Update: one of the photos below currently appears on Mort’s Wikipedia page. Pretty cool.
The seminar I’ve been taking with Morton Subotnick is sadly drawing to a close. As part of the end of the semester, we were invited to Professor Subotnick’s home studio, a few blocks from NYU, to get a demonstration of the setup he uses in performances.
This post is longer and more formal than usual because it was my term paper for a class in the NYU Music Technology Program.
Questions of authorship, ownership and originality surround all forms of music (and, indeed, all creative undertakings.) Nowhere are these questions more acute or more challenging than in digital music, where it is effortless and commonplace to exactly reproduce sonic elements generated by others. Sometimes this copying is relatively uncontroversial, as when a producer uses royalty-free factory sounds from Reason or Ableton Live. Sometimes the copying is legally permissible but artistically dubious, as when one downloads a public-domain Bach or Scott Joplin MIDI file and copies and pastes sections from them into a new composition. Sometimes one may have creative approval but no legal sanction; within the hip-hop community, creative repurposing of copyrighted commercial recordings is a cornerstone of the art form, and the best crate-diggers are revered figures.
Even in purely noncommercial settings untouched by copyright law, issues of authorship and originality continue to vex us. Some electronic musicians feel the need to generate all of their sounds from scratch, out of a sense that using samples is cheating or lazy. Others freely use samples, presets and factory sounds for reasons of expediency, but feel guilt and a weakened sense of authorship. Some electronic musicians view it as a necessity to create their tools from scratch, be they hardware or software. Others feel comfortable using off-the-shelf products but try to avoid common riffs, rhythmic patterns, chord progressions and timbres. Still others gleefully and willfully appropriate and put their “theft” of familiar recordings front and center.
Is a mashup of two pre-existing recordings original? Is a new song based on a sample of an old one original? What about a new song using factory sounds from Reason or Ableton Live? Is a DJ set consisting entirely of other people’s recordings original? Can a bright-line standard for originality or authenticity even exist in the digital realm?
I intend to parse out our varied and conflicting notions of originality, ownership and authorship as they pertain to electronic music. I will examine perspectives from musicians and fans, jurists and journalists, copyright holders and copyright violators. In so doing, I will advance the thesis that complete originality is neither possible nor desirable, in digital music or elsewhere, and that the spread of digital copying and manipulation has done us a service by bringing the issue into stark relief.
Thomas Wuil Joo. A Contrarian View of Copyright: Hip-Hop, Sampling, and Semiotic Democracy. 44 CONN. L. REV. — (2012)
As both a fan and a producer of sample-based music, I’m naturally sympathetic to Lawrence Lessig and the free-culture movement, a group of legal scholars advocating reforms to copyright law that would make it easier to sample, remix and mash up the works of others. The free-culture adherents believe that copyright law exceeded its original purpose to “foster the Useful Arts and Sciences,” and that now it mostly stifles less-powerful creators while benefiting more-powerful entities. A narrative has emerged in this movement implicating the high-profile sampling lawsuits of the 1990s like Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. Records and Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension Films in suppressing sample-based hip-hop and related collage-like popular music.
Lessig and company think that sampling and remixing of popular culture can empower us, enabling us to take ownership over the products of the dominant culture industry and enhancing “semiotic democracy.” Copyright law inhibits recoding and is grossly overbalanced in favor of large corporate entities and other powerful actors. In particular, so the narrative goes, marginalized hip-hop artists have suffered under the heavy hand of lawsuits and exorbitant licensing fees.
Thomas Joo challenges the free-culture movement’s assertions both theoretically and empirically. He analyzes the infamous lawsuits and finds only reinforcement of a longstanding status quo. He provides extensive evidence that commercial hip-hop artists of the “golden age” (the 1980s and early 1990s) were perfectly aware of the requirement that they license their samples, and that they were able to produce and profit from their music nonetheless.
Here’s an email conversation I’ve been having with my friend Greg Brown about Kanye West’s recent albums. Greg is a classical composer and performer with a much more avant-garde sensibility than mine. The exchange is lightly edited for clarity.
Greg: I’ve been listening to 808s and Heartbreak and Twisted Fantasy. I’m really enjoying them. Far more than I thought I would. I think Auto-tune here is somehow protective for Kanye when he is expressing emotion in a genre where that is not really smiled on. I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but I think the dehumanizing of the human voice is somehow a foil for the expression of inner turmoil. It’s haunting.
Ethan: Yes! Absolutely. The Auto-tune gives Ye a way to be the sensitive, vulnerable singer, as opposed to the swaggering rapper. And I like the similar sonic palettes between 808s and Fantasy, except 808s is sparse and Fantasy is full. And the thing of using tuned 808 kick drums to play the basslines is so hip.
Greg: The hard part for me to wrap my head around is the fact that Auto-tune is a filter, a dehumanizer, and it manages to make Kanye both closer and more human.
Ethan: I have a broader philosophical idea brewing about the concepts of “dehumanizing” and “posthuman” and how they’re really kind of meaningless, at least as applied to music. How can things that humans create be dehumanizing? Everyone involved in the production of Kanye’s albums is human. Auto-tune is a novel way of sounding human, but it’s still human, just like the sound of reverb or EQ or compression.
Greg: Yes — I have similar issues with natural vs. unnatural in general. Humans are natural, therefore everything we do is also natural.
Continue reading “What we talk about when we talk about Kanye West”
Steven R. Livingstone, Ralf Muhlberger, Andrew R. Brown, and William F. Thompson. Changing Musical Emotion: A Computational Rule System for Modifying Score and Performance. Computer Music Journal, 34:1, pp. 41–64, Spring 2010.
