i'm writing an 8-page thesis on sampling, specifically it's meaning in music history. does anyone have know any good sources like books or documentaries that they could recommend? at the moment i'm reading "making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop", but i need more sources! any help would be greatly appreciated.

heh, that's what I was gonna say. The scratch movie touches on it barely if I remember right, although it's more about DJ stuff. Good flick though.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520261051

mark katz write a little bit on sampling. not much, but interesting stuff, definitly recomend it.

yo, remember that sampling in music uses borrows the word sample from science, from wiki. In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous signal to a discrete signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave (a continuous signal) to a sequence of samples (a discrete-time signal).

In practice, the continuous signal is sampled using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a non-ideal device with various physical limitations. This results in deviations from the theoretically perfect reconstruction capabilities, collectively referred to as distortion.

Audio sampling

Digital audio uses pulse-code modulation and digital signals for sound reproduction. This includes analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), digital-to-analog conversion (DAC), storage, and transmission. In effect, the system commonly referred to as digital is in fact a discrete-time, discrete-level analog of a previous electrical analog. While modern systems can be quite subtle in their methods, the primary usefulness of a digital system is the ability to store, retrieve and transmit signals without any loss of quality.
[edit] Sampling rate

When it is necessary to capture audio covering the entire 20–20,000 Hz range of human hearing, such as when recording music or many types of acoustic events, audio waveforms are typically sampled at 44.1 kHz (CD), 48 kHz (professional audio), or 96 kHz. The approximately double-rate requirement is a consequence of the Nyquist theorem.

There has been an industry trend towards sampling rates well beyond the basic requirements; 96 kHz and even 192 kHz are available.[1] This is in contrast with laboratory experiments, which have failed to show that ultrasonic frequencies are audible to human observers; however in some cases ultrasonic sounds do interact with and modulate the audible part of the frequency spectrum (intermodulation distortion). It is noteworthy that intermodulation distortion is not present in the live audio and so it represents an artificial coloration to the live sound,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_% ... cessing%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_%28music%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampler_%2 ... trument%29

word man.

There is a documentary called "Deep Crates" that talks about techniques and interviews people like Diamon D, Lord Finesse and others.
You can watch all parts on YouTube. here is one parthttp://youtu.be/ssxRYoeIc2c

You could check out Copyright Criminals.

http://www.copyrightcriminals.com/

Secondhand Sureshots!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-3EHaZVss

Post that ish online when it's complete, would love to have a read.

plus one on secondhand sureshots (and "making beats" is a GREAT book!).

maybe Other People's Property by Jason Tanz?

hey man, this isn't all about sampling, but I found it relevant to the role it plays in the transformation of media and culture.

http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_s ... ivity.html

pretty much this guy talks uses an analogy of pre-commercialized culture and media as "read-write", and the commercialization of music and media along with copyright and piracy laws turns this into a "read only" culture, where music and media is spoonfed to people listening to a radio or looking at a screen. The new generation of media creators use techniques such as sampling and recycling other content to produce something new and original, which brings back "read-write" culture to our society, which is being confronted and fought with piracy laws . The talk is pretty based on how copyright laws are outdated and aren't relevant to the way that our generation deals with media. Let me know what you think about it! I think this guy is very smart.

+1 TED TALKS!

Watch a few of those and you're ready to take on the world. They're like a Red Bull for your intellectual senses. Great source of inspiration.

The one with Roger Ebert is really dope, though not at all relevant to this discussion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNXOVpN8Wgg

arent documentaries kinda.. not valid reference material?

In the age of wikipedia and youtube, everything is valid and nothing is permitted. Or something.

I always found this interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

KLF (kopyright liberation front) was an electronic band in the end of '80. they got lot of problems with abba for their rude sampling from their records. they wrote a -free- book (you can find it on line) about how to make hits with sampling (and also without samplers).

other sources:
try the "samplers pioneers": the french concrete music (musique concrete) musicians or also KH Stockhausen or J cage...they prefigured the sampling theory.

I think Radiophonic might have predated those guys...Delia Derbyshire was using tape loops for sampling even before that, however, they weren't sampling anything but themselves playing other instruments or dropping pots and pans, etc.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDX_CS3NsTk