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Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions remain stable despite delocalization in the digital age

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Music sampling is a common practice among hip-hop and electronic producers that has played a critical role in the development of particular subgenres. Artists preferentially sample drum breaks, and previous studies have suggested that these may be culturally transmitted. With the advent of digital sampling technologies and social media the modes of cultural transmission may have shifted, and music communities may have become decoupled from geography. The aim of the current study was to determine whether drum breaks are culturally transmitted through musical collaboration networks, and to identify the factors driving the evolution of these networks. Using network-based diffusion analysis we found strong evidence for the cultural transmission of drum breaks via collaboration between artists, and identified several demographic variables that bias transmission. Additionally, using network evolution methods we found evidence that the structure of the collaboration network is no longer biased by geographic proximity after the year 2000, and that gender disparity has relaxed over the same period. Despite the delocalization of communities by the internet, collaboration remains a key transmission mode of music sampling traditions. The results of this study provide valuable insight into how demographic biases shape cultural transmission in complex networks, and how the evolution of these networks has shifted in the digital age.
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Cultural transmission modes of music
sampling traditions remain stable despite
delocalization in the digital age
Mason YoungbloodID
1,2
*
1Department of Psychology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, United
States of America, 2Department of Biology, Queens College, City University of New York, Flushing, NY,
United States of America
*myoungblood@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Abstract
Music sampling is a common practice among hip-hop and electronic producers that has
played a critical role in the development of particular subgenres. Artists preferentially sample
drum breaks, and previous studies have suggested that these may be culturally transmitted.
With the advent of digital sampling technologies and social media the modes of cultural
transmission may have shifted, and music communities may have become decoupled from
geography. The aim of the current study was to determine whether drum breaks are cultur-
ally transmitted through musical collaboration networks, and to identify the factors driving
the evolution of these networks. Using network-based diffusion analysis we found strong
evidence for the cultural transmission of drum breaks via collaboration between artists, and
identified several demographic variables that bias transmission. Additionally, using network
evolution methods we found evidence that the structure of the collaboration network is no
longer biased by geographic proximity after the year 2000, and that gender disparity has
relaxed over the same period. Despite the delocalization of communities by the internet, col-
laboration remains a key transmission mode of music sampling traditions. The results of this
study provide valuable insight into how demographic biases shape cultural transmission in
complex networks, and how the evolution of these networks has shifted in the digital age.
Introduction
Music sampling, or the use of previously-recorded material in a new composition, is a nearly
ubiquitous practice among hip-hop and electronic producers. The usage of drum breaks, or
percussion-heavy sequences, ripped from soul and funk records has played a particularly criti-
cal role in the development of certain subgenres. For example, “Amen, Brother”, released by
The Winstons in 1969, is widely regarded as the most sampled song of all time. Its iconic 4-bar
drum break has been described as “genre-constitutive” [1], and can be prominently heard in
classic hip-hop and jungle releases by N.W.A and Shy FX [2]. Due to the consistent usage of
drum breaks in particular music communities and subgenres [15] some scholars have
PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211860 February 5, 2019 1 / 12
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OPEN ACCESS
Citation: Youngblood M (2019) Cultural
transmission modes of music sampling traditions
remain stable despite delocalization in the digital
age. PLoS ONE 14(2): e0211860. https://doi.org/
10.1371/journal.pone.0211860
Editor: Catharine Penelope Cross, University of St
Andrews, UNITED KINGDOM
Received: October 29, 2018
Accepted: January 23, 2019
Published: February 5, 2019
Copyright: ©2019 Mason Youngblood. This is an
open access article distributed under the terms of
the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author and source are credited.
Data Availability Statement: All R scripts and data
used in the study are available in the Harvard
Dataverse repository: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/
Q02JJQ.
Funding: The author received no specific funding
for this work.
Competing interests: The author has declared that
no competing interests exist.
suggested that they may be culturally transmitted [6], which could occur as a direct result of
collaboration between artists or as an indirect effect of community membership.
Before the digital age, artists may have depended upon collaborators for access to the physi-
cal source materials and expensive hardware required for sampling [7]. In the 1990s, new tech-
nologies like compressed digital audio formats and digital audio workstations made sampling
more accessible to a broader audience [8]. Furthermore, the widespread availability of the
internet and social media have delocalized communities [9], and allowed global music “scenes”
to form around shared interests beyond peer-to-peer file sharing [10,11]. Individuals in online
music communities now have access to the collective knowledge of other members [12,13],
and there is evidence that online communities play a key role in music discovery [14].
Although musicians remain concentrated in historically important music cities (i.e. New York
City and Los Angeles in the United States) [15,16], online music communities also make it
possible for artists to establish collaborative relationships independently of geographic location
[17]. If more accessible sampling technologies and access to collective knowledge have allowed
artists to discover sample sources independently of collaboration [18], then the strength of
cultural transmission via collaboration may have decreased over the last couple of decades.
Similarly, if online music communities have created opportunities for interactions between
potential collaborators, then geographic proximity may no longer structure musical collabora-
tion networks.
Studies of the cultural evolution of music have primarily investigated diversity in musical
performances [19] and traditions [20], macro-scale patterns and selective pressures in
musical evolution [2124], and the structure and evolution of consumer networks [14,25,26].
Although several diffusion chain experiments have addressed how cognitive biases shape
musical traits during transmission [2729], few studies have investigated the mechanisms of
cultural transmission at the population level [30,31]. The practice of sampling drum breaks in
hip-hop and electronic music is an ideal research model for cultural transmission because of
(1) the remarkably high copy fidelity of sampled material, (2) the reliable documentation of
sampling events, and (3) the availability of high-resolution collaboration and demographic
data for the artists involved. Exhaustive online datasets of sample usage and collaboration
make it possible to reconstruct networks of artists and track the diffusion of particular drum
breaks from the early 1980s to today. Furthermore, the technological changes that have
occurred over the same time period provide a natural experiment for how the digital age has
impacted cultural transmission more broadly [32].
The aim of the current study was to determine whether drum breaks are culturally trans-
mitted through musical collaboration networks, and to identify the factors driving the evolu-
tion of these networks. We hypothesized that (1) drum breaks are culturally transmitted
through musical collaboration networks, and that (2) the strength of cultural transmission via
collaboration would decrease after the year 2000. For clarification, the alternative to the first
hypothesis is cultural transmission occurring outside of collaborative relationships (i.e. inde-
pendent sample discovery via “crate-digging” in record stores or online). Previous studies have
investigated similar questions using diffusion curve analysis [30], but the validity of inferring
transmission mechanisms from cumulative acquisition data has been called into question [33].