The authors present CMERS, “a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the real-time control of musical emotion that modifies features at both the score level and the performance level.” The paper compares CMERS to other computer-based musical expressiveness algorithms, as part of a larger effort to find a complete systematic categorization of all of the emotions that can be expressed and evoked through music.
The authors first conducted a survey of past efforts to categorize emotions, and after meta-analysis of the results, devised a two-dimensional graph. The vertical axis runs from Active to Passive. The horizontal axis runs from Negative to Positive. The Negative/Active quadrant includes such emotions as anger and agitation. The Passive/Positive quadrant includes serenity and tenderness. The authors then paired particular musical devices with each emotion, both compositional and performative. For example, sadness is correlated with slow tempo, minor mode, low pitch height, complex harmony, legato articulation, soft dynamics, slow note onset, and so on.
A complete list of countries from which people have listened to my SoundCloud tracks, in order of number of listens:
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, Russian Federation, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Portugal, Denmark, Argentina, Sweden, Turkey, India, Georgia, Chile, New Zealand, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Colombia, Romania, Czech Republic, Finland, Israel, Philippines, Austria, Bulgaria, South Africa, China, Indonesia, Ukraine, Norway, Singapore, Latvia, Korea, Tunisia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Serbia, Thailand, Peru, Croatia, Slovakia, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Egypt, Lithuania, Estonia, Puerto Rico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Algeria, El Salvador, Albania, Kuwait, Slovenia, Belarus, Luxembourg, Guadeloupe, Ecuador, Uruguay, Jamaica, Martinique, Iceland, Pakistan, Mauritius, Malta, Azerbaijan, Macedonia, Bermuda, Paraguay, Sri Lanka, Angola, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Qatar, Yemen, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Brunei Darussalam, Botswana, French Polynesia, Ethiopia, Guam, Panama, Jersey, Viet Nam, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago, Myanmar, Armenia, Haiti, Reunion, Oman, Nicaragua, Montenegro, Monaco, Sudan, Iraq, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Tanzania, Djibouti, Cote D’Ivoire, Bahrain, Barbados, Netherlands Antilles, Antigua and Barbuda, Andorra.
There are parts of South America, Africa and the Middle East not represented here, but otherwise this covers just about the entire world. Being a musician in the future is weird.
Alan Blackwell and Nick Collins. The Programming Language as a Musical Instrument. In P. Romero, J. Good, E. Acosta Chaparro & S. Bryant (Eds). Proc. PPIG 17, pp. 120-130.
Any musician who wants to be competent with digital production tools has to take on qualities of a programmer. Music notation is itself a “programming language” for human musicians, complete with loops and subroutines. Electronic music collapses composition, performance and recording into the same act.
How do you differentiate a “live” electronic performance from playing back canned sequences? One way to make the presentation into an actual performance is to include improvisation, or at least the possibility of it. Morton Subotnick is a good example. He considers his compositions to consist of his synthesizer patches and sequences. His performances, on the other hand, are mostly improvisational, deploying his preset elements as he sees fit in the moment. This is similar to the methods of jazz musicians, spontaneously recombining and hybridizing pre-learned riffs and patterns.
Continue reading “Programming languages as musical instruments”
Joshua Pablo Rosenstock. Free Play Meets Gameplay: iGotBand, a Video Game for Improvisers. Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 20, pp. 11–15, 2010.
Guitar Hero, Rock Band and games like them have done a wonderful service to non-musicians. The games give a good sense of what playing an instrument in a band is like. The interface is simplified, but the overall experience is qualitatively remarkably similar. The games also change their players’ listening habits. A non-musician friend told me that until he played through Beatles Rock Band as Paul McCartney, he had never paid attention to a song’s bassline. Now he hears all those familiar Beatles songs in a new and richer way, and generally has learned to listen like a musician.
There is one crucial difference between the games and real music-making, however, and that is the absence of improvisation. The player moves through the song like a train on a track, and the games penalize any variation from the prescribed notes. Not all real-life music is improvisational either, but there is usually some element of personal expressiveness. Not so in Guitar Hero. Mimicry is the only way to play.
Malawey, Victoria. Harmonic Stasis and Oscillation in Björk’s Medúlla. Music Theory Online, Volume 16, Number 1, January 2010.
The fundamental unit of electronic popular music is the loop. This puts it at odds with the Western art music tradition, which typically favors linear structures with a narrative arc. Repetition has mostly appeared in classical music at the macro level of phrases and sections. While shorter repetitive cells do appear in classical music, they are not always welcome. The term ostinato, from the Italian “obstinate,” does not connote approval. Popular music (and some minimalist classical) of the twentieth century has been significantly more repetitive, deriving its harmony from western Europe but its rhythms and circular loop-based structures from Africa and the Caribbean. The advent of synthesizers, drum machines and computers has strongly encouraged the trend toward cyclic repetition, since the default output of such devices is the endless loop.
Björk produced relatively conventional dance music early in her solo career, but her use of loops has become more sophisticated and complex over the course of her career. Her 2004 album Medúlla is comprised entirely from vocals, aside from the occasional synthesizer. Some of the songs are traditional songs and choral works, but most are built from vocals that have been heavily edited, sampled and looped in Pro Tools.
Guberman, Daniel. Post-Fidelity: A New Age of Music Consumption and Technological Innovation. Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 4, pp 431–454
Guberman divides the history of recorded music into two distinct sections: the fidelity era, stretching from Thomas Edison through the invention of the compact disk, and the post-fidelity era, beginning with the iPod. He argues that, since about 2001, the listening public has come to value convenience, variety, personalization and curation over sound quality.
An emblematic image of the late fidelity era: the Maxell advertisement showing a wealthy young man in his home, sitting deep in an easy chair with a martini, getting physically blown away by giant, powerful speakers.
The emblematic image of the post-fidelity era: silhoutted people of both genders and diverse backgrounds, dancing with iPods.
