Sampling and Musical Borrowing

Sampling belongs as a subset under the ‘musical borrowing’ umbrella, but distinguishes itself from notation-based forms (e.g. those that utilize quotes, pastiche or paraphrasing) where dots on the page indicate instances of idea transfer, known in the sampling world as interpolations, ‘allosonic quotations’, or replayed material.Footnote ¹³ For example, Ariana Grande’s use of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘My Favourite Things’ (1959) in her pop hit ‘7 Rings’ (2019) is not a sample but a quotation of the main theme, replayed as an interpolation and recorded specifically for this new track.Footnote ¹⁴ Direct sampling is different, bypassing notational instruction and instead involving the direct lifting of audio from an existing track and subsequently placing it into a new location via cut and paste, as in the case of Radiohead’s ‘Idioteque’ (2000), which directly samples a passage of Paul Lansky’s experimental FM-synthesis work Mild und Leise (1973) as well as an extract from Arthur Kreiger’s Short Piece (1976).Footnote ¹⁵ Since sampling lifts audio from an existing track (via a copying process), it is unique in possessing production detail, depth, and density as a consolidation of whole mixes (the sample is usually a stereo render of a larger multitrack mix), which can contain complex layers and combinations of instruments and vocals.

The Two-Part Gesture

The two-part gesture which Metzer speaks of encourages us to take account of the new work and the work being borrowed from.Footnote ¹⁶ Studying sampling thoroughly is to know and understand these parts in depth, and since acts of sampling are not bound by genre, cultural contexts, or eras, sample-based works are capable of being complex sites of reference, cultural hybridity, and fusion. For example, hip-hop music does not restrict its sampling activity to existing hip-hop tracks; rather, the choice and selection process is wide open, enabling any musical material of any genre, era, and culture to be a viable sample, a freedom initially propagated through the act of crate-digging (searching for new and inspiring sounds from old records in record shops’ crates). Schloss observes that hip-hop’s crate-digging practice presented a means for producers to educate themselves with ‘styles of music with which they may not be familiar’.Footnote ¹⁷ His exchanges with hip-hop producers reveal that accessing records from different genres ‘is important because it’s gonna give you a lot more to draw on and it’s [also] gonna open up your mind to different ideas of what you can do’.Footnote ¹⁸

Appreciating creators’ attitudes towards cross-genre sampling establishes a further rationale for the diversity of expertise required to interpret the sampled content and its new-found home. For example, hip-hop artist Kanye West uses a sample of Aphex Twin’s ‘Avril 14th’ (2001), a Disklavier piano work that belongs to the electronic ambient classification, in his track ‘Blame Game’ (2010); Young Thug’s ‘Money’ (2023), featuring Juice WRLD and Nicki Minaj, uses a sample from TV show Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Eric Idle’s ‘Money Song’, 1972); and Saigon’s ‘Get Busy’ (2010) draws on the world of video-game music, using a sample from the 8-bit theme tune of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. from 1985. These examples underscore the purposeful and intentional genre-hopping taking place within the creative stage that is integral to the art form. Williams reminds us that ‘the hip-hop world includes a high degree of intertextuality within its aesthetic and that hip-hop cultures form an interpretive community that recognises a number of these references’.Footnote ¹⁹ These cross-genre liaisons, as an embedded part of the music-making, thus call out for multiple interpretations or readings.

Expanding the Network

The two-part nature previously mentioned deserves some further attention here; it may not be as clear-cut as first implied, since sample content itself may be a product of earlier sampling or borrowing activity — hence we may find ‘a borrowing within a borrowing’. These samples within samples may flit across genres; thus sample-based musics referred to as ‘cross-genre’ become more multi-genre or ‘fusionesque’, defined through the cocktail of sampled ‘ingredients’ that sit within different branches and sub-divisions of musicological and non-musical study. Take, for example, the recording of Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria from the Magic Flute (1791) sampled within Kelis’s pop song ‘Like You’ (2006). These two works are separated by an impressive three-century gap, with the recording of Mozart’s work but a simulacrum of the Classical-era composition (the exact recording sampled is unknown here, and Kelis’s production team would have been able to choose from hundreds of versions sung by different sopranos, all produced within sixty or so years of Kelis’s release).Footnote ²⁰ The Mozart sample is transposed, sped up, segmented, and looped to form an ongoing backdrop to Kelis’s vocals. Interestingly, Mozart’s work is on a libretto written by Emanuel Schikaneder, widely known to be a ‘literary magpie’, indicating a further site of non-musical borrowing and influence beyond the two works by Kelis and Mozart.Footnote ²¹ Importantly, the scholars who are invested in discussing these separate works and time periods are found in separate fields and sub-fields within the arts and humanities, and the connection and common ground is formed via a contemporary meeting of sources in the act of sampling and borrowing.

