Xavier Westergaard Thursday, December 13th, 2018
Professor Konrad Kaczmarek
MUSI315: Fundamentals of Music Technology
Final Paper
TA: Anteo Fabris
Sampling as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is “to record (sound) digitally for subsequent electronic processing; to store (an excerpt of recorded sound) in digital form, esp. in order to reuse it, often modified, in a subsequent recording or performance.” The Oxford English Dictionary, or OED for short, is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, and being a historical dictionary, it aims not to merely explain the present day usages of words, but rather to show their development through time. It is, therefore, a point of great irony that the OED’s definition of sampling fails to encompass sampling’s analog origins. The aim of this essay will be to trace the history of sampling, beginning from the middle of the 20th century and ending up until the present, with a particular emphasis on the technological innovations that enabled the technique to escape the confines of government-sponsored radio broadcasting studios and leap into the arsenal of the tools at the disposal of the everyday musician.
To understand the origins of sampling, we must first touch upon the life of a 20th-century Frenchman by the name of Pierre Schaeffer. Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was born on August 14th, 1910 in Nancy, France, the capital of the northeastern French department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. Schaeffer was born into a musical family, as his father was a violinist and his mother was a pianist. Although Schaeffer demonstrated an interest in music early in his life— he studied the cello through private lessons in his hometown music school at the Nancy Conservatoire,—Schaeffer’s parents discouraged his musical pursuits; in fact, they urged him to pursue a more stable, more lucrative career in engineering. Schaeffer studied engineering at Lycée Saint-Sigisbert in Nancy and then at École Polytechnique in Paris before completing his education at École supérieure d'électricité, also in Paris. His diploma from the École Polytechnique was in radio broadcasting, and Schaeffer soon found himself employed as a telecommunications engineer in Strasbourg during the fall of 1934. Within a year of moving back to northeastern France, he met a German woman by the name of Elisabeth Schmitt, with whom he had his first child, Marie-Claire Schaeffer.
After fewer than two years working as an engineer in Strasbourg, Schaeffer and his fledgling nuclear family relocated to Paris, where he secured work at the French national broadcasting organization Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française. Although gainfully employed as a telecommunications engineer, Schaeffer was unable to shake his initial interest in music and yearned to combine his capabilities as a telecommunication engineer with his lifelong passion for sound. During his time at Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, Schaeffer was able to persuade his superiors at the radio station to allow him greater access to their equipment during the station’s off-air hours. During his ‘fiddling’ sessions, Schaeffer experimented with using the radio station’s equipment to change the nature of recorded sounds. He played sounds backward, sped them up and slowed them down, and even combined segments of tape to produce sounds through a multiplicity of operations that no one could have ever heard before. Schaeffer was able to draw on skills he had honed as a telecommunications engineer to utilize electronic instruments in his experiments. His expertise, combined with the knowledge of his fellow engineers at RTF, allowed his embarkments to blossom as he slowly but surely moved away from telecommunications engineering as his principal occupation.
Having thoroughly exhausted the sound production resources at RTF, Schaeffer sought to take advantage of new technology in a studio of his own. In 1951, Schaeffer and his RTF colleagues Pierre Henry and Jacques Poullin founded Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète within the RTF at which they were initially employed. At his brand-new and generously-funded government-sponsored music studio, Schaeffer had access to instruments far more diverse and powerful than the phonographs and turntables he used to manipulate recording in his former broadcasting studios. One of his most frequently used pieces of equipment was an industrial-grade tape recorder, a sound recording and reproduction device that made use of magnetic tape as a storage medium. Schaeffer’s life after leaving Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète is of great interest to musicologists, historians, and biographers, but it was his time at the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète on which we will pivot this discussion from Schaeffer’s life to his contribution to the art of music sampling.
The name of Schaeffer’s studio at RTF was Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète, which literally translates to ‘Concrete Music Research Group’, or, more figuratively, ‘Real Music Research Group’. What is real music, concrete music, musique concrète? According to our hero Pierre Schaeffer, music concrete is music created with sounds from phenomena that are then abstracted to create a composition. As Schaeffer explains, this is, in effect, the inverse of how classical music is written, where musical notation is realized into its final form by musicians reading from notated sheet music. According to Schaeffer, “Sound is the vocabulary of nature”, and Schaeffer’s aim was to broaden the scope of the musical lexicon by including sounds that traditionally would be considered non-musical.