Instead, we applied network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA), a recently developed statistical
method for determining whether network structure biases the emergence of a novel behavior
in a population [34]. As NBDA is most useful in identifying social learning, an ability that is
assumed to be present in humans, it has been primarily applied to non-human animal models
such as birds, whales, and primates [3537], but the ability to incorporate individual-level vari-
ables to nodes makes it uniquely suited to determining what factors bias diffusion more gener-
ally. Additionally, we hypothesized that (3) collaboration probability would be decoupled from
Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions
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geographic proximity after the year 2000. To investigate this we applied separable temporal
exponential random graph modeling (STERGM), a dynamic extension of ERGM for deter-
mining the variables that bias network evolution [38].
Methods
All data used in the current study were collected in September of 2018, in compliance with the
terms and conditions of each database. For the primary analysis, the three most heavily sam-
pled drum breaks of all time, “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons, “Think (About It)” by Lyn
Collins, and “Funky Drummer” by James Brown, were identified using WhoSampled (https://
www.whosampled.com/). The release year and credits for each song listed as having sampled
each break were collected using data scraping. In order to avoid name disambiguation, only
artists, producers, and remixers with active Discogs links and associated IDs were included in
the dataset. In order to investigate potential shifts in transmission strength around 2000, the
same method was used to collect data for the eight songs in the “Most Sampled Tracks” on
WhoSampled that were released after 1990 (see S1 Appendix). One of these, “I’m Good” by
YG, was excluded from the analysis because the sample is primarily used by a single artist.
Each set of sampling events collected from WhoSampled was treated as a separate diffusion.
All analyses were conducted in R (v 3.3.3).
Collaboration data were retrieved from Discogs (https://www.discogs.com/), a crowd-
sourced database of music releases. All collaborative releases in the database were extracted
and converted to a master list of pairwise collaborations. For each diffusion, pairwise collabo-
rations including two artists in the dataset were used to construct collaboration networks, in
which nodes correspond to artists and weighted links correspond to collaboration number.
Although some indirect connections between artists were missing from these subnetworks,
conducting the analysis with the full dataset was computationally prohibitive and incomplete
networks have been routinely used for NBDA in the past [35,36,39].
Individual-level variables for artists included in each collaboration network were collected
from MusicBrainz (https://musicbrainz.org/), a crowdsourced database with more complete
artist information than Discogs, and Spotify (https://www.spotify.com/), one of the most pop-
ular music streaming services. Gender and geographic location were retrieved from the Music-
brainz API. Whenever it was available, the “begin area” of the artist, or the city in which they
began their career, was used instead of their “area”, or country of affiliation, to maximize geo-
graphic resolution. Longitudes and latitudes for each location, retrieved using the Data Science
Toolkit and Google Maps, were used to calculate each artist’s mean geographic distance from
other individuals. Albunack (http://www.albunack.net/), an online tool which draws from
both Musicbrainz and Discogs, was used to convert IDs between the two databases. Popularity
and followers were retrieved using the Spotify API. An artist’s popularity, a proprietary index
of streaming count that ranges between 0 and 100, is a better indicator of their long-term suc-
cess because it is calculated across their entire discography. Followers is a better indicator of
current success because it reflects user engagement with artists who are currently more active
on the platform. Discogs IDs are incompatible with the Spotify API, so artist names were
URL-encoded and used as text search terms.
In order to identify whether social transmission between collaborators played a role in sam-
ple acquisition, order of acquisition diffusion analysis (OADA) was conducted using the R
script for NBDA (v 1.2.13) provided on the Laland lab’s website (https://lalandlab.st-andrews.
ac.uk/freeware/). OADA uses the order in which individuals acquire a trait to determine
whether its diffusion is biased by the structure of the social network [40]. OADA was utilized
instead of time of acquisition diffusion analysis (TADA) because it makes no assumptions
Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions
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about the baseline rate of acquisition [34]. For each artist, order of acquisition was determined
by the year that they first used the sample in their music. Sampling events from the same year
were given the same order. Gender, popularity, followers, and mean distance were included as
predictor variables. For gender, females were coded as -1, males were coded as 1, and individu-
als with other identities or missing values were coded as 0. For popularity, followers, and mean
distance each variable was centered around zero. Asocial, additive, and multiplicative models
were fit to all three diffusions collectively with every possible combination of individual-level
variables. Standard information theoretic approaches were used to rank the models according
to Akaike’s Information Criterion corrected for sample size (AIC
c
). Models with a ΔAIC
c
<2
were considered to have the best fit [41]. The best fitting model with the most individual-level
variables was run separately to assess the effects of each variable on social transmission. Effect
sizes were calculated according to [36]. An additional OADA was conducted using the seven
diffusions from after 1990. Individual-level variables were excluded due to insufficient demo-
graphic data. An additive model was fit to the OADA, and separate social transmission
parameters were calculated for each diffusion to identify differences in transmission strength.
Additive and multiplicative models give identical results in the absence of individual-level vari-
ables, so no model comparison was necessary.
In order to assess the effects of individual-level variables on network evolution, STERGM
was conducted using statnet (v 2016.9), an R package for network analysis and simulation.
STERGM is a dynamic social network method that models the formation and dissolution of
links over time [38]. Collaboration events involving artists from each diffusion were com-
bined to construct static collaboration subnetworks for each year between 1984 and 2017,
which were then converted into an undirected, unweighted dynamic network. Early years
not continuous with the rest of the event data (i.e. 1978 and 1981) were excluded from the
dynamic network. In order to determine whether the variables biasing network structure
have changed over time, the analysis was conducted separately with the data from 1984-1999
and 2000-2017. For each time period a set of STERGM models with every possible combina-
tion of individual-level variables were fit to the dynamic network using conditional maxi-
mum likelihood estimation (CMLE). Although STERGM can be used to separately model
both the formation and dissolution of links, this analysis was restricted to the former.
Gender, popularity, and followers were included to investigate homophily, while mean
distance was included to assess its effect on link formation. As STERGM cannot be run
with missing covariates, NA values in popularity (6.39%), followers (6.39%), and mean dis-
tance (38.49%) were imputed using the random forest method. The models from each period
were ranked according to AIC, and the best fitting models (ΔAIC <2) with the most indi-
vidual-level variables were run separately to assess the effects of each variable on network
evolution.
Results
The three most heavily sampled drum breaks of all time were collectively sampled 6530 times
(n
1
= 2966, n
2
= 2099, n
3
= 1465). 4462 (68.33%) of these sampling events were associated
with valid Discogs IDs, corresponding to 2432 unique artists (F: n= 143, 5.88%; M: n= 1342,
55.18%; Other or NA: n= 947, 38.94%), and included in the primary OADA and STERGM.
The eight samples released after 1990 were collectively sampled 1752 times (n
1
= 284, n
2
= 260,
n
3
= 248, n
4
= 198, n
5
= 194, n
6
= 193, n
7
= 192, n
8
= 182). 1305 (74.53%) of these sampling
events were associated with valid Discogs IDs, corresponding to 1270 unique artists, and
included in the additional OADA.
Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions
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NBDA
The best fitting model from the primary OADA, which was multiplicative and included all
four individual-level variables, can be seen in Table 1. In support of our first hypothesis, a like-
lihood ratio test found strong evidence for social transmission over asocial learning (ΔAIC
c
=
141; p<0.001). Based on the effect sizes, transmission appears to be more likely among
females (p<0.01) and less likely among artists who are more popular (p<0.001) and have
more followers (p<0.001). Mean distance is not a significant predictor of transmission
(p= 0.89). The diffusion network and diffusion curve for all three drum breaks included in the
primary OADA are shown in Fig 1 and S1 Fig, respectively. All other models fit to the primary
OADA can be found in S1 Appendix.
The results of the additional OADA, conducted using the seven diffusions from after 1990,
can be found in S1 Appendix. A likelihood ratio test found strong evidence for social transmis-
sion overall (ΔAIC
c
= 88; p<0.001). Contrary to our second hypothesis, linear regression
found no significant relationships between either mean year of diffusion and social transmis-
sion estimate (R
2
= 0.20, p= 0.31) or median year of diffusion and social transmission estimate
(R
2
= 0.17, p= 0.36) (see S2 Fig).
STERGM
For both time periods the second best fitting STERGM models (ΔAIC <2) included all four
individual-level variables, the results of which can be seen in Table 2. All other models can be
found in S1 Appendix. Across both periods there appears to be homophily based on popularity
(p<0.001) and gender (M: p<0.001; F: ps<0.05). In support of our third hypothesis, mean
distance negatively predicts link formation only before 2000 (p<0.001). Additionally, there
is a heterophilic effect of followers only after 2000 (p<0.001). Based on the effect sizes, there
has been a nearly three-fold decrease in the strength of homophily among females. Conversely,
the strengh of homophily by popularity has actually increased since 2000. The results of the
STERGM analysis assuming different transition years (e.g. 1994, 1996, 1998, 2002, 2004,
2006) can be found in S1 Appendix. Linear regression found significant positive relationships
between both popularity and number of collaborations (R
2
= 0.048, p<0.001) and followers
and number of collaborations (R
2
= 0.090, p<0.001) (see S3 Fig).
A goodness-of-fit analysis was conducted by generating simulated networks (n = 100) from
the parameters of the best fitting model and comparing them to the observed network statistics
Table 1. The results of the multiplicative model for the OADA including all individual-level variables.
Multiplicative Model—Order of Acquisition
Estimate Effect size p
Gender -0.11 0.81 <0.01
Popularity -0.013 0.86 <0.001
Followers -9.6E-8 0.92 <0.001
Mean distance -1.8E-9 1 0.89
Likelihood Ratio Test
AIC
c
p
With social transmission 14719 <0.001
Without social transmission 14860
The top panel shows the model estimate, effect size, and p-value for each individual-level variable. The bottom panel
shows the AIC
c
for the model with and without social transmission and the p-value from the likelihood ratio test.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211860.t001
Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions
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[42]. For both time periods, the global statistics (i.e. gender, popularity, followers, mean dis-
tance) from the simulated networks were not significantly different from those observed, indi-
cating that both models are good fits for the variables in question. Structural statistics (i.e.
degree, edgewise shared partner, minimum geodesic distance) from the simulated networks
were significantly different from those observed, indicating that both models are not good fits
for the structural properties of the network. The results of this analysis can be found in S1
Appendix.
Fig 1. The diffusion of all three drum breaks through the combined collaboration network. At each time point individuals who have not yet used
one of the drum breaks (informed) are shown in white, individuals who first used one of the drum breaks in a previous time step (previously informed)
are shown in blue, and individuals who first used one of the drum breaks in the current time step (newly informed) are shown in red.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211860.g001
Table 2. The results of the STERGM analyses for before and after 2000.
STERGM 1984-1999 2000-2017
Effect size pEffect size p
Gender (F) 6.86 <0.001 2.23 <0.05
Gender (M) 1.70 <0.001 2.43 <0.001
Popularity 0.84 <0.001 0.54 <0.001
Followers 1.02 0.64 1.96 <0.001
Mean distance 0.87 <0.001 0.99 0.82
The table shows the effect size and p-value for gender, popularity, followers, and mean distance during each time period.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211860.t002
Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions
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Discussion
Using high-resolution collaboration and longitudinal diffusion data, we have provided the first
quantitative evidence that music samples are culturally transmitted via collaboration between
artists. Additionally, in support of the widespread assertion that the internet has delocalized
artist communities, we have found evidence that geographic proximity no longer biases the
structure of musical collaboration networks after the year 2000. Given that the strength of
transmission has not weakened over the same time period, this finding indicates that collabo-
ration remains a key cultural transmission mode for music sampling traditions. This result
supports the idea that the internet has enhanced rather than disrupted existing social interac-
tions [9].
Gender appears to play a key role in both network structure and cultural transmission.
Across the entire time period, collaborations were more likely to occur between individuals of
the same gender. Additionally, the probability of cultural transmission appears to be much
higher for female artists. This effect could be a result of the much higher levels of homophily
among women before 2000. Previous work has suggested that high levels of gender homophily
are associated with gender disparity [4345], which is consistent with the historic marginaliza-
tion of women in music production communities [1,10,46]. Although the proportion of
female artists in the entire dataset is extremely low (*6%), the reduction in homophily among
female artists after 2000 could be reflective of increasing inclusivity [47].
Artists with similar levels of popularity were also more likely to collaborate with each other.
The increase in homophily by popularity after 2000 could be the result of an increase in skew,
whereby fewer artists take up a greater proportion of the music charts [48]. In addition, the
probability of cultural transmission appears to be higher among less popular artists, even
though they are slightly less collaborative. This effect could be linked to cultural norms within
“underground” music production communities. In these communities, collective cultural pro-
duction is sometimes prioritized over individual recognition [49,50]. This principle is best
demonstrated by the historic popularity of the white-label release format, where singles are
pressed to blank vinyl and distributed without artist information [49,50]. In more extreme
cases, individual artists who experience some level of mainstream success or press coverage
risk losing credibility, and may even be perceived as undermining the integrity of their music
community [50,51]. Concerns about credibility could cause individuals to selectively copy less
popular artists or utilize more rare samples (i.e. De La Soul’s refusal to sample James Brown
and George Clinton because of their use by other popular groups [52]). Future research should
investigate whether the “high prestige attached to obscurity” [50] in these communities may be
driving a model-based bias for samples used by less popular artists or a frequency-based bias
for samples that are more rare in the population [53]. A frequency-based novelty bias was
recently identified in Western classical music using agent-based modeling [31], and similar
methods could be utilized for sampling.
Similarly to popularity, the number of followers an individual has negatively predicts trans-
mission probability. However, artists with similar numbers of followers were actually less likely
to collaborate with each other after 2000. This result could be due to the fact that followers is a
better indicator of current popularity, but has lower resolution further back in time. Newer art-
ists with inflated follower counts who collaborate with older, historically-important artists
with lower follower counts may still be expressing homophily based on overall popularity.
