Origins
We are so used to hearing manipulated sounds that we are rarely aware of it any more. Imagine how today´s sound world would shock someone from the era before recorded sound, when all sounds were heard ´straight´ ie never reversed, stretched out, speeded up or transformed in any way.
In today´s digital world recorded sounds are utterly flexible and the ways in which they can be altered are limited only by one´s imagination and because the price of the technology required is getting lower all the time, ever increasing numbers of people are discovering the pleasures of creating music with sound samples.
...[more]Tape Arrives
For composers it was the advent of magnetic tape that gave them a whole new medium with which to explore sounds and launched the sample era. With tape you could easily:
• chop up the sounds and insert other bits in between
• speed sounds up and slow them down
• play them backwards and add new sounds over the top of others.
You could also play sounds through different speakers to create interesting spatial effects.
...[more]The 1960s
Several sound technologies came into their own in the Sixties that were to massively expand the possibilities for work with sound samples, the most significant were multi-track recording and 'effects'.
Many people thought that one of the Beatles´ great innovations in the 1967 album, Sergeant Pepper was the extensive use of tape manipulation. Indeed tracks like A Day In The Life or Strawberry Fields were technically very innovative for the pop world and there is no doubt about the impact that they had on the sound of 60s psychedelia, but the techniques of repeated overdubbing and the assemblages of sound samples in various manipulations were all techniques pioneered and established long before. It´s simply the case that more people liked what the Beatles did with it all.
...[more]The 70s
Synthesizers
During the Seventies electronic synthesized music took off in a big way. The machines of the previous decade, such as the Moog had already had a tremendous impact, but during the seventies that the synthesizer became embedded in the aural landscape by its extremely widespread use in films, TV, advertising and on innumerable records. Very often synthesizers were used in the background such that one was unaware of their presence, rather than in the overt manner of 50s sci-fi movies or the 60s ´hey-listen-to-my-far-out-synthesizer´ music.
The 80s
Digital Samples
The most significant event in the history of the sound sample happened with the release of the Fairlight. New digital synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7 were becoming widespread and the brash sounds of Eighties electro-pop rejoiced in new technology, but the Fairlight was a different thing altogether. Any pop band that had made it big usually dragged theirs into the Top of the Pops studio, perhaps because they cost as much as a house and you didn´t have one of these unless you really had made it.
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The 90s
Computers
In the Nineties the computer replaced the tape machine as the hub of the recording studio. The computer could not only generate music whether from synthesized sounds or sampled sounds it could record at higher quality than was possible on tape.
Following on from this, recording companies and film studios discovered that the combination of sound sampling and computers was making it possible to avoid using real musicians, who were expensive and may not perform as reliably as a computer controlled sample. So in much the same way as the 70s saw the synthesizer become embedded in our sound world the 90s brought sampling and the digital manipulation of sound into almost everything that we hear and its often there in very subtle ways.
...[more]Samples Today
Today sampling technology is everywhere and getting cheaper. Many people´s mobile phones are even capable of recording and manipulating samples. What the future holds is difficult to predict, but it is likely that just as online computer gaming has taken off we will in due course see the arrival of popular ways of play music online. It´s already possible to play music interactively using the internet, but truly popular it ain´t, not yet. All it needs is someone to do for the internet what the Beatles did for magnetic tape.
In other areas of the media, the sample is just getting going and is set to continue to make inroads, but the technology has many other applications and will be at the centre of many other things that will effect all our lives apart from music, such as the ever increasing numbers of machines that talk.
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