Furthermore, Schaeffer did not want his pieces to be ‘realized’ live, but, rather, he wanted the recording he himself had engineered to be the exact version of his work that was heard in the studio, in a concert hall, or on the radio. The most famous example of a non-musical sound Schaeffer incorporated into his works was that of a train moving along its railroad tracks, which can be heard readily in his 1949 work "Étude aux chemins de fer”. It is a point of great interest that Schaeffer did not take these sounds from passing trains driven by unsuspecting conductors; rather, he was in cahoots with these conductors, who were under explicit instruction to “improvise” under a specific set of guidelines. Schaeffer then combined these noises on the basis of an entirely musical aesthetic, and in doing so hoped to divorce the semantic components of the noises—their context as train noises—from their music characteristics, such as pitch, timbre, and rhythm. Schaeffer was able to create his music in part because of his expertise in radio broadcasting and recording technologies, but he was also able to create his music in part because of the technological innovations in sound production technology that were occurring at the time. It was this contribution to the field of music—using equipment at the frontier of technological innovation to borrow, manipulate, and reincorporate sound into novel musical settings—that laid the stage for the conventional use of sampling in popular music several decades later.
It is essential to understand that Schaeffer’s music was far more innovative than it was popular. Indeed, it is unlikely that Schaeffer’s recordings of trains moving along their tracks would have successfully competed against Nat King Cole’s “Too Young” or Tony Bennett’s Because of You” for the top spot on the 1951 Billboard Hot 100. However, the principles behind Schaeffer’s music were able to gain widespread traction in the musical community because of a technological innovation that was developed in the ensuing decade, the computer memory-based sampler. Within ten years of Pierre Schaeffer’s music concrète experiments, several companies had developed tape replay keyboards that were able to store sampled recordings on magnetic tape. The most influential of these tape replay keyboards was the Mellotron, an electro-mechanical, polyphonic tape replay keyboard which can be heard on the Beatles’s 1967 “Strawberry Fields Forever”, the Rolling Stones’s 1967 “She’s a Rainbow”, and several tracks on Radiohead’s 1997 album OK Computer. Much like Pierre Schaeffer’s recording equipment, the mellotron was held back in part by its high cost, in part by its great physical weight, and in part by its limited ability to sample more than two dozen or so unique sound clips. Digital sampling technology helped to remedy these limitations. Digital sampling was first achieved by the EMS Musys system, which can be heard on Harrison Birtwistle’s 1975 piece Chronometer. Like many technologies that were at one point in time cutting-edge and innovative, the costly EMS Musys system gave way to the less expensive Computer Music Melodian by Harry Mendell. In 1979, the first polyphonic digital sampling synthesizer, the Fairlight CMI, was introduced to market. Both the EMS Musys system and the Fairlight CMI employed wavetable sample-based synthesis, a form of audio synthesis that uses sampled sounds as seed waveforms rather than the sine and saw waves used in additive and subtractive synthesis techniques. It was Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel, the designers of the Fairlight CMI, that first coined the word ‘sampling’ in its modern-day usage. The Fairlight CMI was wildly popular, and even though it originally sold for upwards of $25,000, units were purchased by mainstream artists from Peter Gabriel and Hans Zimmer to Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder. The widespread commercial success of the Fairlight CMI motivated other companies to jump on the sampler bandwagon. The technology improved and the price point dropped, until, eventually, an American company called Ensoniq introduced the Mirage in 1985 for a mere $1695. Thirty-six years after Pierre Schaeffer had recorded trains on railroad tracks, the capacity to record found sounds and incorporate them into novel musical compositions finally reached the hobbyist musician at an affordable price point.