There are several limitations to this study that should be highlighted. Firstly, the time lag
inherent in the user editing of WhoSampled means that older transmission records are more
complete. Algorithms for sample-detection [54] may allow researchers to reconstruct full
transmission records in the future, but these approaches are not yet publicly available.
Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions
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Secondly, MusicBrainz and Spotify had incomplete demographic data for some artists (i.e.
gender and geographic location), which may have introduced bias into our model estimates.
Lastly, Discogs primarily documents official releases, which means that more recent releases
on streaming sites like Soundcloud are not well-represented. In combination with the exclu-
sion of artists without Discogs IDs, this indicates that less prominent artists may be underrep-
resented in the dataset. Fortunately, social networks are fairly robust to missing data, especially
when networks are large, centralized, and disproportionately include central nodes [5557].
Additionally, simulation studies evaluating the robustness of NBDA indicate that it performs
well under fairly high levels of sampling error and bias [34,5860], risks that are mitigated
by the fact that the network was reconstructed from published collaborations rather than tem-
poral co-occurrence data. Data on collaborative relationships between artists are less likely to
suffer from significant observation error because (1) they do not have to be statistically trans-
formed or filtered before network construction and (2) they result in cultural artifacts that are
part of the public record. The crowd-sourced nature of these data is unlikely to impact the
results, given that comparative studies of other crowd-sourced, quantitative datasets indicate
that they have high accuracy [6163].
The results of this study provide valuable insight into how demographic variables, particu-
larly gender and popularity, have biased both cultural transmission and the evolution of collab-
oration networks going into the digital age. In addition, we provide evidence that collaboration
remains a key transmission mode of music sampling traditions despite the delocalization of
communities by the internet. Future research should investigate whether decreased homophily
among females is actually linked to greater inclusivity in the music industry (e.g. booking rates,
financial compensation, media coverage), as well as whether the inverse effect of popularity on
cultural transmission probability is a result of a model-based bias for obscurity or a frequency-
based bias for novelty.
Supporting information
S1 Appendix. Statistical output, goodness-of-fit tests, and supplementary analyses.
(PDF)
S1 Fig. The combined diffusion curve for all three drum breaks included in the primary
OADA. The proportion of informed individuals is on the y-axis, and the year is on the x-axis.
Although recent research suggests that inferring acquisition modes from diffusion curves is
unreliable, it appears that the curve may have the S-shape indicative of social transmission
prior to the early-2000s.
(TIFF)
S2 Fig. The relationship between diffusion years and transmission strengths for all seven
diffusions included in the additional OADA. The mean (left) and median (right) years of dif-
fusion are on the x-axis, and the social transmission estimates from the additive model are on
the y-axis. Linear regression found no significant relationships between either mean year of
diffusion and social transmission estimate (R
2
= 0.20, p= 0.31) or median year of diffusion
and social transmission estimate (R
2
= 0.17, p= 0.36).
(TIFF)
S3 Fig. The relationship between popularity and followers and the number of collabora-
tions for each artist in the dataset. Popularity and followers are on the x-axis, and number
of collaborations is on the y-axis. Linear regression found significant positive relationships
between both popularity and number of collaborations (R
2
= 0.048, p<0.001) and followers
Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions
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and number of collaborations (R
2
= 0.090, p<0.001).
(TIFF)
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank David Lahti and Carolyn Pytte, as well as all members of the Lahti lab, for
their valuable conceptual and analytical feedback.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization: Mason Youngblood.
Data curation: Mason Youngblood.
Formal analysis: Mason Youngblood.
Investigation: Mason Youngblood.
Methodology: Mason Youngblood.
Resources: Mason Youngblood.
Software: Mason Youngblood.
Validation: Mason Youngblood.
Visualization: Mason Youngblood.
Writing original draft: Mason Youngblood.
Writing review & editing: Mason Youngblood.
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... Цифрова епоха збільшує доступність творів вокально-хорового мистецтва, чим актуалізує питання авторських прав, що особливо важливо з огляду на питання виконавської доброчесності, з одного боку, та відповідності принципу діалогічності мистецтва усіх форм естетиці постмодерної доби (Schulkin & Raglan, 2014;Троцька, 2017;Youngblood, 2019). З огляду джерел можна дійти висновку, що тема впливу цифрових трансформацій на різні форми музичного мистецтва, зокрема вокальнохорову його царину, більш розроблена в зарубіжному музикознавстві. ...
... Новітні дослідження також доводять, що після 2000 року на структуру мережі співпраці в межах вокально-хорового мистецтва значно менше впливає географічна близькість виконавців, відбулася т. зв. делокалізація спільнот через інтернет під впливом функціоналу цифрових технологій (Youngblood, 2019). ...
... Our study leverages this concept of cultural evolution to investigate sample-based music's developmental path through network science methods, revealing the stylistic and generational shifts that contribute to the art form's longevity. In the realm of sample-based music, this analogy becomes particularly apt: Samples in compositions act like "cultural genes" of sorts in the creation of new music through direct transmission, replication, and modification [33,34]. ...
... This breakdown adds an additional layer of analysis, offering perspective on the geographic distribution of research on the topic under study. [29], [32], [35], [37], [38], [41]- [43], [45], [46], [49], [50], [52], [53], [56], [57], [59], [70], [ ...
Article
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Our analysis explores the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in music generation, showcasing progress in electronic music, automatic music generation, evolution in music, contributions to music-related disciplines, specific studies, contributions to the renewal of western music, and hardware development and educational applications. The identified methods encompass neural networks, automation and simulation, neuroscience techniques, optimization algorithms, data analysis, and Bayesian models, computational algorithms, and music processing and audio analysis. These approaches signify the complexity and versatility of AI in music creation. The interdisciplinary impact is evident, extending into sound engineering, music therapy, and cognitive neuroscience. Robust frameworks for evaluation include Bayesian models, fractal metrics, and the statistical creator-evaluator. The global reach of this research underscores AI's transformative role in contemporary music, opening avenues for future interdisciplinary exploration and algorithmic enhancements.
... Новітні дослідження також доводять, що після 2000 року на структуру мережі співпраці в межах вокально-хорового мистецтва значно менше впливає географічна близькість виконавців, відбулася т. зв. делокалізація спільнот через інтернет під впливом функціоналу цифрових технологій (Youngblood, 2019). ...
