique Concrète derived from the concepts introduced by them.

[whyterabbyt]

If we're taking the post hip-hop definition of sampling, sure. But then there are countless examples pre-Schaeffer in the form of sound effect and novelty records. The word "sampling" directly implies digital capture (storing as 'samples', as in sampling rate). This is the earliest work I know that meets both definitions (and AFAIK the first to use digital sampling full stop.)

How can this be pre-Shaeffer?

Learn to read. He doesnt claim that its pre-Shaeffer; he specifically says that its 'the earliest work I know that meets both definitions' where he's talking about the two definitions of sampling.

Do you actually know the work of Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry?

Y'know you're the second person to say that to cron recently, and in both cases its been borderline Dunning-Kruger; challenging something said because you think you know more about the subject when you actually seem to know less. Cron knows this side of music better than most people at KVR, you included.

"Countless examples pre-Shaeffer"? Shaffer started working on this in 1942... When exactly did happen those "countless" pre-Shaeffer examples?

Did you miss the bit where he explains what those 'samples' he's talking about specifically consist of? Or not understand it?
Or are you challenging the fact that there were novelty and sound effects records before Schaeffer? Because sound effects records are historically known to be one of the sets of source material that Schaeffer used because he got access to them through RTF.

http://homepage.smc.edu/tobey_christine ... chaef.html

[fmr]

If we're taking the post hip-hop definition of sampling, sure. But then there are countless examples pre-Schaeffer in the form of sound effect and novelty records. The word "sampling" directly implies digital capture (storing as 'samples', as in sampling rate). This is the earliest work I know that meets both definitions (and AFAIK the first to use digital sampling full stop.)

How can this be pre-Shaeffer?

Learn to read. He doesnt claim that its pre-Shaeffer; he specifically says that its 'the earliest work I know that meets both definitions' where he's talking about the two definitions of sampling.

Two definitions? According to whom? And why two, and not three, or ten, or one hundred?

Do you actually know the work of Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry?

Y'know you're the second person to say that to cron recently, and in both cases its been borderline Dunning-Kruger; challenging something said because you think you know more about the subject when you actually seem to know less. Cron knows this side of music better than most people at KVR, you included.

Shut up troll. You may know Cron, but you know nothing about me. Say what you want. You only come here to patronize or attack others, pretending you know more than anybody. Get some treatment.

His statement is questionable, to say the least. Yours is plainly stupid and rude (as usual). It's funny that you (from all people) mention Dunning-Kruger. Look at the mirror. Oh and don't expect me to answer you more. I will not feed trolls.

[fedexnman]

Stupidest thread ever , got to 10 pages and was started by someone that sells samples ..... SMH

[cron]

I'm more saying that we can call just about anything the earliest sample if we redefine the word appropriately. Yes, in the modern era a "sample" is just a fragment of one piece incorporated into another, but there's a reason why the machines that appeared in the 70s and 80s were called "samplers" and prior machines weren't: because they convert an analog signal to digital samples (samples as in "sampling rate" - 44100 samples per second etc).

For what it's worth, I've been encouraged to double check my assertion that the Tenney piece utilised digital sampling in the true sense of the word, and I suspect I may be wrong. 1961 would be extraordinarily early in this regard (Xenakis discusses the difficulty of finding labs equipped with decent DACs at all 10 years later in Formalized Music) and the pieces on which Tenney is unequivocally known to have used a computer and DAC (e.g. the ironically titled Analog #1, also from 1961) contain nothing like the complexity and high sound quality of the Elvis fragments heard in Collage #1. So yes, perhaps not the first work to utilise digital sampling of an audio signal, but perhaps the earliest to realise the 'plunderphonic' use of the word sampling that we're familiar with today.

[whyterabbyt]

Two definitions? According to whom? And why two, and not three, or ten, or one hundred?

The two definitions that were being used in this thread, dumbass. Keep up.

You only come here to patronize or attack others, pretending you know more than anybody. Get some treatment.

You mean, exactly what you were doing? What a wonderful example of psychological projection.

I will not feed trolls.

You're on a starvation diet?

[BONES]

Really? I don't recall hearing any samples on any of Kraftwerk's seminal albums

I guess you don’t consider Electric Cafe one of their “seminal albums”?

No, and if you look up the meaning of seminal you will understand why. Electric Cafe came out a year after I bought my first sampler (Korg DSS-1).

[BONES]

Do you actually know the work of Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry?

Nobody does, which makes it completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter when sampling was invented, what matters is when it started to gain widespread use in the way it is used today. i.e. Digital recordings of instrument and other sounds. Even using stuff of tape is irrelevant to this discussion.

[jancivil]

Sure, my borderline Dunning-Krugerness was finding this:

Sampling was responsible for the single most radical musical movement of the 20th Century (hip-hop) and now we're wondering if it's killing music a mere 40 years later..

Really? So not Cage, Stockhausen or the French music concrete crowd? Not even the Italian Futurists?

He doesn't know those, or what they did. He just started listening to music with hip-hop

You are wasting your time.

I know them very well. None had the immediately transformative cultural and musical impact hip-hop did. These guys were recycling other people's music. Yeah, Musique Concrete occasionally did that (e.g. James Tenney's Blue Suede Study) but it wasn't built around that by default. Add use of the voice in a completely rhythmic/timbral way without a hint of melody and you've got, well, extremely radical music that's a larger conceptual break with the past than just about anything before it. And it stuck, then evolved. It changed the world.

suspect.

Yeah, I said you can't know Cage and Stockhausen at all, then.