Although the Fairlight CMI and the Ensoniq Mirage were, technologically speaking, lightyears ahead of Pierre Schaeffer’s phonographs, they were still clunky, primitive devices compared to today’s digital audio workstations. Random access memory, computer data storage that stores data currently in use, was in short supply to the average consumer, as were large external data storage devices. Only a few seconds of sound could be recorded at any one time, and the operations available to musicians to manipulate their recordings were limited to pitch shifting and envelope adjustment. These limitations were addressed most substation ally by a machine called the Akai MIDI Production Center, or MPC. By way of the MPC, Akai introduced processing techniques such as crossfading and time-stretching, by which a sample could be shortened or lengthened without distorting the pitch of the original track. The MPC sampler looks strikingly different from the Fairlight CMI and other earlier samplers because it does not present with a piano-style keyboard interface; rather, the machine presents with 16 distinct pads arranged in a 4×4 grid, which can be assigned samples and triggered independently of one another. Although sampling length was at first limited to a brief 13 seconds, the MPC was so powerful that its technological limitations could be overcome not by technological innovation but rather by clever thinking: the Grammy-award winning producer Om'Mas Keith recorded long samples at high speeds and then slowed them down and pitch-adjusted them using the MPC, thus bypassing the 13-second recording limitation the machine imposed. The MPC was most only affordable and widely accessible, but its intuitive interface allowed musicians with no working knowledge of engineering, music theory, or classical instrumentation to compose music and thus join technologists at the frontier of sonic experimentalism. The MPC was particularly attractive to hip-hop artists because it effectively served as a drum machine: looping and crossfading capabilities, along with the machine’s pressure-sensitive pads and intuitive interface, allowed artists to create complex rhythmic patterns with ease, over which vocalists sound sing or rap and other samples could be layered on top.
As sampling has become an essential component of modern popular music, it is vital to the tracing of the history of sampling in music to describe some of the seminal works that embody the role of sampling in modern music and popular culture. The first album to make extensive use of sampling was Stevie Wonder’s 1979 album Stevie Wonder's Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants”. Stevie Wonder's Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants” is the soundtrack to the movie The Secret Life of Plants. Wonder created the film score by having the film’s producer describe each visual image in detail; this information, in combination with the specific length of a passage, was processed to a four-track tape with the sound of the movie taking up on of the tracks. Stevie Wonder was then left space on the other three tracks to add his musical accompaniment. The tracks, many of them instrumental, are experimental in nature and make extensive use of the aforementioned Computer Music Medallion. While the album cannot compete in popularly with his albums Songs in the Key of Life or Innervisions, the impact of Stevie Wonder's Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants” remains undisputed by musical critics, as it showed way of proof-of-concept that sampling indeed could serve a melodious role in the production of popular music.
Before the rise of sampling in hip-hop and popular music, disc jockeys used turntables to loop drum breaks from records, and these repeated beats could be rapped over. With the advent of the Akai MPC, sampling became easier, and as a result, more complex breaks become prominent. A sort of proof-of-concept album was released in 1996 by Joshua Paul Davis, better known as DJ Shadow. The Album, Endtroducing…, was produced almost exclusively using the Akai MPC and is composed almost entirely of sampled content. It is widely hailed to be one of the greatest albums of the 1990s and has been praised by various publications as one of the most influential works in hip-hop of all time.
New and improved sampling technology continues to be created to this day, and as the field has increased in complexity, the price of introductory level equipment has accordingly decreased in price. A commonly used tool in modern music composition is the digital audio workstation, or DAW for short. These softwares allow users to record samples, upload audio and MIDI files, and alter multiple tracks at once to both produce a final piece from mixed stems or to perform a live set in front of an audience. As the price of RAM continues to decline and software becomes increasingly easier to develop and to update, the cost of a base-model DAW like Ableton Live or Logic Pro X has decreased to less than $200. To think that fewer than 70 years ago Pierre Schaeffer and his colleagues at RTF needed large, complicated machinery, technical expertise afforded by a college education, and sponsorship from a government entity in order to create experimental electronic music is genuinely extraordinary. In fact, a teenager in the modern age is able to make a chart-topping dance hit with nothing more than a laptop and a 30-day free DAW trial, which to me is the musical equivalent of private citizens having the resources to take commuter trips to Mars (and back). It is both a testament to the rapid innovation of the field and an unnatural enabling of anyone to become a professional with limited resources and requisite training. As sampling technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous, the legal and ethical issues of this musical democratization will undoubtably continue to fill headlines, essay theses, and court dockets. It is a privilege to be alive during this exciting time, and I look forward to observing the path that music sampling continues to take.