sampling

Banned Music is a web project that promotes music activism, especially the non-commercial distribution of works that major record labels have driven underground. The site is one of several that are raising important questions about the role that the law plays in determining what we can experience.

The site is a project of Downhill Battle, a site that documents and promotes music activism against the major record labels, and promotes independent music. The site has two main goals.

• To make it impossible for the five major record labels to use legal threats to stifle musical art. Their plan is to publicly distribute works that are driven underground by the major labels.
• To advocate for common-sense reforms to copyright law that can make sampling legal and practical for artists, and benefiting both the musicians who created source material and sample-based musicians who are using it to create new works. For an informed and vibrant discussion to exist on these topics, sample-based music needs to be readily available. To determine whether current copyright law is serving musicians and fans, the public needs to be able to hear the kind of work that’s currently being suppressed.

The site is distributing an easy BitTorrent installer to help distribute banned works.

This 1997 release by Martin Russ is one of the best introductions to synthesis and sampling in print. It discusses both analog and digital synthesis concepts and sampling in a fairly non-technical fashion, making it a great way to expand your understanding of synthesizers.

Sound Synthesis and Sampling is extensively illustrated with diagrams that help make the ideas it discusses clear. The combination of layman writing and profuse illustrations help make some of the more difficult subject matter easy to understand.

Russ has written for Sound on Sound magazine, a publication known for its high standards and good writing. Russ brings a similar direct style to his book.

This book is highly recommended for anyone wanting to learn more about the basics of synthesis and sampling. This would also make an excellent textbook for teaching, because Russ provides timelines, examples of important/influential equipment, and even chapter reviews. Finally, he provides a large glossary of the jargon of synthesis.

Musicians using samplers are faced with an unique set of legal problems. Using samples of copyrighted works has become a minefield, often just best avoided. Now new licenses from Creative Commons promise to make it easier for samplists to find samples they can use without fear of getting sued.

Sampling and lawsuits have gone hand and hand for nearly twenty years. In the eighties, musicians went sample crazy, leading to songs that were sound collages of cultural references. This trend ended abruptly, though, when songs like Paul Hardcastle’s “Nineteen” ended up creating legal problems for their creators.

The Creative Commons Sampling Licenses promise to make it easier for musicians to know what they can legally sample. The CC Sampling Licences were launched in December of 2003, and were developed with the help of veteran sample-art group Negativland.

According to Creative Commons, the Sampling licenses will help authors foster a broad range of culture, from photo collage to musical “mash-ups,” that the law currently deems illegitimate, despite its growing popularity and acceptance online. And while embodying the Creative Commons “Some Rights Reserved” model of copyright, the licenses will offer a combination of conditions and freedoms that our current licenses do not.

The Sampling License

The Sampling License is designed to let the author of the work invite others to transform their work, even for commercial purposes, while prohibiting the distribution of verbatim copies, or to be used in advertising.

For example, an artist could take a photo licensed under Sampling, crop it, and use it in a commercial collage, but she could not distribute simple copies of the whole, original photo. A DJ could borrow elements of a licensed song, royalty-free, and use them in an original piece. He could not, however, put a copy of the tune on a file-sharing network.

The Sampling-Plus License

The Sampling-Plus license will offer the same freedoms as the Sampling license, but will also allow noncommercial sharing of the verbatim work.

So, an artist could release her song under a Sampling-Plus license to encourage her fans to trade it on file-sharing networks, then remix or build upon it however they like. But the license would protect verbatim copies of her work from for-profit exploitation by others. Or a photographer could invite the widespread, noncommercial distribution of a whole photo and its resulting transformation while preventing others from simply reselling the photo, unchanged.

Additional information is available at the Creative Commons site.

By now you may have heard of DJ Danger Mouse, and his remix of rapper Jay-Zs Black Album with music from the Beatles White Album. Now that the album has been blocked by EMI, it has become one of the most sought after music downloads on the Net. One site dares to publish the full CD in MP3 format.

