SAMPLING

Sampling is taking a small section of pre-existing music/sound and putting it into another recording or playing it (as a recording) live.

A sample can be:

a) a recorded found (non-musical) sound or field recording
b) a section of a pre-existing recording* i.e a drum break
c) re-creating a previously written section of music*
[d) to a certain extent, the sound of a particular era ie Mark Ronson/Amy Winehouse but then cleverly putting new life into it so as not to make it a pastiche]

Sampling came directly from early musique concrete where found sounds were played live. This idea was then adopted in hip hop where vinyl records were cued up and sections were 'dropped in'.

* if you sample a pre-existing recording/piece then you must get clearance from the copyright owner of the recording and negotiate a royalty % with them before using. See PRS for full details.



TASK:
Using www.whosampled.com find who sampled the drum intro from 'When the Levee Breaks' by Led Zeppelin. Why did they sample it rather than recreate it? 

15-minute extension task: How did led Zeppelin record the drums for that?

Further resources for researching for your assignment:
Modern Approached (Red Bull Academy)
Examples of frequently sampled drums
Kendrick Lamar's use of sampling

L2 Extension task - voices

EXTENSION/ADVANCED PREP TASK: record or find some spoken word, perhaps reading news articles or headlines. Add them all to individual bandlab tracks. Move and arrange volumes so you can hear them individually to start with and then all joined up and difficult to hear.

Tools to use:

cut

panning

volume

pitch shift

playback rate

automation

What effect does it have when you hear clearly audible snippets of different spoken lines?

What effect does it have when you hear them all together?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news

https://www.independent.co.uk/

Found Sounds and Musique Concrete

To fully understand how technology for music has developed and where it might lead in the future, we should go right back to the beginning again and examine sound in it's simplest form. 'Music' does not necessarily need to originate from a 'musical instrument'. We've already talked about taking sounds and editing them to then trigger as samples and manipulate. Some of you may have already done this in projects.





Definitions:

FOUND SOUND - a sound made by a non-musical object

ACOUSMATIC - music created to be listened to and not performed

SAMPLE - a section of previously recorded sound

PLUNDERPHONICS - creating new music by altering existing recordings

SOUND COLLAGE - music created entirely by gluing samples together.

EXAMPLES

TASK: using your DAW of choice, create a short piece using non-musical sounds or a collage of samples. You have total freedom. Forget any notion of harmony, lyrics or genre and just focus on sounds. Please upload to classroom as an mp3.


EXTENSION - if you want to explore this more, let your inner geek loose on this.....

A more recent development in repurposing electronic toys and circuit bending them to use as musical instruments:



Plunderphonics is another interesting subject within the realms of sampling/re-purposing existing music...

"Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative" - Otswald
Chris Cutler - Plunderphonia

Career planning - short, mid and long term goals

Using what you have learned from the funding proposal research and assignment, the career diversity lesson and your artist statement and all other classes/workshops so far on the course, have a think about your future.

PLAN	Short term - 12-18 months	Mid term - 3 years	Long term 5 years+
What do I want to achieve/be doing?
How will I be able to do this - what steps/training/funding/advice might I need?
What obstacles might I need to overcome?
What resources/contacts/organisations might be able to help?

Copy and paste the table into a new doc for the goals assignment on classroom.




Some resources:
https://www.helpmusicians.org.uk/about-us
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/24r7mcftgLJHbN27VbKsxhJ/advice

LOOPING

Loopers are pedals that record a specified length of sound from an input, then plays it back as a loop and allows you to layer more sounds on top. The first loop you record determines the length of the loop.

This week, we looked at live looping. the examples we discussed can be found here:
4 bar loop - everything looped....



2 bar looped - melodies played over the top but not looped


3 loop phrases, many mics....





24 Track Tape Loop starts at 44:06 - multiple loops of differing lengths, played by different people, some looped, some live....









Using looping software...


MORE EXAMPLES AND GUIDES

TASK: find two contrasting artists & views on live looping and comment critically on them, drawing your own conclusions on how much of an 'art' is live looping. 

If you are stuck. here are some:
http://www.guitarworld.com/loop-introduction-looping
http://www.justalliance.com/blog



Above are some more examples but do explore and find your own....

Creating an artist statement

Your statement will keep you focused and help communicate what you are aiming to achieve with those who can help you so it's important to get it right.