Article
Full-text available
Стаття присвячена впливові глибинної діджиталізації сьогодення на один із найдавніших різновидів музи- котворення, яким є вокально-хорове мистецтво. Мета статті полягає в інформаційно-аналітичний оцінці циф- рових трансформацій вокально-хорового мистецтва з огляду на досвід та нові можливості, які пропонує вка- заній сфері музики епоха наскрізної щодо глибини впливу та глобальної щодо географічного масштабування діджиталізації. Хорове виконання багато в чому є загерметизованим, однак у парадигмі сучасності воно теж зазнає еволюції. Вплив цифрових технологій на вокально-хорове мистецтво розглянуто у зв’язку з дотичними впливами естетики постмодернізму та засилля популярної культури з її тяжінням до типовості, яскравості, емоційної легкості, розважальності тощо. Вокально-хорове мистецтво висвітлено з позицій високоестетич- ного музичного жанру, з погляду педагогічних тенденцій та способу культурної участі широких мас населен- ня. Вказано на використання типових для всієї сучасної музичної індустрії ресурсів на кшталт AutoTune та Sidechain-компресії. Інтернет, соцмережі та програми відеокомунікації є основами для становлення та поши- рення віртуального хору. Через складність технологічної організації доцільно задля досягнення професіонального ефекту використовувати не звичайні платформи на кшталт Zoom чи Google Meet, а спеціально розроблені для використання хористами (Musicroom, iDevice, Acapella тощо). Аналіз масштабу цифровізації різних сфер буття людства показує, що ті сфери, котрі дистанціюються та замикаються від проникнення цифрових технологій, програють у боротьбі за реципієнта, натомість ті галузі, що вигідно взаємодіють із цифровими технологіями, перетворюючи їх на інструмент власної еволюції, оновлюються та завойовують шанувальників, збагачуються арсеналом новітніх прийомів творчості та дистрибуції. Тому попри виокремлення деяких негативних трендів, у статті акцентовано на перевагах, які цифрові трансформації дають сучасному вокально-хоровому мистецтву за умови збалансування фундаментальних рис та новаторських тенденцій, пов’язаних з інтеграцією цифрових технологій.
... It is common practice for people to share sounds with one another for free in online forums, such as the Subreddits r/DrumKits and r/SampleHunters (Edney 2021). With the internet serving as a central space for music production and collaboration, producers across international markets are able to enter the space and collaborate with one another (Youngblood 2019;Eze 2020). ...
Article
Full-text available
As a large marketplace of royalty-free samples, the music platform Splice has worked to centralize and open up the process of hip hop production to over 4 million users, varying from beginning bedroom producers to established producers like Turbo (who has worked on tracks for artists including Young Thug, Gunna and Lil Baby). Founded by sound engineer Matt Aimonetti and GroupMe co-founder Steve Martocci in 2013, Splice experienced extreme growth during the COVID-19 pandemic as more aspiring producers took up beat-making from home. Hip hop producers have long used the internet to exchange and sell samples for beat production through direct messaging, sample blogs and sample marketplaces. While these digital exchanges have enabled quicker collaboration and accessibility for producers, they have also set the groundwork for companies like Splice to have an unprecedented influence in musical interactions and activity. Online platforms geared towards hip hop production and beat-making are becoming increasingly critical to the music industry, offering an important opportunity to examine digital creative economies and the platformization of cultural production. Splice incorporates features such as curation and algorithmic recommendation of samples to aid creators in their production process. Through interviews with producers who use Splice and a critical analysis of the platform’s user experience, this article demonstrates that producers can feel the need to strike a balance when engaging with the platform, finding ways to use automated tools that make their work more efficient while simultaneously striving to maintain high standards of individual creativity and technical skills. This suggests that it is necessary to have a nuanced understanding of Splice’s impact on music production and how it differs from streaming platforms because of its particular logics and functionalities geared towards music creators as a primary userbase.
... This focus was intentional, as we adopted the recombinatory approach to studying innovation in this genre. However, by using alternative phenotypes, such as lyrics [49], sampling [89], musical instruments [27], beats [90], or chord progression [13], future research could present further insights into root concepts' historical influence on the evolution of cultural fields and explore alternative ways of empirically capturing root concepts. ...
Article
Full-text available
This study proposes the notion of “root concepts” in cultural production, defined as a novel style and mode that a creator expresses at the initial field development phase, and that has a great influence on subsequent creators. We explore the role of root concepts in cultural evolution by focusing on their capacity to generate new combinations with other elements and examine how creators use root concepts jointly with other elements. Using data on artists and albums in the rap genre from the online database Allmusic, we view music moods as a type of experience that music generates and focus on music moods as a phenotype in studying styles and modes. We constructed a dataset of recombinatory patterns in the subsequent cultural production and identified two types of root concepts: implosive concepts, which artists use jointly with similar elements; and explosive concepts, which artists use in conjunction with highly diversified elements. Implosive concepts are exclusive because they require creators to have network contagions with those familiar with the root concepts and have strong and specific socio-economic identities. Previous research has suggested that finding a new combination is challenging owing to creators’ limited cognitive capacities and the resulting local search. Our finding presents an alternative explanation: some root concepts (i.e., implosive ones) possess innate characteristics that limit creators from experimentally integrating diversified elements. This study develops new opportunities for future research on the evolutionary growth of cultural production and knowledge fields.
... Evolutionary approaches to culture are used to shed light on contemporary cultural dynamics, such as the evolution of programming languages (Valverde and Solé 2015), the prevalence of certain narrative techniques in films (Sobchuk and Tinits 2020), the diffusion of music sampling traditions (Youngblood 2019), or the cognitive underpinnings of vaccine hesitancy . ...
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Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, wherein individuals need to understand, memorize, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing—only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment ( N = 1,080 participants) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain setup. The second experiment ( N = 1,200 participants) used the same material, but participants were asked whether or not they would share the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network or with their friends, in their favorite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorization and reproduction are involved in the transmission—as in oral transmission—than when they are not—as in online sharing. Negative content seems to be reliably favored in both modalities of transmission.
... Exaptation is ubiquitous in a broad variety of realms, including language (Williams 1983;Traugott 2004), music (Ryu 2010; Barthet et al. 2014;Youngblood 2019), and urban planning and architecture (Furnari 2011). Exaptation is critical to technological innovation (Andriani and Carignani 2014;Ferreira et al. 2020); co-option of proteins Handling editor: Aaron Goldman. ...
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Evolution works by adaptation and exaptation. At an organismal level, exaptation and adaptation are seen in the formation of organelles and the advent of multicellularity. At the sub-organismal level, molecular systems such as proteins and RNAs readily undergo adaptation and exaptation. Here we suggest that the concepts of adaptation and exaptation are universal, synergistic, and recursive and apply to small molecules such as metabolites, cofactors, and the building blocks of extant polymers. For example, adenosine has been extensively adapted and exapted throughout biological evolution. Chemical variants of adenosine that are products of adaptation include 2′ deoxyadenosine in DNA and a wide array of modified forms in mRNAs, tRNAs, rRNAs, and viral RNAs. Adenosine and its variants have been extensively exapted for various functions, including informational polymers (RNA, DNA), energy storage (ATP), metabolism (e.g., coenzyme A), and signaling (cyclic AMP). According to Gould, Vrba, and Darwin, exaptation imposes a general constraint on interpretation of history and origins; because of exaptation, extant function should not be used to explain evolutionary history. While this notion is accepted in evolutionary biology, it can also guide the study of the chemical origins of life. We propose that (i) evolutionary theory is broadly applicable from the dawn of life to the present time from molecules to organisms, (ii) exaptation and adaptation were important and simultaneous processes, and (iii) robust origin of life models can be constructed without conflating extant utility with historical basis of origins.
