Some interesting points about the morality of certain aspects of song production software have been raised during this class.  Namely, what kind of message is sent when we have all of these little clips to do whatever we want with that came from a real person, and may have even had cultural significance?  It’s not an issue that I pretend to fully understand the implications of, mostly because I’m not sure that anyone does.  There’s a lot of complexity here, and quite a few layers of potential problems that have to be unpacked.  Generally, I think that as long as whoever contributed the sound was compensated and fully aware of what it was going to be used for, there isn’t an actual problem, though it can still be a little strange.  But when you consider the implications of the culture-specific sounds that are available and the ones that are often tied to something important or religious in nature, things get a lot more complex.  Again, I don’t know that I’m really in a position to speak about how those things could be harmful, or beneficial, or just plain weird.  None of them affect me directly, so I’m just an interested bystander.  But to someone from one of those cultures, how might it feel to have this part of yourself reduced down into a neatly packaged audio stereotype?  Was there any action taken to avoid offense during recording?  Whether there was or not, does intent really matter when it comes to someone’s culture being treated as a joke or an easily broken down trope?  I don’t know the answers for sure, but it does make me a little uncomfortable to consider these questions, even though I think it’s important to do so.

Discussing the history of recordings was fascinating to me.  Seeing how far it’s come from needles on glass and bands crowded into a single room to the ease of modern recording is honestly mind-boggling.  These days, anyone with any sort of electronic device can easily record sound, with or without video.  Recording studios don’t need to bother with a specific setup – recording quality is better overall, and changes can always be made in post-production.  It’s so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine a time when this wasn’t possible, but it wasn’t so long ago that people were only just figuring out how digital recordings worked.  I’ll admit that I don’t quite understand the specifics of how they work now.  There’s a lot of technicalities involved with technology in general that escape me, though I usually know how it works.  Maybe that’s why the early attempts at recording are so interesting to me.  I don’t even know the details about how something that I use often works, but these people, so far removed from modern society, understood enough to create and improve the groundwork for it.  There’s probably some kind of statement to be made there about modern society, but I’m unsure exactly what it is – in the meantime, the various ideas of all those people trying to make the first recordings are still endlessly fascinating to me.

Sampling is a common practice in the music industry.  Generally, it means the use of pieces of songs created by other artists in a song of your own, and it has been widely used ever since technology allowed for the possibility of it, especially in the hip-hop scene.  Some people view it as a cop-out, something done by someone too lazy to create their own piece.  This is just one of many arguments against it, but many more claim that it’s an art form in its own right.  I agree with the latter.  Sometimes the use of audio clips from other songs can enhance a piece, give it more meaning than it would otherwise have.  Part of this comes from the community of the music industry, from knowing what the other song was meant to stand for and what it did in society, and using that context to add to something else.  Art is meant to be shared.  Sampling is just an extension of this sentiment.  Using something that already has an established significance to give more meaning to something new is just as artistically important as completely original works.  Being able to understand and apply that kind of context to something new is its own art form.