The format of the statement will differ according to what your master plan is. However, it is not a retrospective biography but a statement about your current focus. Not so much who you are but 'who' your work is or what you are /exploring finding out by creating it. Over time, you will find that your statement will change as your focus and ideas shift. It's also not about staying what you are achieving right now, but what you are creating over time.  It takes ages and many experiments to get anywhere close to achieving. Here are some thoughts on that:




You may like to look back at your artist bio's from last year to get you started.

A useful structure is:

1 Focus - Who are you? What do you do?
2 Inspiration - what makes you want to create and what are you interested in?
3 Intent - what are you trying to achieve?

Here are some examples:

Nick Grondin

"Serena Korda was born 1979 lives and works in London. Through large-scale ensemble performances she reconsiders aspects of communion and tradition in our lives. Underpinning her practice is a desire to find and highlight ritual in the everyday, which is developed through encounters, conversations and the researching of abandoned histories. Audiences are often encouraged to participate at some point in her process creating collective experiences that often focus on the forgotten and overlooked."

Tai Shani's multidisciplinary practice revolves around experimental narrative texts, which alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect in relation to post-patriarchal realism. Shani’s on-going project, Dark Continent Productions, includes films and performances, forming a mythology that conceptualises the ‘epic’ to test the potentials of feminist politics and ideologies, a platform to imagine a post-patriarchal world.

Daniel O'Sullivan is a London based composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer. Member of Grumbling Fur, This Is Not This Heat, Mothlite, Laniakea, Ulver, Sunn O))), Guapo, Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses, Miracle & Æthenor. O'Sullivan collages a wide range of musical disciplines from free-form improvisation to hallucinatory dreampop to extended drone and electric chamber music.

Artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa lives and works between Brooklyn, New York and the Niger Delta, Nigeria. Saro-Wiwa works with video installations, photographs and experimental films, as well as food and performances. She also founded the contemporary art gallery, Boys’ Quarters Project Space, in Port Harcourt. Saro-Wiwa’s interest lies in mapping emotional landscapes. She often explores highly personal experiences, carefully recording their choreography, making tangible the space between internal experience and outward performance as well as bringing cross-cultural and environmental/geographic considerations to bear on these articulations.

Difference between artist/band bio intended for press, artist bio and statement:

Band bio - ideally has a long and a short (in bold) version and press quotes that can be re-used by press and promoters. 

"Absolutely beautiful." - John Doran

​

What is V Ä L V Ē? Folk lullabies re-imagined by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Found-sound collages interrupted by Welsh language orations and sudden outbursts of fuzz bass. Gleaming synthpop workouts that collapse into swirling dreamscapes of sax and harp. Tiny sounds opening out onto the epic. Hi-tech and no-tech, deployed with equal measures of discipline and abandon. Carefully sculpted disorder. Uncanny geometries of noise and melody. Dizzy and gleeful and drawn in notebooks. That is V Ä L V Ē.

​

VÄLVĒ  started out as the outlet for composer/performer Chlöe Herington’s compositional work using text and image as the starting point for scores. She collects sounds and diagrams, composing predominantly for bassoon, saxes, electronics and found sounds to explore synaesthetic memory and collective experience.

The band has morphed - from what originated as a solo project, performing mainly in art galleries, it grew to include Elen Evans on harp.  After moving from galleries back into music venues, they were recently joined by Chlöe's Chrome Hoof comrade, Emma Sullivan on bass, microkorg and vocals.  Live, the music traverses the realms of noise and improv into songs, punctuated with found sounds and eases into spacey soundscapes. 

Highlights to date include having the honour of closing the Barn stage at Supernormal (2017) and, equally,  being played by John Doran on BBC R3's Late Junction.

 

Press:

​

"It seems then that with V Ä L V Ē, Chlöe Herington wants to create a lingering series of moments and movements that will sit differently with everyone who encounters them. These sounds aren't designed to sit on top of memories or prop them up but rather they are precisely shaped to weave through the mind like blood through a capillary. A vital cog in the mechanics of many an ensemble over the years, Herington and company's V Ä L V Ē is a complex machine that is now almost ready to crash into our lives. Best ready our senses then." -Eoin Murphy (The Quietus) Full article HERE

​

​

"Much smitten by this. Discovered by a sheer and we should say, happy accident by way of a facebook posting, this is the rather delightfully transfixing ‘atmos #1’ by the London based collective V Ä L V Ē. A teaser track culled from a forthcoming EP by the name ‘#1 [the theosophical society]’ which i’m sure you’ll agree manages to craft something of a daydreaming wonderland imagining one suspects, a snoozing magic woodland adored with hypnotically shimmering bowed chimes and music boxes, all very serenely captivating and alluringly twinklesome not to mention playful and cutely becoming, in short, Reich for reception classes and something that ought to be on the radar of those whose listening loves stray fondly to the lulling tones of the Clangers and the Moomins." - https://marklosingtoday.wordpress.com/2017/07/29/v-a-l-v-e/

Artist bio: more about an individual artist and their whole output. Useful for getting other work.