The above example provides an instance of a sampling (or borrowing) chain, which are common occurrences necessitating the expansion of the ‘two-part gesture’, where musical material serves as an ongoing influence for multiple works via a genealogical family tree-type process. Issey Cross’s ‘Bittersweet Goodbye’ (2023), Dr Dre’s ‘Zoom’ (1998), and, previously mentioned, Radiohead’s ‘Idioteque’ (2000) are examples that are born out of lineages of musical material changing hands, one artist to the next, over significant periods of time. With each instance of transference, sampled content evolves further and further from its initial appearance via segmentation, transformation, and recontextualization.Footnote ²² Nabeel Zuberi acknowledges this movement, observing that ‘samples have idiosyncratic half-lives as they take multiple routes and mutate during their travel’.Footnote ²³ Sample-based music may not only be sites of dual content, but exist as tri-, quad-, or multi-faceted musical and non-musical compounds, as in the example of The Avalanches’s track ‘Since I Left You’ (2001), which integrates samples from nine different identified works of varying genres (pop, disco, rock, jazz, and blues). Another interesting example is TroyBoi’s trap work ‘Do You?’ (2015), which samples the TV theme tune from Three’s Company by Ray Charles and Julia Rinker (called Come and Knock at our Door (1977)), ‘Do You Love Me’ (1987) by Lebanese band The Bendaly Family, and an eighties Texas Instruments Speak & Spell toy that utters TroyBoi’s sound signature at the end of the work.Footnote ²⁴

Such works displaying multiple samples are particularly attractive candidates for multi-voice commentary, since possible interpreters or commentators invested in the origins of these samples are so varied and widespread (era-, genre-, and culture-wise). Sampled content within a given work can belong or pertain to a mixture of musical and non-musical specialisms; therefore it calls for commentary from voices within those disparate identified fields which, as shown, can fall beyond the overarching discipline of music. Sample-based music that engages with self-sampling and the sampling on non-musical content, e.g. found sound, are not excluded from this approach, as there is much to explore via multi-voice interpretation that could speak to the new contexts of sound, the movement from hypotext to hypertext, and any technical modification or embedding of the sample(s). Probing these views not through surveys of existing literature but as fresh, bespoke, requested insights is a novel step in seeking out multi-disciplinary input and demonstrates the essence of this new approach, which is one that respects multi-voice interpretation and receivership with the aim of acknowledging the wider narrative around sampling and appreciating that different writings ‘allow certain moments of sonic experience to be heard while foreclosing upon others’.Footnote ²⁵ This increased number of viewpoints may enable more voices to be heard within this arena. Instead of these voices being subsumed, parsed, or paraphrased into a single text, the approach here differs, providing space for all contributions on a given sample-based work to sit side by side in a compendium of perspectives that will no doubt overlap and diverge while extending the story of sampling. The membership structure of this multi-voice approach is optimistically egalitarian, in that no one voice rises above another, to ensure collective authorship (see the sections below on ‘inclusive design’ and ‘instructional design’ for thoughts on logistics).

Literature Review

Sampling as a subject of academic study proliferates in disparate pockets, finding most coverage in popular music studies, music production, electroacoustic music, sound studies, music technology, copyright law, media, and business and marketing literature. The topic of sampling captivates and sustains these areas in very different ways, while the action of taking existing audio is simultaneously a common thread through this typically unconnected network. These separate discourses report on technical know-how, sampling aesthetics, technological developments, case law, music sales, economic contributions, ethical implications, sampling politics, and analytical approaches. Laderman and Westrup (2014) recognize sampling studies as an ‘interdisciplinary pursuit that puts into conversation scholarly ideas and approaches from art history, popular music, film, television, musicology, ethnomusicology, new media and cultural studies (to name just a few)’.Footnote ²⁶

Sampling is well explained in the literature via the work of key figures, pioneers, and provocateurs in the field, for example literature on John Oswald’s Plunderphonics and Pierre Schaeffer and his early experiments with sampling and sound objects as early as the 1940s, as well as on the wealth of technology that facilitated the emergence of sampling in the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁷ Legalities also provide extensive subject matter for literature on copyright infringement cases and case law, while theories of postmodernism have a stronghold on the topic of sampling and intertextuality.Footnote ²⁸ My literature scan casts its net wide, surveying individual sample-based repertoire and observing how these works are handled by authors; the finding that single authorial modes currently reign supreme is conclusive. My own early analysis work on sample-based music has, too, fallen prey to this norm; for example, my chapter ‘Analysing the Identifiable: Cultural Borrowing in Diana Salazar’s La voz de fuelle’ would have been significantly enriched by establishing a multi-voice commentary from those with expertise in Argentine tango, Astor Piazzolla, and from Salazar herself, beyond the brief quotes included.Footnote ²⁹

Within the literature, there are signs of authors growing tired with well-worn narratives of sample-based music that have done disservice to their fields. For example, Tricia Rose has been particularly vocal in her dissatisfaction with the ‘one-dimensional sound-bites’ that have not only contributed to the ‘demise of hip-hop but has also impoverished our ability to talk successfully about race and about the role of popular culture, mass media and corporate conglomerates in defining — and confirming — our creative expression’.Footnote ³⁰ In this respect, the literature addressing sample-based music has bumped up against its own challenges and limitations that could be remedied with an alternative, multi-voice approach.