And I actually later said why I think this does not work at all for me. I'll be frank: I think this is incredibly pretentious and it seems (note that word, seems; I may be wrong) like it comes from a professor. Cultural impact. And It seems to me whyterabbyt lives pretty far from Oakland if you get my drift.

This is not about my assessment of my own capacity to grok this which led me to a false impression of what cron *knows*. Information is not knowledge.

He penned a little story about how hiphop evolved and "changed music". This was reflected later in a thread at Everything Else 'When did "pop music" become synonymous with "music". I hear the 'urban' stuff all the time, it's inescapable. Yeah, the practices of absolute laziness and appropriating someone else's efforts, 1 and 2-bar loops and there is nothing else in the whole godforsaken track was ruinous. To a subset of commercial Urban Radio which has nothing to offer the world of music because there is just a dire lack of musical content. It's a loop that came with FLS or Logic or Live slapped over the other 'drum' loop and all the interest is in the rap. Which is typically very rudimentary in terms of rhythm. Really, rapping triplets and sextuplets is the height of sophistication here. Mind you, I admire the ability to fit syllables within a beat and have it scan worth something so I had high hopes. So we have a very sharp difference in aesthetics. He could be the Rain Main with an ability to recall every fact on Wikipedia about these matters, it isn't going to make me think any better about that assertion. It strikes me as fatuous and silly, the same as it did when I read it first.

You don't know what I know. If I'm guilty of overassessing my abilities just by doing basically 'you don't know what you're talking about', you're really doubling down on having done exactly this. Check yourself. Your ass is showing.

[Zombie Queen]

Which geniuses in hip hop are going to stand the test of time in the area of music? Where is their John Cage?

[cron]

Good spot Jan. Nice to hear the wannabe prof vibes are showing through . I chose my undergraduate degree on the basis that there was a year's worth of electroacoustic music study mixed in there, but that's about as far as any formal training goes. I found academic writing a horrorshow in the end. Post-structuralism was all the rage at the time, and writing about aesthetics seemed less about the music and more about trends in academic writing itself. Not for me. I'm all about that paper pushing office life now.

A lot of hip-hop may be generic as it comes now, but so is a lot of electroacoustic music. How many recent pieces have you heard that start with a loud explosive gesture followed by a 'twinkly' decay? It's the I IV V I of openings and it's everywhere. There's still plenty of interesting, challenging work to be found in both areas, and I think that's true of pretty much any genre.

[BONES]

The problem here is that I've never heard of any of these artists and I'm sure nobody else outside of certain parts of the US have, either (assuming they are US artists). Mind you, I couldn't name anything John Cage ever did, either, but he is very poor choice on jancivil's part. How do you think those artists will compare to The Beatles or the Sex Pistols or Nirvana in 100 years? They might feature in historical works about hip-hop but they won't in books about music in general, where the artists I've named definitely will.

Sampling was responsible for the single most radical musical movement of the 20th Century (hip-hop) and now we're wondering if it's killing music a mere 40 years later..

Is this a joke? Hip-hop has had zero cultural impact on anything, especially if you compare it to Blues or Rock'n'Roll. In fact, Punk had a far greater, more wide-ranging cultural impact than hippity-hop could ever hope to have had. Punk literally changed the entire music industry almost overnight, as did Grunge 20 years later. OTOH, hip-hop exists within it's own, tiny cultural void and is largely irrelevant to the rest of the musical universe. i.e. Hip-hop created it's own branch on the tree and had little or no influence beyond that, where Blues, Rock, Punk and Grunge changed everything around them. Hip-hop is also rubbish (in case that's not blindingly obvious to everyone).

[blowback time]

Y'know you're the second person to say that to cron recently, and in both cases its been borderline Dunning-Kruger; challenging something said because you think you know more about the subject when you actually seem to know less. Cron knows this side of music better than most people at KVR, you included.

Shut up troll. You may know Cron, but you know nothing about me. Say what you want. You only come here to patronize or attack others, pretending you know more than anybody. Get some treatment.

His statement is questionable, to say the least. Yours is plainly stupid and rude (as usual). It's funny that you (from all people) mention Dunning-Kruger. Look at the mirror. Oh and don't expect me to answer you more. I will not feed trolls.

Dunning-Kruger should be renamed to Whiting-Rabbyter. He's got them totally beat.

[cron]

The problem here is that I've never heard of any of these artists and I'm sure nobody else outside of certain parts of the US have, either (assuming they are US artists). Mind you, I couldn't name anything John Cage ever did, either, but he is very poor choice on jancivil's part. How do you think those artists will compare to The Beatles or the Sex Pistols or Nirvana in 100 years? They might feature in historical works about hip-hop but they won't in books about music in general, where the artists I've named definitely will.

Sampling was responsible for the single most radical musical movement of the 20th Century (hip-hop) and now we're wondering if it's killing music a mere 40 years later..

Is this a joke? Hip-hop has had zero cultural impact on anything, especially if you compare it to Blues or Rock'n'Roll. In fact, Punk had a far greater, more wide-ranging cultural impact than hippity-hop could ever hope to have had. Punk literally changed the entire music industry almost overnight, as did Grunge 20 years later. OTOH, hip-hop exists within it's own, tiny cultural void and is largely irrelevant to the rest of the musical universe. i.e. Hip-hop created it's own branch on the tree and had little or no influence beyond that, where Blues, Rock, Punk and Grunge changed everything around them. Hip-hop is also rubbish (in case that's not blindingly obvious to everyone).

Punk and grunge were extensions of existing musical forms. Hip-hop posited an entirely new way of creating music that was unthinkable 10 years previously. If it had been a university that produced virtuosos of the playback system, we'd be lauding it as genius and slotting its inventors in among the greats. We'd recognise it for what it is: radical music and radical methodology.