Chlöe Herington is a Nottingham-born bassoonist, saxophonist, composer and sound maker, based in London.

​

Classically trained through an arts scholarship in Nottingham and then studying for a BMus (hons) at Goldsmiths College, University of London, she soon ventured out of the concert hall to seek new ways of creating music, suddenly finding herself in a very different kind of orchestra, Chrome Hoof, in 2000, with whom she stayed throughout their career.

​

VÄLVĒ  is the outlet for her compositional work using text and image as the starting point for scores. Chlöe collects sounds and diagrams, composing predominantly for bassoon, saxes, electronics and found sounds to explore synaesthetic memory and collective experience.

 

Regular other playing is currently as a multi-instrumentalist with DnB/free jazz/noise trio Hirvikolari, space doom/disco collective Chrome Hoof, psychedelic 8-piece Knifeworld, Daniel O'Sullivan's Dream Lion Ensemble, in Lindsay Cooper Songbook with Chris Cutler, Dagmar Krause, Tim Hodgkingson and Yumi Hara, performing the music of Lindsay Cooper (Henry Cow/News From Babel) as well as occasional live performances with Teeth of the Sea and Daniel O'Sullivan's live band.

 

Chlöe has appeared on various recordings over the years by bands such as Guapo, Cathedral and Teeth of the Sea and has composed for and taken part in performance and sound art works by Turner prize winner Tai Shani, Serena Korda/Daniel O’Sullivan, Jonathan Baldock and Circumstance. 

​

Alongside her work as a musician, she has been an educator for the last 20 years, currently teaching Music Performance and Production on the UAL courses at Westminster Kingsway College in Kings Cross, London.

Artist Statement: short and about the work and ideas behind the artist rather than their background so much. Often used in programmes, for arts funding applications and group or collaborative projects.

Chlöe Herington is a composer, performer and sound artist based in London and Wiltshire. She performs as a multi-instrumentalist with various groups and leads her own trio, VÄLVĒ. As a sound artist, she collaborates with visual artists to create soundscapes in response to the visual work in galleries including The Hayward (Mirror Cities) and Tram Way (Dance International Glasgow). Often using text and image as the starting point for scores, Herington collects sounds and diagrams, composing predominantly for bassoon, saxes, electronics and found objects to explore synaesthetic memory and collective v personal experience. She is currently exploring the link between the olfactory system and memory to create an immersive performance and listening space.

Some help:
https://www.gyst-ink.com/artist-statement-guidelines/

Wearable music technology

Mainstream music ideas usually stem from ideas from art or sound art. Music technology very much so. Sound Artist, Benoit Maubrey, explored the concept of wearable clothes, starting with his 'Audio Jackets'.  As technology advanced, so did his pieces...

 https://www.benoitmaubrey.com

e-Textiles are in their infancy but have a lot of potential for us as musicians.

Artist and producer, Imogen Heap, has always embraced the use of technology and is now at the forefront of wearable music technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imogen_Heap

http://imogenheap.com/home.php?



https://mimugloves.com/#featured-artists-slider

Demo at Wired:



What do you think the future of wearable technology will be? How do you think the gloves will develop?

Who are you? Identity - Experience, strands & plans

This early in your career, you will have limited experience but you will have some as we give you this on the course!

You should list all gigs, collaboration, projects, opportunities you have had so far as previous experience.

You can also start to plan ideas for the future. How have you been creative during COVID? Which venues would you like to play when COVID is over? Next year? Who could you support? Where would you like to get live sound experience? Where could you do a warm-up set?

Think about offshoots too - what about writing for film? Producing music for dance or theatre? You can develop your career in many different ways, all of which will be useful in different ways too.

Here are some examples of varied careers:

Chantal Brown

Keir Cooper/A Sweet Niche

https://khyamallami.com/

Leafcutter John

Mica Levi



And here is some advice:
Making Your Way as a DJ
Collaboration, not competition
More from BBC introducing...

remote working

 https://www.bandlab.com/

https://www.audacityteam.org/

https://jamkazam.com/