Sampling as virtual collaboration

This is a chapter in the The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, 4 Bring That Beat Back: Sampling as Virtual Collaboration Rowan Oliver.

Need to revisit this subject when I dig more into [[ electronic music, psychogeography, and nostalgia ]]

I tried to log in here to read the full text, but I got an error with my New York Public Library number, even though I know it works. You gotta access it through the database section of the NYPL website; just search for OUP’s portal and it’ll let you in.

The abstract:

This chapter focuses on music technology and production techniques that predate the Internet but have contemporary relevance. The role of digital sampling in the development of hip hop, and other subsequent genres based around use of “breakbeats,” is widely acknowledged and has been explored from various perspectives. This chapter argues that the creative interplay between the contemporary producer who samples and the instrumentalist whose performance is sampled can be read as a process of virtual collaboration. By considering use of sampled breakbeats in a range of examples, the chapter explores this contemporary, virtual “musicking,” in which collaboration becomes possible for performers and producers working across temporal, geographical, and stylistic boundaries. Fundamental to the breakbeat’s role here is Steven Shaviro’s notion of a musical environment in which the digital “re-becomes analogue,” a characterization of sampling that is integral to contemporary understanding of groove and collaborative music making.