What is music concrete?
It’s a style of music practice where a noise is taken out of context and manipulated to change the pace, feel and overall result of the original sound. It breaks away from using recorded sounds rather than traditional music instruments.
Sampling and the Fairlight
Art of noise – Close (1984)
The Art of Noise (1984) by Close is a great example of the early sampling device called a Fairlight and its use. It was one of the first of its kind before digital sampling. A big keyboard that changes a sample and creates something new depending on where you press on the keyboard, high keys create a short but higher pitch whereas lower will bring a different itch.
You can tell a sample by its repetition and consistency, throughout the Art Of Noise (1984) you can see these constant samples pulled from different sources. This a quite a modern example of music concrete.
The Avalanches – Frontier Phschiatrist (2001)
In this sample heavy song they pulled from so many records and samples it was unseen at its time. It has an early hip hop beat behind the various samples of vocals, violins and bird squarks and so on. The reason they pulled areas from different structures is because of the different timbre and noise you get from each sample and record.
Accousmatiuc – Sound that’s decoupled from its source, has no visual implication and becomes its own Sound Object
Is it ethically correct to sample others work?
In class we talked about whether we should credit people when we intend to sample their work or artistic labour.
The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony (2009)
Bitter Sweet Symphony (2009) is a great example of the ‘incorrect’ use of sampling. I put the incorrect in quotations because it’s debatable whether or not sampling is a progressive use of artistic expression. The main ‘hook’ of the sound is a sample of a Rolling Stones Instrumental album of ‘The Last Time’ (1965) that they used throughout the song. It brings up a question on whether we as sound artists can hold onto our own labour. I personally think that if you’re a new artist and someone big samples your work it would be good coverage, why can’t it be seen if a smaller artist uses a bigger artists sample? Not sure…
Manipulating some audio we captured
Gareth for the end of lesson told us to go out and find some audio on campus so we could use music concrete techniques to change the sample. I went to the stair well and captured this.
I had to leave early because of work but I went home and used techniques such as Sampler, Simpler and pitch correct to change the sound objects in my recording.
the end result was surprising.
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