If you’ve missed the controversy somehow, rapper Jay-Z recently released an a cappella version of his latest album, The Black Album. A cappella versions contain just vocals, with none of the original backing music. Artists occasionally release these versions to encourage underground remix versions that can help create a buzz around new releases. If an underground remix becomes popular, mainstream artists are in a position where they can make a deal on their own terms with the underground remixer, or squash the release.

DJ Danger Mouse, a largely unknown producer, took the obvious step of combining the rapping from Jay-Z’s Black Album and combined it with the music of the Beatles White Album, calling it (surprise!) the Grey Album. He pressed a few thousand CDs to share with some of his closest friends, and it quickly got people’s attention because of its blatant appropriation of the Beatles’ music. The Beatles are known for never allowing sampling of their music, and as soon as EMI caught wind of Danger Mouse’s release, they sent him Cease and Desist letters.

Once this happened, some viewed this as censorship, or banning of types of art. In visual art, images are often appropriated and reused in new contexts as a way of commenting on well-known images, icons and stereotypes. In music, this has been a contested area of intellectual property for many years.

Downhill Battle’s Holmes Wilson argues that music labels are turning copyright into a form of censorship. “If Danger Mouse had requested permission and offered to pay royalties, EMI still would have said no and the public would never have been able to enjoy this critically acclaimed work. Artists are being forced to break the law to innovate.” Holmes sees the Grey Album as one of thousands of legitimate forms of musical art that have been stifled by the legal limits of copyright. 

EMI wants to protect its rights, and the rights of the Beatles. The Beatles have an obvious interest in controlling how their music is used. They’ve successfully protected their music, so that it isn’t used to hawk baby wipes and deodorant and nasal decongestants. Licensing their music for movies and commercials would have been extremely lucrative for them. Forgoing licensing income has the effect of letting the music exist on its own, rather than as the soundtrack for a car commercial.

Observers like Wilson, though, see EMI’s tactics as more than just protecting their rights. “EMI isn’t just trying to shut down a musician who they believe is unfairly profiting from the White Album, they’re also trying to censor the album entirely by preventing the public from hearing it. There is simply no justification for denying or attempting to deny the public the right to hear this music.”

Judge for Yourself

Rolling Stone has called the Grey Album “the ultimate remix record”, while other listeners call it boring or opportunistic. EMI has run most sources of the Grey Album underground, making the music some of the most sought-after music on the Web.

One site though, Illegal-Art.org, has boldly posted the full album in MP3 format. Illegal-Art is a web site dedicated to exploring video, visual art and audio that explores ideas using techniques that American culture has deemed illegal. The site takes the view that intellectual property laws have grown to the point that they are interfering with artistic expression, or as the site puts it “artists need legal experts to sort them all out.”

The Illegal Art Exhibit showcases “degenerate art” – art and ideas that lie on the legal fringes of intellectual property. The site is full of controversial work that questions the role of copyright in the world of art. The site as a whole asks the question “Should lawyers decide what is legal in the world of art?”

Frank Samagaio

Back before samplers made the scene in the 80’s, the Mellotron ruled as a source of “lifelike” playback of prerecorded sounds. The Mellotron Book takes you back to the early days of sampling, and explores the unique qualities of this strange instrument.

The Mellotron is a keyboard that basically has a tape player assigned to each key. When any key is depressed, the tape for that note is played, sort of a lo-fi sampler.

The Mellotron made it possible to add orchestral sounds inexpensively. There were loops for strings, voices, flutes, and other sounds. It was used extensively by acts in the late 60’s and 70’s by groups such as The Beatles, the Moody Blues, Klaus Schulze, and Tangerine Dream. Because Mellotrons were used on so many classic cuts, they are now sought after vintage instruments.

Samagaio’s book explores the history of the Mellotron, offering an in-depth take on this unusual instrument. The book includes many photos of the instrument and old promotional material. It also provides a discography of albums that feature the Mellotron. It even covers the mechanics of the Mellotron, the sound loops available for it, and its use.

This is a very well-done book, and worthwhile read for anyone interested in electronic music history, or the story behind the sounds of all those classic pop, rock and synth albums of the 70’s. Musicians are beginning to get back into the classic Mellotron sounds, and this is the best reference available.