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Culture evolves,1-5 but the existence of cross-culturally general regularities of cultural evolution is debated.6-8 As a diverse but universal cultural phenomenon, music provides a novel domain to test for the existence of such regularities.9-12 Folk song melodies can be thought of as culturally transmitted sequences of notes that change over time under the influence of cognitive and acoustic/physical constraints.9-15 Modeling melodies as evolving sequences constructed from an "alphabet" of 12 scale degrees16 allows us to quantitatively test for the presence of cross-cultural regularities using a sample of 10,062 melodies from musically divergent Japanese and English (British/American) folk song traditions.17,18 Our analysis identifies 328 pairs of highly related melodies, finding that note changes are more likely when they have smaller impacts on a song's melody. Specifically, (1) notes with stronger rhythmic functions are less likely to change, and (2) note substitutions are most likely between neighboring notes. We also find that note insertions/deletions ("indels") are more common than note substitutions, unlike genetic evolution where the reverse is true. Our results are consistent across English and Japanese samples despite major differences in their scales and tonal systems. These findings demonstrate that even a creative art form such as music is subject to evolutionary constraints analogous to those governing the evolution of genes, languages, and other domains of culture.
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Phylogenetic trees or networks representing cultural evolution are typically built using methods from biology that use similarities and differences in cultural traits to infer the historical relationships between the populations that produced them. While these methods have yielded important insights, researchers continue to debate the extent to which cultural phylogenies are tree-like or reticulated due to high levels of horizontal transmission. In this study, we propose a novel method for phylogenetic reconstruction using dynamic community detection that focuses not on the cultural traits themselves (e.g., musical features), but the people creating them (musicians). We used data from 1,498,483 collaborative relationships between electronic music artists to construct a cultural phylogeny based on observed population structure. The results suggest that, although vertical transmission appears to be dominant, the potential for horizontal transmission (indexed by between-population linkage) is relatively high and populations never become fully isolated from one another. In addition, we found evidence that electronic music diversity has increased between 1975 and 1999. The method used in this study is available as a new R package called DynCommPhylo. Future studies should apply this method to other cultural systems such as academic publishing and film, as well as biological systems where high resolution reproductive data is available, and develop formal inferential models to assess how levels of reticulation in evolution vary across domains.
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In 1956, John Cage predicted that “in the future, records will be made from records” (Duffel, 202). Certainly, musical creativity has always involved a certain amount of appropriation and adaptation of previous works. For example, Vivaldi appropriated and adapted the “Cum sancto spiritu” fugue of Ruggieri’s Gloria (Burnett, 4; Forbes, 261). If stuck for a guitar solo on stage, Keith Richards admits that he’ll adapt Buddy Holly for his own purposes (Street, 135). Similarly, Nirvana adapted the opening riff from Killing Jokes’ “Eighties” for their song “Come as You Are”. Musical “quotation” is actively encouraged in jazz, and contemporary hip-hop would not exist if the genre’s pioneers and progenitors had not plundered and adapted existing recorded music. Sampling technologies, however, have taken musical adaptation a step further and realised Cage’s prediction. Hardware and software samplers have developed to the stage where any piece of audio can be appropriated and adapted to suit the creative impulses of the sampling musician (or samplist). The practice of sampling challenges established notions of creativity, with whole albums created with no original musical input as most would understand it—literally “records made from records.” Sample-based music is premised on adapting audio plundered from the cultural environment. This paper explores the ways in which technology is used to adapt previous recordings into new ones, and how musicians themselves have adapted to the potentials of digital technology for exploring alternative approaches to musical creativity. Sampling is frequently defined as “the process of converting an analog signal to a digital format.” While this definition remains true, it does not acknowledge the prevalence of digital media. The “analogue to digital” method of sampling requires a microphone or instrument to be recorded directly into a sampler. Digital media, however, simplifies the process. For example, a samplist can download a video from YouTube and rip the audio track for editing, slicing, and manipulation, all using software within the noiseless digital environment of the computer. Perhaps it is more prudent to describe sampling simply as the process of capturing sound. Regardless of the process, once a sound is loaded into a sampler (hardware or software) it can be replayed using a MIDI keyboard, trigger pad or sequencer. Use of the sampled sound, however, need not be a faithful rendition or clone of the original. At the most basic level of manipulation, the duration and pitch of sounds can be altered. The digital processes that are implemented into the Roland VariOS Phrase Sampler allow samplists to eliminate the pitch or melodic quality of a sampled phrase. The phrase can then be melodically redefined as the samplist sees fit: adapted to a new tempo, key signature, and context or genre. Similarly, software such as Propellerhead’s ReCycle slices drum beats into individual hits for use with a loop sampler such as Reason’s Dr Rex module. Once loaded into Dr Rex, the individual original drum sounds can be used to program a new beat divorced from the syncopation of the original drum beat. Further, the individual slices can be subjected to pitch, envelope (a component that shapes the volume of the sound over time) and filter (a component that emphasises and suppresses certain frequencies) control, thus an existing drum beat can easily be adapted to play a new rhythm at any tempo. For example, this rhythm was created from slicing up and rearranging Clyde Stubblefield’s classic break from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”. Sonic adaptation of digital information is not necessarily confined to the auditory realm. An audio editor such as Sony’s Sound Forge is able to open any file format as raw audio. For example, a Word document or a Flash file could be opened with the data interpreted as audio. Admittedly, the majority of results obtained are harsh white noise, but there is scope for serendipitous anomalies such as a glitchy beat that can be extracted and further manipulated by audio software. Audiopaint is an additive synthesis application created by Nicolas Fournel for converting digital images into audio. Each pixel position and colour is translated into information designating frequency (pitch), amplitude (volume) and pan position in the stereo image. The user can determine which one of the three RGB channels corresponds to either of the stereo channels. Further, the oscillator for the wave form can be either the default sine wave or an existing audio file such as a drum loop can be used. The oscillator shapes the end result, responding to the dynamics of the sine wave or the audio file. Although Audiopaint labours under the same caveat as with the use of raw audio, the software can produce some interesting results. Both approaches to sound generation present results that challenge distinctions between “musical sound” and “noise”. Sampling is also a cultural practice, a relatively recent form of adaptation extending out of a time honoured creative aesthetic that borrows, quotes and appropriates from existing works to create new ones. Different fields of production, as well as different commentators, variously use terms such as “co-creative media”, “cumulative authorship”, and “derivative works” with regard to creations that to one extent or another utilise existing works in the production of new ones (Coombe; Morris; Woodmansee). The extent of the sampling may range from subtle influence to dominating significance within the new work, but the constant principle remains: an existing work is appropriated and adapted to fit the needs of the secondary creator. Proponents of what may be broadly referred to as the “free culture” movement argue that creativity and innovation inherently relies on the appropriation and adaptation of existing works (for example, see Lessig, Future of Ideas; Lessig, Free Culture; McLeod, Freedom of Expression; Vaidhyanathan). For example, Gwen Stefani’s 2004 release “Rich Girl” is based on Louchie Lou and Michie One’s 1994 single of the same title. Lou and One’s “Rich Girl”, in turn, is a reggae dance hall adaptation of “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. Stefani’s “na na na” vocal riff shares the same melody as the “Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum” riff from Fiddler on the Roof. Samantha Mumba adapted David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” for her second single “Body II Body”. Similarly, Richard X adapted Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me” for a career saving single for Sugababes. Digital technologies enable and even promote the adaptation of existing works (Morris). The ease of appropriating and manipulating digital audio files has given rise to a form of music known variously as mash-up, bootleg, or bastard pop. Mash-ups are the most recent stage in a history of musical appropriation and they epitomise the sampling aesthetic. Typically produced in bedroom computer-based studios, mash-up artists use software such as Acid or Cool Edit Pro to cut up digital music files and reassemble the fragments to create new songs, arbitrarily adding self-composed parts if desired. Comprised almost exclusively from sections of captured music, mash-ups have been referred to as “fictional pop music” because they conjure up scenarios where, for example, Destiny’s Child jams in a Seattle garage with Nirvana or the Spice Girls perform with Nine Inch Nails (Petridis). Once the initial humour of the novelty has passed, the results can be deeply alluring. Mash-ups extract the distinctive characteristics of songs and place them in new, innovative contexts. As Dale Lawrence writes: “the vocals are often taken from largely reviled or ignored sources—cornball acts like Aguilera or Destiny’s Child—and recast in wildly unlikely contexts … where against all odds, they actually work”. Similarly, Crawford argues that “part of the art is to combine the greatest possible aesthetic dissonance with the maximum musical harmony. The pleasure for listeners is in discovering unlikely artistic complementarities and revisiting their musical memories in mutated forms” (36). Sometimes the adaptation works in the favour of the sampled artist: George Clinton claims that because of sampling he is more popular now than in 1976—“the sampling made us big again” (Green). The creative aspect of mash-ups is unlike that usually associated with musical composition and has more in common with DJing. In an effort to further clarify this aspect, we may regard DJ mixes as “mash-ups on the fly.” When Grandmaster Flash recorded his quilt-pop masterpiece, “Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” it was recorded while he performed live, demonstrating his precision and skill with turntables. Modern audio editing software facilitates the capture and storage of sound, allowing mash-up artists to manipulate sounds bytes outside of “real-time” and the live performance parameters within which Flash worked. Thus, the creative element is not the traditional arrangement of chords and parts, but rather “audio contexts”. If, as Riley pessimistically suggests, “there are no new chords to be played, there are no new song structures to be developed, there are no new stories to be told, and there are no new themes to explore,” then perhaps it is understandable that artists have searched for new forms of musical creativity. The notes and chords of mash-ups are segments of existing works sequenced together to produce inter-layered contexts rather than purely tonal patterns. The merit of mash-up culture lies in its function of deconstructing the boundaries of genre and providing new musical possibilities. The process of mashing-up genres functions to critique contemporary music culture by “pointing a finger at how stifled and obvious the current musical landscape has become. … Suddenly rap doesn’t have to be set to predictable funk beats, pop/R&B ballads don’t have to come wrapped in cheese, garage melodies don’t have to recycle the Ramones” (Lawrence). According to Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School critic, popular music (of his time) was irretrievably simplistic and constructed from easily interchangeable, modular components (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). A standardised and repetitive approach to musical composition fosters a mode of consumption dubbed by Adorno “quotation listening” and characterised by passive acceptance of, and obsession with, a song’s riffs (44-5). As noted by Em McAvan, Adorno’s analysis elevates the producer over the consumer, portraying a culture industry controlling a passive audience through standardised products (McAvan). The characteristics that Adorno observed in the popular music of his time are classic traits of contemporary popular music. Mash-up artists, however, are not representative of Adorno’s producers for a passive audience, instead opting to wrest creative control from composers and the recording industry and adapt existing songs in pursuit of their own creative impulses. Although mash-up productions may consciously or unconsciously criticise the current state of popular music, they necessarily exist in creative symbiosis with the commercial genres: “if pop songs weren’t simple and formulaic, it would be much harder for mashup bedroom auteurs to do their job” (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). Arguably, when creating mash-ups, some individuals are expressing their dissatisfaction with the stagnation of the pop industry and are instead working to create music that they as consumers wish to hear. Sample-based music—as an exercise in adaptation—encourages a Foucauldian questioning of the composer’s authority over their musical texts. Recorded music is typically a passive medium in which the consumer receives the music in its original, unaltered form. DJ Dangermouse (Brian Burton) breached this pact to create his Grey Album, which is a mash-up of an a cappella version of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ eponymous album (also known as the White Album). Dangermouse says that “every kick, snare, and chord is taken from the Beatles White Album and is in their original recording somewhere.” In deconstructing the Beatles’ songs, Dangermouse turned the recordings into a palette for creating his own new work, adapting audio fragments to suit his creative impulses. As Joanna Demers writes, “refashioning these sounds and reorganising them into new sonic phrases and sentences, he creates acoustic mosaics that in most instances are still traceable to the Beatles source, yet are unmistakeably distinct from it” (139-40). Dangermouse’s approach is symptomatic of what Schütze refers to as remix culture: an open challenge to a culture predicated on exclusive ownership, authorship, and controlled distribution … . Against ownership it upholds an ethic of creative borrowing and sharing. Against the original it holds out an open process of recombination and creative transformation. It equally calls into question the categories, rifts and borders between high and low cultures, pop and elitist art practices, as well as blurring lines between artistic disciplines. Using just a laptop, an audio editor and a calculator, Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, created the Night Ripper album using samples from 167 artists (Dombale). Although all the songs on Night Ripper are blatantly sampled-based, Gillis sees his creations as “original things” (Dombale). The adaptation of sampled fragments culled from the Top 40 is part of Gillis’ creative process: “It’s not about who created this source originally, it’s about recontextualising—creating new music. … I’ve always tried to make my own songs” (Dombale). Gillis