Friday, 17 October 2008

mash-ups and sample - what does noise-thievery tell us about digital plagiarism?

An excellent discussion of music-sampling and mash-ups, alongside approaches to creative expression and re-editing, with some thoughts on lazy approaches to music generation, on this week's "In New Music We Trust", hosted by Pete Tong last night. I found the notion that where a producer/artist does not, for instance, have the skill to create their own bass line, or where the one they want already exists, they might borrow/sample/re-edit it in a new format. Digital technologies make this easier and more accessible. Which makes copyright-management, citation, acknowledgement important.

The "cutting and pasting of styles" in forging a new style is really creative, apparently, although it can also encourage a lack of creativity and laziness. So do we need new rules or approaches to producing and assessing creative, digitally-manufactured content, given the portable, user-friendly, fleet-of-foot technologies that we have?

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