For the purposes of this article, the repertoire-focused texts, where a sample-based work is discussed as a case study for analysis, have been of most interest and use. My research process set out to observe the lens, handling and management of multi-component interiors (sampling), focusing especially on cross-genre, cross-era, or cross-cultural musical material. A noteworthy example of academic writing about sampling is Katz’s breakdown of Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’ (1998), a work which samples Camille Yarbrough’s ‘Take Yo’ Praise’ (1975), articulated within his book Capturing Sound. Katz notices the ‘unequal power relationship’ between Cook and Yarbrough, and weaves in quotes from Yarbrough expressing her gratitude towards Cook for sampling her music and for elevating her fame from what it had been previously.Footnote ³¹ However, the chapter falls short in not allowing Yarbrough to fully articulate her perspectives beyond mere strategically positioned quotes. A unique opportunity is offered by way of the inclusion of the sampled original artist within the narrative of sampling (as found within this well-distributed academic book), but frustratingly, the opportunity vanishes since Yarbrough, the Black musician responsible for the success of ‘Praise You’, is relegated to the sidelines. To hear from Yarbrough, unframed by and separate from Katz’s chapter, may well be different from hearing brief quotes and paraphrased content. Other voices that could speak to Yarbrough’s original lyrics and her messages on the civil rights movement could have also been included or consulted. As Yarbrough states: ‘Take Yo’ Praise was also directed at all people of African ancestry […] who had at that time been in the front lines of the battle to turn racism around’.Footnote ³² The lack of minoritized voices authoring, contributing to, or appearing within academic texts discussing sampling is a theme which will be returned to in due course.

There are more recent contributions to the literature which include the musicians of the hypotext within their commentaries, as in M. I. Franklin’s Sampling Politics. Her analysis and historical excavations of Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) is atypical in bringing the voice of Lebanese singer Dunya Yunis (whose vocal track ‘Abou el Zelouf’ was sampled by Eno and Byrne) into the commentary, recognizing that ‘her take on these issues matter[s] too’.Footnote ³³ What is noticeably different when comparing this approach to that of Katz is the dedicated space, the unbroken quote from Yunis (which extends to three-quarters of the page) and her freedom of expression, which in this case is demonstrated by the inclusion of biographical detail about her. Franklin’s commentaries (which cover five case studies of sampling) also actively encourage readers to engage their ears with the traditions and historical contexts of the hypotext as a means to appreciate what was there before.Footnote ³⁴ This process is integral to Franklin’s musicological rigour and demonstrates due service in going beyond sample identification and aesthetic appreciation by building on what was originally present musically, historically, and politically to arrive at a substantial interrogation.

Franklin’s text epitomizes a shift in approach and attitude towards discussing and dissecting instances of sampling by conveying sensitivity to the voices represented in the music and by presenting bigger-picture views of hypotexts. Other offerings that move towards more progressive visions include Hannes Lietechi’s book This Track Contains Politics, which seeks to broaden the discourse of sampling studies by spotlighting lesser-known and diverse protagonists. Lietechi provides five case studies of experimental electronica producers who sample and states:

Also of note in Lietechi’s book is the evident self-reflexivity and positionality used to identify degrees of privilege through factors such as race, class, gender, and socio-economic status. The insertion of a sub-chapter on positionality enables Lietechi to justify his intentions, while he points to the limits of his knowledge. He reminds us that ‘every scholar inevitably brings their own habitus into research’ and that sample-based music ‘remains a powerful tool to speak out about global injustice’.Footnote ³⁶ While his text does not engage with voices that speak about the sampled content, he brings the artists who sample into the chapter content through interview material to deliver new insights on compositional intent.

Minoritized Voices within Commentaries on Sample-Based Music

Commentaries on and analyses of sample-based music that address repertoire sourced from distant cultures, countries, and traditions, as well as audio content derived from or associated with particular minoritized or indigenous groups, raise a particular set of considerations that underscore the need for this new multi-voiced approach in more explicit ways. To establish this argument, we can consider the tracks on Moby’s Play (1999) and B Sides (2000) compilation albums, many of which sample Black musicians and also include Black voices sourced from the Alan Lomax archives.Footnote ³⁷ Moby’s sampling activity is significant across these two albums, and utilizes sizeable durations of recognizable audio from traditional American folk music, doo-wop, Motown, blues, African American gospel, and rap.Footnote ³⁸ At no point within the academic literature do we hear from Black voices that may recount, critique, or comment on this music-making.

