A Sampler Is A Musical Instrument - A Presentation
For assignment four I had to make a short presentation in which I stated that a sampler could be considered a musical instrument. Below you can read what I had in mind in order to convince people of my statement.
Introduction:
Modern sampling in popular music dates back to the 1960s with Jamaican DJ’s who combined instrumental reggae recordings with other albums into new songs. However, sampling made its real breakthrough at the end of the 1970s and had near the mid-1980s a commercial breakthrough when samplers became accessible to the general public.
When it comes to music, sampling can be seen as the act of taking a sample of a sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. In general this is done by a sampler: a piece of hardware or a computer program on a digital computer. It can record and store sounds which can be combined and mixed into a series of sounds or music.
Because a sampler uses mainly existing sounds, the discussion arose whether it should be considered a musical instrument or not. People considered sampling to be merely a practice of cutting and pasting of sound recordings without the special musical characteristics. Nevertheless, I want to state that a sampler can in fact be considered a musical instrument.
In order to elaborate my statement I will first define what I consider to be a musical instrument. Secondly I will try to use this definition in order to show that a synthesizer can be a musical instrument. Next, I will discuss Andrew Goodwin and his idea on the problem of sampling. Finally I will come back to my statement and summarize my argument.
Body:
My definition of a musical instrument is very well formulated by the electronic encyclopaedia Wikipedia. I quote: “A musical instrument is a device constructed or modified with the purpose of making music. In principle, anything that produces sound, and can somehow be controlled by a musician, can serve as a musical instrument.” End of quote. So basically it is a device which produces music and can be controlled by a musician.
An example of a sampler is the so-called synthesiser. A synthesiser can be considered an electronic musical instrument designed to produce electronically generated sound. Hence, it contains recorded sounds which can be combined, mixed and transformed into music.Synthesizers traditionally have a keyboard which provides the human interface to the instrument and are often thought of as keyboard instruments. However, a synthesizer's human interface does not necessarily have to be a keyboard, nor does a synthesizer strictly need to be played by a human. Nevertheless, the possibility to intervene is there.
Andrew Goodwin wrote already in 1988 an essay called “sample and hold: pop music in the digital age of reproduction” in which he demonstrated the problems of sampling.
According to Goodwin, without doubt the digital sampling music computer (the sampler) is potentially the most postmodern musical instrument yet invented. It is relatively a new machine that digitally encodes any sounds, stores them and enables the manipulation and reproduction of those sounds with almost infinite parameters and no discernible loss and sound quality.
Goodwin considered that it needs only a matter of time before it would be accepted as a musical form. He sees the origin of the problem of sampling in the problematic distinction between originals and copies on the one hand, and between human and automated performance on the other.
For example:
- Musicians became technicians, more concerned with technology than the acquiring of traditional musical skills.
- It is confusing that the musicians are able to play all sounds just with the use of a technological device and that they do not constantly need to concentrate on the musical instrument which is heard from the technological device because it can be heard automatically after being activated.
Already in the 1988 Goodwin saw the development in the digital pop age where analogue sounds are the real thing, however automated or synthetic. With the naturalisation of electronic technology he saw the audience become more and more habituated to seeing pop performers as technicians, computer programmers, DJs or studio engineers.
Conclusion:
Personally, I think that the development Goodwin noticed has developed increasingly over the last twenty years. I like to think of sampling as part of a new music genre. For me each genre has its own ‘sound’ or characteristics which implies sometimes the need for specific musical instruments. In that case, the synthesiser is the musical instrument which creates the specific sound of modern pop music.
When considering the definition of musical instruments by Wikipedia, it can be considered that the sampler suits the description well because a sampler can be used as a device to make music and can be controlled by a musician.
The reason for the discussion on whether the sampler is an musical instrument or not can in my opinion be traced back to the fact that with the rise of the modern pop music people were shocked by the fact that the music was produced electronically and that the skills for the production of the music were no longer based on the acquiring of traditional musical skills but mainly on the acquiring of technological skills.