states that his music has no political message, but is a reflection of his enthusiasm for pop music: “It’s a celebration of everything Top 40, that’s the point” (Dombale). Gillis’ “celebratory” exercises in creativity echo those of various fan-fiction authors who celebrate the characters and worlds that constitute popular culture. Adaptation through sampling is not always centred solely on music. Sydney-based Tom Compagnoni, a.k.a. Wax Audio, adapted a variety of sound bytes from politicians and media personalities including George W. Bush, Alexander Downer, Alan Jones, Ray Hadley, and John Howard in the creation of his Mediacracy E.P.. In one particular instance, Compagnoni used a myriad of samples culled from various media appearances by George W. Bush to recreate the vocals for John Lennon’s Imagine. Created in early 2005, the track, which features speeded-up instrumental samples from a karaoke version of Lennon’s original, is an immediate irony fuelled comment on the invasion of Iraq. The rationale underpinning the song is further emphasised when “Imagine This” reprises into “Let’s Give Peace a Chance” interspersed with short vocal fragments of “Come Together”. Compagnoni justifies his adaptations by presenting appropriated media sound bytes that deliberately set out to demonstrate the way information is manipulated to present any particular point of view. Playing the media like an instrument, Wax Audio juxtaposes found sounds in a way that forces the listener to confront the bias, contradiction and sensationalism inherent in their daily intake of media information. … Oh yeah—and it’s bloody funny hearing George W Bush sing “Imagine”. Notwithstanding the humorous quality of the songs, Mediacracy represents a creative outlet for Compagnoni’s political opinions that is emphasised by the adaptation of Lennon’s song. Through his adaptation, Compagnoni revitalises Lennon’s sentiments about the Vietnam War and superimposes them onto the US policy on Iraq. An interesting aspect of sampled-based music is the re-occurrence of particular samples across various productions, which demonstrates that the same fragment can be adapted for a plethora of musical contexts. For example, Clyde Stubblefield’s “Funky Drummer” break is reputed to be the most sampled break in the world. The break from 1960s soul/funk band the Winstons’ “Amen Brother” (the B-side to their 1969 release “Color Him Father”), however, is another candidate for the title of “most sampled break”. The “Amen break” was revived with the advent of the sampler. Having featured heavily in early hip-hop records such as “Words of Wisdom” by Third Base and “Straight Out of Compton” by NWA, the break “appears quite adaptable to a range of music genres and tastes” (Harrison, 9m 46s). Beginning in the early 1990s, adaptations of this break became a constant of jungle music as sampling technology developed to facilitate more complex operations (Harrison, 5m 52s). The break features on Shy FX’s “Original Nutta”, L Double & Younghead’s “New Style”, Squarepusher’s “Big Acid”, and a cover version of Led Zepplin’s “Whole Lotta Love” by Jane’s Addiction front man Perry Farrell. This is to name but a few tracks that have adapted the break. Wikipedia offers a list of songs employing an adaptation of the “Amen break”. This list, however, falls short of the “hundreds of tracks” argued for by Nate Harrison, who notes that “an entire subculture based on this one drum loop … six seconds from 1969” has developed (8m 45s). The “Amen break” is so ubiquitous that, much like the twelve bar blues structure, it has become a foundational element of an entire genre and has been adapted to satisfy a plethora of creative impulses. The sheer prevalence of the “Amen break” simultaneously illustrates the creative nature of music adaptation as well as the potentials for adaptation stemming from digital technology such as the sampler. The cut-up and rearrangement aspect of creative sampling technology at once suggests the original but also something new and different. Sampling in general, and the phenomenon of the “Amen break” in particular, ensures the longevity of the original sources; sampled-based music exhibits characteristics acquired from the source materials, yet the illegitimate offspring are not their parents. Sampling as a technology for creatively adapting existing forms of audio has encouraged alternative approaches to musical composition. Further, it has given rise to a new breed of musician that has adapted to technologies of adaptation. Mash-up artists and samplists demonstrate that recorded music is not simply a fixed or read-only product but one that can be freed from the composer’s original arrangement to be adapted and reconfigured. Many mash-up artists such as Gregg Gillis are not trained musicians, but their ears are honed from enthusiastic consumption of music. Individuals such as DJ Dangermouse, Gregg Gillis and Tom Compagnoni appropriate, reshape and re-present the surrounding soundscape to suit diverse creative urges, thereby adapting the passive medium of recorded sound into an active production tool. References Adorno, Theodor. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Ed. J. Bernstein. London, New York: Routledge, 1991. Burnett, Henry. “Ruggieri and Vivaldi: Two Venetian Gloria Settings.” American Choral Review 30 (1988): 3. Compagnoni, Tom. “Wax Audio: Mediacracy.” Wax Audio. 2005. 2 Apr. 2007 http://www.waxaudio.com.au/downloads/mediacracy>. Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1998. Demers, Joanna. Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity. Athens, London: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Dombale, Ryan. “Interview: Girl Talk.” Pitchfork. 2006. 9 Jan. 2007 http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/37785/Interview_Interview_Girl_Talk>. Duffel, Daniel. Making Music with Samples. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005. Forbes, Anne-Marie. “A Venetian Festal Gloria: Antonio Lotti’s Gloria in D Major.” Music Research: New Directions for a New Century. Eds. M. Ewans, R. Halton, and J. Phillips. London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004. Green, Robert. “George Clinton: Ambassador from the Mothership.” Synthesis. Undated. 15 Sep. 2005 http://www.synthesis.net/music/story.php?type=story&id=70>. Harrison, Nate. “Can I Get an Amen?” Nate Harrison. 2004. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.nkhstudio.com>. Lawrence, Dale. “On Mashups.” Nuvo. 2002. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.nuvo.net/articles/article_292/>. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001. ———. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. McAvan, Em. “Boulevard of Broken Songs: Mash-Ups as Textual Re-Appropriation of Popular Music Culture.” M/C Journal 9.6 (2006) 3 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/02-mcavan.php>. McLeod, Kembrew. “Confessions of an Intellectual (Property): Danger Mouse, Mickey Mouse, Sonny Bono, and My Long and Winding Path as a Copyright Activist-Academic.” Popular Music & Society 28.79. ———. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday Books. Morris, Sue. “Co-Creative Media: Online Multiplayer Computer Game Culture.” Scan 1.1 (2004). 8 Jan. 2007 http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display_article.php?recordID=16>. Petridis, Alexis. “Pop Will Eat Itself.” The Guardian UK. March 2003. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,922797,00.html>. Riley. “Pop Will Eat Itself—Or Will It?”. The Truth Unknown (archived at Archive.org). 2003. 9 Jan. 2007 http://web.archive.org/web/20030624154252 /www.thetruthunknown.com/viewnews.asp?articleid=79>. Schütze, Bernard. “Samples from the Heap: Notes on Recycling the Detritus of a Remixed Culture”. Horizon Zero 2003. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?tlang=0&is=8&file=5>. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York, London: New York University Press, 2003. Woodmansee, Martha. “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity.” The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Eds. M. Woodmansee, P. Jaszi and P. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1994. 15. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Collins, Steve. "Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/09-collins.php>. APA Style Collins, S. (May 2007) "Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/09-collins.php>.
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