Incidentally, the texts available on this subject are provided by three white, male academics (David Hesmondhalgh, Richard Osborne, and Barry Shank), who draw attention to the unethical practice of Black artists going unremunerated, Moby’s crediting mishaps in using these samples (Hesmondhalgh and Osborne), the ‘paternalistic recording strategies of John Lomax’, and the ‘political salience of racial difference in the cultures of the United States’.Footnote ³⁹ The issue here is the convention of the discourse, where discussions of sampling mirror the colonial approaches and power structures being played out in the music-making: white male authors publishing texts on the marginalizing of African American musicians’ contributions to an affluent white male artist’s success, while simultaneously overlooking minoritized voices in their writing. With so few academic texts available in this area, the storytelling on this topic is told only from the white male standpoint, which is inexorably attached to lived experience and the position of privilege. For example, Hesmondhalgh describes Bessie Jones’s vocal samples as displaying ‘primitiveness’ and having an ‘unfamiliar timbre’; he goes on to say that his interest is in ‘thinking about the way that Hall’s blackness is represented here’.Footnote ⁴⁰ I find these comments symptomatic of working as a lone voice and being in need of reflexivity. I would like to be clear that my argument is not about dismissing what white male authors have to say on the topic of sampling; it is more a plea to understand and learn about sampling from alternate angles, lenses, and positions, and indeed from those who affiliate more directly with the music’s hypotext.

Since this particular sampling activity treads a path similar to that of colonial acquisition, and has been deemed a significant case of cultural appropriation, the case for exploring stories of the hypotext grows stronger, as a means to achieve balance, consider ethics, and seek understanding from those who have been perpetrated against. Richard Milner, in his positionality framework for racial and cultural awareness, expresses the view that researchers need not come ‘from the racial or cultural community under study to conduct research in, with, and about that community’; instead they ‘should be actively engaged, thoughtful, and forthright regarding tensions that can surface when conducting research where issues of race and culture are concerned’.Footnote ⁴¹ What matters here, according to Linda Tillman, is ‘whether the researcher has the cultural knowledge to accurately interpret and validate the experiences of others’.Footnote ⁴² While I appreciate these outlooks, possession of cultural knowledge is slippery and hard to ascertain; thus I am hesitant to fully agree with Milner’s and Tillman’s invitations to the academic community for discursive contributions from all on the topic of race, which they ‘authorize’ as long as the researchers are in pursuit of cultural competence.

Michael Awkward’s book Negotiating Difference offers a more nuanced and balanced discussion on this topic, demonstrating both the debilitating effects of protectionist stances based on biological or racial heritage and an examination of the difference race can make in the interpretation of Black texts.Footnote ⁴³ While Awkward is forthright in his belief that the possession of a Black physicality is not necessary for the creation of engaging and provocative critical texts on African American literature, his openness to exposing the differences in such readings is compelling.Footnote ⁴⁴ His view is that such work is a responsibility which he himself, as an African American scholar, takes on. A key argument from his work is that Afrocentric readings of texts (or in this article’s case, musics) are differentiated from those that are ‘caucacentric’ since they ‘counter the negative effects on the black psyche and readings of Afro-American expressive culture’.Footnote ⁴⁵ We may say these voices are ‘differently invested’ and thus have the potential to be different in their content.Footnote ⁴⁶ Due diligence in researching and gathering insights and perspectives can take us so far, but there are inevitable blind spots stemming from positionality, considering the histories of oppression and daily injustices that inform and shape an individual’s world views that need acknowledging through the different vantage points multi-voiced commentary offers. As Awkward observes, within the literary world, ‘some have argued that the best readers of Afro-American literature are black critics who have firsthand knowledge of black cultural codes and the forms of racial oppression’, whereas white readers of Black texts are perceived by some to have interpretive inadequacies or even interpretive disabilities.Footnote ⁴⁷

Franklin’s analysis of ‘Abou el Zelouf’ (the hypotext within Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) negotiates a similar challenge and includes a warning from Habib Hassan Touma to ‘avoid the definitions and technical terms used in European music and rid oneself of the opinions expressed by European writers’ on the subject of how the maqamat (the Arabic melody type and technique of improvisation used in ‘Abou el Zelouf’) works musico-culturally.Footnote ⁴⁸ While the warning is sounded, Franklin proceeds with some ‘cautious analogies’ to cater to those accustomed to the repertoire of tempered tonalities in western music ‘to get a sense of how and why Yunis sings in this way’.Footnote ⁴⁹ As this example suggests, protectionist stances can emerge from recognized incompatibilities between western music terminology and music-making that sits outside these classifications, language, and perceptions, and provides a further rationale in support of multi-voice commentary for seeking expertise from those whose stake is more closely aligned with the musical tradition and culture under scrutiny.

