Syllabus
The workshops will pick up where the talk leaves off and will focus on how to make sample-based music. Subjects will include decisions regarding how to find and collect/record samples; how to approach composing with these materials; compositional and manipulation techniques; and so on. Participants should bring in their own laptops and a means for capturing sounds, e.g., a mobile phone. If they already have relevant software, that is fine. The software made for beginners called Compose with Sounds will be on offer to all participants. This software provides means to upload sounds with corresponding images for instant recognition, sequencing them and manipulating them in order to create interesting sample-based music. Note: at the moment of writing, this software only works on a Macintosh platform but it is expected that the Windows version will be ready by October.
Leigh Landy is currently completing a book with his colleague, John Richards, entitled ‘On the Music of Sounds and the Music of Things’. Richards recently offered workshops in Prague on making/hacking culture and these two days will be spent thoroughly investigating the music of sampled sounds. He has also published a book for beginners called ‘Making Music with Sounds’ (Routledge, 2012) and has been composing sample-based music for many years.
Annotation
This talk and workshop will focus on making music with samples whether involving existent musical material or any sound. The theoretical session will start by surveying the field of sampling and then discuss some interesting differences between the more commercial music-oriented history of sampling and the various innovative developments made outside of that sector as well as examples that cross over, such as John Oswald’s ‘Plunderphonics’. The talk will also look at a number of aspects related to sampling culture that are unusual such as the relative anonymity of its artists to the subjects of appropriation and of legal issues. Sampling is a peculiar area of musical innovation for, unusually, in some ways developments within more popular forms of sample-based music have shown the way for more experimental musicians. Often it works the other way around. An example of this is how musicians with roots in popular music collaborate within sampling culture/remix. Many working within more innovative circles still adhere to the composer as the ‘owner’ of a work, something that is slightly contradictory given the nature of the use of samples. The talk, therefore, will cover a wide range of issues related to sampling and sonic exploration. The speaker will investigate some of his own works to illustrate many of the issues raised.
The course is organized in two days 25th - 26th October 2018 and will take place in Divadlo Inspirace at HAMU (https://hamu.cz/cs/vse-o-fakulte/organizacni-struktura-pracoviste/divadlo-inspirace/) expected timetable: THURSDAY 10-14 (theoretical part), FRIDAY 9-16 (practical part).