11.5 Musical examples#
Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry - Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950)#
A landmark of musique concrète, the movement that first made music by collaging recorded sounds. Schaeffer and Henry built this “symphony for one man alone” from recordings of the human body (breathing, footsteps, voices, and whistling) alongside fragments of instrumental sounds. In this era, sampling and sequencing meant physically manipulating recordings on magnetic tape, decades before digital samplers existed.
Tracklib - The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973–2023)#
Hip-hop artists pioneered the modern practice of sampling and sequencing, beginning with DJs who extended the drum breaks of funk and soul records by looping them on two turntables. This video surveys fifty years of the genre through one iconic sample per year, showing how producers have chopped, looped, and re-sequenced fragments of older recordings into new music.
The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist (2000)#
The Avalanches’ debut album, Since I Left You, is built almost entirely from samples. The track Frontier Psychiatrist sequences dialogue from a comedy sketch of the same name over an orchestral backing sampled from an Enoch Light record, among dozens of other sampled fragments.
Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones - Fairlight CMI (1984)#
Watch Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones experiment with the Fairlight CMI, the earliest commercially available digital sampler. Each key of its keyboard plays back a recorded sample, repitched by changing its playback speed, which is exactly the technique of this chapter.
clipping. - Williams Mix (2014)#
The experimental hip-hop group clipping. closes its album CLPPNG with a version of John Cage’s Williams Mix (1952), a pioneering tape piece built from hundreds of fragments of recorded sound, spliced together according to a score that Cage composed with chance operations. Computer musician Tom Erbe, who recreated Cage’s piece in software from its original score, realized this version using fragments of the album’s own tracks as source material. The result is sampling and sequencing, with the sequence dictated by Cage’s score.