An inclusive approach can ensure that majority (outside) voices learn about these processes and recognize and credit contributions from the Global South and other minoritized groups that are often overlooked, both in terms of their work and in commentary about how processes for absorbing their work can reflect their perceptions, attitudes, and feelings. Confrontation with the bounds of our knowledge is not easy, and much academic literature points to the discomfort of challenging hegemonic whiteness as an authority. Barnor Hesse’s ‘8 white identities’ explains the regime of whiteness, outlining a list of action-oriented white identities, while others, including Tracey Owens Patton, Katherine Sang and Thomas Calvard, and Azeezat Johnson, confront whiteness specifically within academic contexts.Footnote ⁵⁰ Multi-voice commentary offers a way to alleviate the anxieties of individualistic perspectives, especially in cases where the sampling act is entwined with politics, power, and race. Activating democratic and decolonial considerations in the process of assessing sample-based works can only be a positive step in enacting social justice and honouring communities which have been neglected in the past. Shaw et al. have questioned who benefits from the production of knowledge about people from marginalized groups and urge consideration of our own perspectives and lived experience in shaping what counts as knowledge.Footnote ⁵¹

The Moby case raises questions about the voices we should be hearing from within academic texts and why they are absent in such cases. Furthermore, there is the issue of who gets to have a voice in interpreting these instances. Epistemic injustice has ensured that certain voices are more audible and respected than others when it comes to interpreting such work, while the concept of hermeneutical injustice accounts for the gap in knowing when we see authors commenting on sample-based music who do not have enough shared experience with the minoritized groups that they are commenting on, while, regrettably, having ‘an unfair advantage in structuring collective social understandings’.Footnote ⁵² In their article on cultural production, David Hesmondhalgh and Anamik Saha emphasize the importance of agency in discussions of race, ethnicity, and power, which means ‘recognizing the ability of oppressed peoples to exercise agency in producing cultural forms that provide pleasure, entertainment, and fecund meanings that may not be apparent to the outside observer’.Footnote ⁵³ There is a chance here to extend this quote to not only include ‘outside observers’, but also ‘outside authors’, building on the vision of agency in welcoming minoritized voices to tell their own stories, whether that be by presenting full accounts of how systemic racism has shaped their lives and written work, recounting and dissecting their creative processes, or reflecting on the uptake of their music or sounds by majoritized individuals.

In considering such cases where marginalized groups and individuals are sampled, it is important to question whether ‘sampling up’ is as much a worry as ‘sampling down’, where ‘up’ and ‘down’ refer to the relative social position of the person sampling (and the sampled music) as well as those commenting on the sampling activity.Footnote ⁵⁴ For example, it becomes important to ask: are the commentators who discuss sampling commenting up, down, or sideways? This thinking has been adapted from anthropologist Laura Nader’s concept of ‘studying up’, which calls for a change in the scholarly examination of systems, structures, and subjects of power.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Nader’s manifesto, studying up or down refers to studying groups who are above or below you within society’s power structures. Applying this thinking to commentaries on sampling and sample-based music, ‘studying down’ becomes ‘sampling down’ (where artists use samples from individuals in positions of less power) and ‘commenting down’ (where authors who write about sampling discuss content from individuals in positions of less power). Sampling down and commenting down are where the challenges appear to become most pronounced, since these downward-trajectory situations often involve appropriation, misappropriation, or expropriation, which are seldom discussed academically from the viewpoint of those perpetrated against; thus commenting down offers an observational view rather than an experiential or ‘sideways’ view. In these cases, sampling activity enters a territory that harms or inflicts damage, incurred from a lack of crediting or financial recompense.

Another useful means of employing analogous directional tendencies is Walser’s contribution on heavy metal appropriations of classical music, where the high art/low art binary is employed to position popular music beneath classical music within a hierarchy that reinforces elitism and prestige, observing those on the outside of the classical music tradition as on the ‘margins of social power’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nader’s and Walser’s analogous concepts shape a vision for what to prioritize in multi-voice commentary. While this article sets out a case for multi-voice commentaries on any sample-based work, there appears to be a greater sense of urgency and attention needed in cases where musicians and creators have ‘sampled down’ with respect to prestige or wealth, and also where commentaries and analyses are derived from ‘commenting down’ situations.

Host and Ancillary Genres

Stepping away from the specifics pertaining to situations of cross-cultural sampling, there are several concepts common to all multi-voice commentaries which require attention. A sample-based work will have a host genre or field of study associated with it; for example, Francis Dhomont’s Forêt profonde (1994–96) is an acousmatic work, whereas its sampling of Schumann’s piano pieces Kinderszenen, op. 15 (1838), is a work that belongs to the Romantic era within what is widely termed western art music. Here, the host genre is accepted as acousmatic or, more broadly, electroacoustic music; thus existing academic discourse relating to this work stems from expertise in this specific field.Footnote ⁵⁷ These texts convey information relevant to the supposed target audience, with the assumption of a shared understanding of acousmatic processes. Seeking commentary on this work from those with specific knowledge of Kinderszenen (e.g. pianists) or from Schumann scholars who know its historical context (musicologists) reaches out to the work’s ancillary genre(s) to augment the knowledge base, brings nuance to historical detail, and illuminates discussions about the source of influence, its segmentation, and its transference to a new musical work.Footnote ⁵⁸ Interpreting the work and sampled content through the lens of the ancillary genre(s) potentially offers a new set of readings. It is a notably uncommon and unconventional practice to stray away from a work’s host genre, for various reasons: in Forêt profonde, the sample-based work’s host genre is considered broadly as ‘electroacoustic’, which, as a practice, engages with sound transformation and modification processes that can heavily distort a sample’s appearance. Thus hesitancy in approaching a work with highly technical processes that obfuscate the original music (in this case, Kinderszenen) may deter commentary from the voices that can speak of the hypotext. One’s confidence levels in approaching a musical work that appears to sit outside one’s area of expertise may have a bearing on whether one participates in multi-voice commentary, and the genre barrier may itself act as an obstacle for outside, ancillary-genre input.

