The ethics of digital audio-sampling: engineers' discourse

Abstract

Over the course of the past several years the use of digital audio-sampling by composers, musicians, engineers and producers has increased to a point where the sampler is now as common in the recording studio as the microphone. Digital samplers allow one to encode a fragment of sound, from one to several seconds in duration, in a digitised binary form which can then be stored in computer memory. This stored sound may be played back through a keyboard, with its pitch and tonal qualities accurately reproduced or, as is often the case, manipulated through electronic editing. Because of its unsurpassed mimetic capabilities, one common use of the sampler has been to store in computer memory a note or set of notes played by an individual who has a unique playing style. When played back through a keyboard, one could construct an entire solo line which would potentially sound as if that person were playing it. Another common use of the sampler is to extract a fragment of sound from one context and place it in a new one, with no appreciable loss of sound quality over each generation of extraction and repositioning. These three capabilities of the sampler – the mimetic/reproductive, the manipulative and the extractive – are crucial to understanding both the sampler's popularity and its potential to disrupt the production process in the music industry.