Sound Bound

SOUND UNBOUND
Sampling Digital Music and Culture

edited by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

6 2008 Paul D. Miller All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permissionin writing from the publisher. For information about special quantity discounts, please email special_sales@mitpress .mit.edu. This book was set in Minion and Syntax on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sound unbound : sampling digital music and culture / edited by Paul D. Miller. p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-63363-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Music—21st century—History and criticism. 2. Music and technology. 3. Popular culture—21st century. I. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. ML197.S694 2008 780.9 0 05—dc22 2007032443 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In Through the Out Door: Sampling and the Creative Act

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Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky thatSubliminal Kid

. . . free content fuels innovation . . . —Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

Silence is one of contemporary info culture’s rarest commodities. In a world where there are several thousand satellites in the sky constantly beaming down at us information, cell phone relays, GPS signals, and weather patterns, even the idea of lightpollution takes on a more than metaphorical value. We see the lights in the sky, but we don’t hear the frequencies beaming through every nook and cranny of a world put in parentheses by human-made objects in the sky. It’s a different sentence, to say the least, when nature and nurture blur to the extent that they have over the last century, and we’ve created a new syntax of human culture, as our inabilityto find another ‘‘intelligent species’’ in the universe attests—we speak only to ourselves, so far—we’re alone in the universe. That’s the current info-culture scenario. We speak to ourselves because that’s what lonely people do sometimes. If the metaphor of architecture and frozen music evokes structure, then I need to update the phrase, give it a spin, and see what pops out of thecentrifuge—after all, if there’s one thing Sound Unbound is about, it’s the remix—it’s a sampling machine where any sound can be you, and all text is only a tenuous claim to the idea of individual creativity. It’s a plagiarist’s club for the famished souls of a geography of now-here. Get my drift?

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Paul D. Miller

Buildings in architecture are nothing more than correspondences betweenrelationships—presence and absence, form and formlessness—and these ideas are extracted from diagrams drawn and configured within an information environment—people working, living, and breathing together to create a structure. I bet the twenty-first-century remix of the idea of architecture will be an FTP server. Archive fever becomes the Napster impulse for the attentiondeficit generation. FTP—File Transfer Protocol.It’s a simple triad of words, but a good one to start a book about sound and multimedia. Think of the idea of the archive (same root word as architecture), and think of structure as exchange. Is there any way to think outside of the networks of exchange that pervade our lives from every angle—from the sky, from the fiber optic cables embedded in the earth beneath our feet, from the texts that ask usat every turn—‘‘Who are you? Where are you going?’’ Search the FTP server for files ending in .mp3, .wma, .ogg, .wav, .mov, .mpg, etc., and you will find nothing that would precipitate this question. After all, it’s all just data. Map one metaphor onto the other, remix, and press play. The sampling machine can handle any sound, and any expression. You just have to find the right edit points in...