The presence of ancillary and host genres within sample-based music can account in part for the historical and typically exclusionary tendencies evident within commentaries on sample-based music. Within the context of this article, exclusion refers to the voices and authors left out whose expertise relates to the hypotext work. The absence of their input takes on more significance within the context of ‘sampling down’ cases and cross-cultural sampling situations, since these are typically sites where power imbalances (in the music-making) are observable. For example, in the case of a trap track which samples a historical Bollywood work, it would be conventional to see an academic with expertise in popular music or electronic dance music (the host genre) take on the role of analyst or commentator on the sample-based music, rather than the Bollywood music expert (the ancillary genre) leading or appearing in this discussion.

Scholarship on exclusion within music studies has recognized the issue of misrecognition, where the ‘expectation is that musicologists who are visible minorities will study “their own music” rather than musics attributed to white European or Eurosettler groups’, while ‘scholars who are visible majorities are generally licenced to study whatever musics they like’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Observing sample-based music with this consideration in mind, and the greater prestige that a host genre may hold (in comparison to any ancillary genre(s)), may well account for the lack of texts by marginalized or underrepresented authors. The host genres as presented in this article are mainly electronic music, electronic dance music, acousmatic music, hip-hop, DJ music, and pop, while the ancillary genres can often (but not always) be regarded as ‘other’, as in the case of folk music from around the globe, indigenous music, field recordings, or esoteric music. Another contributing factor for the lack of diversity in literature on sample-based music is the focus on technology, which these works and practices are heavily reliant on. All sample-based music is dependent on technology for its existence, and the voices that traditionally speak about audio and music technologies have tended to be male. The host genre of any sample-based music will always be entwined with technological forces, and to talk about sampling is also to talk about the means of its realization. In addition to this, since the inception of sampling and audio recording, perceptions of complexity regarding rapidly changing technologies can challenge broader understandings of processes by non-specialists. This has led to a practice of leaving this analytical workload to the technologically minded, the operators of sampling devices and procedures, and those with audio-engineering backgrounds. This tendency encapsulates the view of those intimidated or blocked by such male-dominated discourses, cultures, and environments. Bringing the technological expertise in, together with contextual and historical views, via the multi-voice approach, enables an opportunity to better value the variety of voices that are typically left out of more traditional musicological discourses.

On the topic of excluded voices, a further perception is that of sampling as a less-esteemed practice. Opinions on whether or not sampling is a form of theft, together with arguments about originality, can limit whether more commentaries come forth. Mark Volman of The Turtles famously stated, ‘sampling is just a longer term for theft. Anybody who can honestly say sampling is some sort of creativity has never done anything creative.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Similarly, musician and electronic innovator Susan Ciani likens the act of sampling to visiting ‘graveyards of sounds’, while Morey comments on the observable ‘snobbery’ when the actions of those that work on musical scores versus those that manipulate samples are compared.Footnote ⁶¹ These perspectives demonstrate the recurring dialogues that diminish sampling practices as something ‘less than’ and also suggest why there might not be immediate support for or interest in contributing to this topic in music scholarship.

Inclusive Design

As mentioned earlier, inclusivity is a driver underpinning this approach so as not to further limit commentary from marginalized perspectives. Enabling and encouraging voices from separate disciplines to be heard alongside each other is a somewhat unconventional practice that makes a statement about valuing different readings of a single work, moving beyond roles of single authorship or hierarchical management. The formation of a multi-voice commentary assimilates key components from standpoint theory, which gives voice to marginalized groups and individuals. This theory, which has its roots in feminist social science, acknowledges the marginalized status of groups, and places value on their ‘personal and cultural biographies’.Footnote ⁶² Steve Collins develops this thinking further in relation to Black intellectuals, ‘especially those who are in touch with their marginality in academic settings’ and who ‘tap this standpoint in producing distinctive analyses of race, class and gender’.Footnote ⁶³ Standpoint theory and multi-voice commentary find kinship in their respect for situated knowledge and their visions to expand narratives from knowing subjects.

