Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

'The Rest is History': Writing a History of Music Technologies and their Users

Harkins, Paul

Authors



Abstract

The socio-musical practice of sampling is closely associated with the re-use of pre-existing sound recordings and the technological processes of looping. These practices, based on appropriation and repetition, have been particularly common within the genres of hip-hop and Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Yet early digital sampling instruments such as the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (CMI) were not designed for these purposes. The technologists at Fairlight Instruments in Australia were primarily interested in the use of digital synthesis to imitate the sounds of acoustic instruments; sampling was a secondary concern. In the first part of this presentation, I follow digital sampling instruments like the Fairlight CMI and the E-mu Emulator by drawing on interviews with their designers and users to trace how they were used to sample the sounds of everyday life, loop sequenced patterns of sampled sounds, and sample extracts from pre-existing sound recordings. In the second part I draw on case studies that follow the users of digital sampling technologies across a range of socio-musical worlds to examine the diversity of contemporary sampling practices. Using concepts from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this presentation focuses on the ‘user-technology nexus’ and continues a shift in the writing of histories of technologies from a focus on the designers of technologies towards the contexts of use and ‘the co-construction’ or ‘mutual shaping’ of technologies and their users. As an example of the ‘interpretative flexibility’ of music technologies, digital sampling technologies were used in ways unimagined by their designers and sampling became synonymous with re-appropriation. My argument is that a history of digital sampling technologies needs to be a history of both the designers and the users of digital sampling technologies.

Citation

Harkins, P. (2017, March). 'The Rest is History': Writing a History of Music Technologies and their Users. Presented at Burgundy School of Business Research Seminar, University of Burgundy, Dijon

Presentation Conference Type Lecture
Conference Name Burgundy School of Business Research Seminar
Start Date Mar 30, 2017
End Date Mar 30, 2017
Deposit Date May 9, 2017
Keywords Sampling, looping, hip-hop, Electronic Dance Music, digital technology,
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/825741