Instructional Design

To create a multi-voice commentary on a work and its use of sampling, a facilitator first provides interpreters with a work to listen to and study; they are given the details of the sampled content and access to the work(s) it samples from. The facilitator asks the interpreters to comment on anything deemed relevant with regard to the sampled content, with the understanding that their perspectives have been requested because of their specialism and expertise in their separate field. Very little else is asked of the interpreter, and no other commentary from the community of those interpreting or commenting on the work is shared during the collection stage; individuals are free to provide as much or as little commentary as they want. The facilitator gathers the responses and presents them as a series of readings on a single work.Footnote ⁶⁴ Multi-voice commentary offers an opportunity to allow different viewpoints to enter a space that intentionally encourages honest, present, in-the-moment readings of music. Here, receivership takes centre stage, where communication of the ‘affect’ can reveal individual ‘truths’ that ultimately stem from a person’s lived experience. Commentaries from a coalition of various fields of expertise find an empathetic and hospitable space, welcoming difference as an intrinsic part of the receivership. This is an exercise where interpretations can exist side by side, gaps can be filled, insights and personal reflections can be captured, and histories challenged and, in some cases, revised.

Interpretive Communities

As indicated thus far, the concept of interpretive communities is important to multi-voice commentary, where differences among readings embellish the outcome of any analysis. This thinking builds on Justin Williams’s work on the ‘imaginary community’ of hip-hop; he claims that ‘hip-hop interpretive communities bring their understanding of hip-hop texts, shaping and inflecting that text through the interaction involved in the listening and interpreting experience’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’ also offers a fundamental principle via its assumption that texts (in this case, musics) do not have a single meaning and that texts are ‘composite[s] of different interpretations provided by readers’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The term ‘interpretive communities’ is applied here from Stanley Fish’s seminal work Is There a Text in This Class?, where he claims that we as individuals interpret texts because each of us is part of an interpretive community that gives us a particular way of reading.Footnote ⁶⁷ A central premise of reader-response criticism is that the focus is placed on the reader, who completes the meaning of the work through reading it. My approach acknowledges Fish’s general claim that all texts are, ‘in some sense, about their readers and […] the experience of the reader, rather than the text itself’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Activating this concept in practice initiates a unique opportunity to alter how analysis or commentary usually occurs. The logic here reinforces the inclusion of multiple voices for approaching a single text (which is not so ‘single’, as explained earlier) and where these voices are regarded as ‘readers’ of the text as well as ‘authors’ when they contribute an interpretation. The multi-voice approach adopts this thinking, seeking out readership for sample-based music from individuals who, by self-identification and declaration of music specialism, belong to different interpretive communities. Membership of an interpretive community allows individuals to understand and read texts in a certain way; for example, Ingrid Monson explains that ‘a chain of associations may be set off that engage the listener and unite her or him with a community of other individuals who share a similar musical point of view’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Kim Christian Schrøder expands on this, stating that a text (in this case, sample-based music) is

These accounts stress the benefits of communal reception for the shared building of meaning, but conversely, they also vouch for the gains to be had in reaching beyond a single, discrete interpretive community, as an avoidance strategy for the possible echo chambers they may yield.

The expansion of one reading to multivalent meanings via the establishment of diverse interpretive communities for the study of sample-based music implies that there is a much larger story to tell with regard to sampling in music and that the musical ‘story’ extends beyond discrete disciplines and the viewpoints of musical or non-musical fields. The ambition is to provide storytelling that is longitudinal in outlook, thus enabling new interpretations to come forth. Barthes dismantled the idea that a text can have a meaning at all in any singular sense, asserting that meaning is permanently fluid. In this respect, it is understood that a text’s future meaning might change; in the sampling world, this is easy to imagine, as future sampling of a sample may well take place (as we observed regarding sample chains). A case in point is the BBC News theme composed by David Lowe, which was sampled by Rachel Leary in Raving to the BBC News — Kitchen Remix (2020) within a TikTok video, in response to the March 2020 lockdown in the UK, as she mimed a nightclub DJ set at home as a reflection on and response to the ‘stay at home’ message.Footnote ⁷¹ The context of the pandemic gave new meaning to the BBC News music that could not have been anticipated prior to the events of 2020. Future interpretations of music need to be open-ended and not tied to one critique or author, which ultimately ‘furnish it with a final signification [… and] close the writing’.Footnote ⁷² When implemented, a multi-voice commentary will provide a precedent for fluid interpretations that are accepted for their variance. The process sets out a clear intention to value difference, by standing back once a particular “compendium” has been gathered to respect the new landscape of knowledge brought to the table. The mixing of genres, eras, and cultures that results from sampling offers an invitation to bring viewpoints together that, in usual circumstances, would rarely meander from their own discipline-bound application.

Multi-Voice Commentary in Practice

Drawing on recollections of my time researching Charles Dodge’s Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental for piano and tape (1976), a work which samples from Leon-cavallo’s opera Pagliacci (1892) and specifically the aria ‘Vesti la giubba’ as sung by Enrico Caruso, my exploration took place in tandem with input provided by Kenneth Baird (CEO of the European Opera Centre). Conversations with Baird on the topic of the Leoncavallo, a work I knew little about, revealed specialist knowledge that superseded information available in any existing texts. Baird’s information was experiential, some of it recounting specific recordings, and included first-hand testimonials of live opera performances of Pagliacci, together with cultural context that went beyond the initial remit of my research. This information struck me as somewhat alternative, and preferable, to the commentary stemming from the discourse on electroacoustic music, mixed music analyses, and American avant-garde literature, which account for Dodge’s work in various paragraphs and passing statements. These academic discussions did not stem from expertise in opera (which Dodge’s sample-based composition heavily relies on), and as I later discovered, no discussion in opera communities of Dodge’s piece currently exists. Baird’s commentary focused on perceptions of the emotive content, the interplay between opera samples and the live piano material, the specificity of the recording used, and the broader contextual understanding of the original work and its audiences. His comments contested a generally accepted viewpoint that Dodge’s work is ‘hilarious’, ‘witty’, or even ‘slapstick’;Footnote ⁷³ instead, he viewed it as an ‘extension of emotional impact, expanding and compounding the angst-driven nature of the aria’ from which this sample is taken. No literature matches Baird’s response, since examination of Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental has never been made through an ancillary, opera-focused lens; this thus reiterates that existing writings on it have overlooked the need for viewpoints like Baird’s in order to close the loop on ‘genre-displaced’ samples. This experience mirrors ongoing discussion within ethnomusicological circles about author attribution for field interlocutors, as Swijghuizen Reigersberg describes: ‘interlocutors may receive an acknowledgement and word of “thanks”[,] and they are nowadays cited and accredited for having helped researchers with their work. However, not many arts and humanities researchers go as far as naming their co-creators as co-authors.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Accepting that knowledge and expertise exists beyond one’s own capacities is a sentiment shared with collaboration theory, where a team’s efforts and skills produce benefits greater than those achieved through individuals working alone.

The Challenge Ahead

This new approach requires its own inventory of measures to facilitate multi-voice commentary, in order to feed freely into the discussion of sampling. Logistically, there are challenges ahead, determined largely by the vision of inclusivity being sought: what is meant by inclusivity may have several iterations. Multi-voice commentary as an approach could operate entirely within the academy, where voices from separate disciplines would provide commentaries on a given work or track (inclusively, albeit within a rather exclusive clubFootnote ⁷⁵), or non-academic voices within the process could be invited, to enrich a commentary that perhaps better respects the non-scholarly stakeholders, knowledge-holders, and readership that sample-based music both extends to and associates with.Footnote ⁷⁶ Sample-based music serves wide non-academic interest groups, which include online databases such as WhoSampled.com, which members of the public can add to through identifying instances of sampling. The ‘Sample Spotters’ Facebook group enables users to query undisclosed acts of sampling, while Tracklib encourages the music production community (amateurs and professionals) to sample from music pre-cleared of copyright, offered on its website for a fee. These provisions, together with numerous blog sites and online forums dedicated to dissecting sampling, demonstrate the extensive appeal that sampling has ignited outside the academy.

As academic attitudes and modes of thinking begin to shift and align with inclusive practices, it is only right that the make-up of a multi-voice team is considered with appropriate scrutiny and care. While this has yet to be fully determined and is perhaps only discoverable through practical implementation, the need for a new approach is motivated by inclusivity — but whether multivalence equals inclusivity is another question entirely. This issue probes at the definition of inclusivity, questioning how much multivalence would be ‘enough’ (where would it end?) while also appreciating that multivalence does not equate to conclusiveness. I envision that the selected repertoire will dictate the initial make-up of the team, where the choice of host genre, ancillary genres, and accompanying fields are indicated by the delineation of the work’s interior and sampled content. As I have begun working in this manner, I have noticed that the ancillary genre input has indicated further areas of expertise for the coalition through recommendations. Freedom to expand the number of perspectives is integral to the approach, as the process is based in discovery.

There are other challenges and unknowns with this approach when we consider the rise and prevalence of AI use to aid sampling. AI stem separation is perhaps the most profound and game-changing tool that sampling artists now have at their disposal to extract individual instrumental and vocal lines from stereo renders in their efforts to isolate the ‘perfect’ sample. The sample transplant process from piece to piece thus no longer needs to carry over the full instrumentation present within the original stereo mix; rather, a surgical extraction of lone voices and parts is possible, giving rise to greater flexibility in arrangement and production, and perhaps reducing audiences’ certainty about sampling occurrences by playing more fluidly with the senses of familiarity and recognition of those who interpret and comment on these works. AI sample manipulation software also offers radical editing capabilities that promise to transform samples beyond what is normally possible, while others afford melodic and harmonic reconstructions (or interpolations) of sampled content in an instant. These tools have initiated reflection on what this means for labour, creativity, and sampling in the age of ‘metacreativity’.Footnote ⁷⁷ With these new tools in operation, and others rapidly advancing close behind, our assessment of, commentaries on, and analyses of sample-based music need to shift, adapt, and keep pace with a consciousness of what is possible technologically. This new frontier of burgeoning new tools offers an invitation for future research that assesses and comments on AI use within sample-based music, using a multi-voice approach both to document and to critically assess this shift in music production history.