Originality: not what you think.

Starry Night, by Robert Silvers

Technically speaking, according to current copyright law, the above work is completely unoriginal. It's a replication of a famous Van Gogh painting, and it's made up of NASA images. There's nothing original about it! This is highway robbery!? Let's sue Robert Silvers. Cunningly, Silvers copyrighted his artistic Photomosaic method, and can, I'm sure, wiggle his way out of copyright battles at this point. But many musicians, who aren't millionaires, CEO's, and legal wizards, and who do essentially the same thing with audio, have a lot to worry about. But isn't Silvers' work an originality mindfuck? I applaud him for that.

Ben Franklin said that "originality is the art of concealing your sources." Girltalk, Robert Silvers, and others may have altered this philosophy.

I wrote a pretty long comment on a NewMusicBox post about sampling, Girltalk, and intellectual property law, so I thought I'd just post it here. I'm a little disappointed that no one else responded...The original post, by Carl Stone, brings up the familiar debate over originality, and what defines this concept today versus what it used to mean. You can read my thoughts on the topic below.

I'm glad to read many similar thoughts to my own in an interesting NMB post. Since taking a class on fair use in the music world (and really, before that), I came to realize how the legal system (especially in America) is always so horribly behind mainstream culture. (Gay marriage is still illegal in most states. The death penalty is still legal in many states. The list goes on.) At least in terms of copyright, this is probably largely the result of "case law," which only gets built slowly, over time, and, maybe, less the fault of insane, fundamentalist Supreme Court judges who would be better off behind bars than in a post appointed by the president. Maybe Girltalk is the first one to break through to the next generation of musicians who can sample electronically in just the same manner, as you write, as Brahms and Bach and everyone else did acoustically. I see absolutely no difference in what Girltalk does and what any Baroque or Classical composer did (and what many of these composers' instituational incarnates continue to do now, acoustically). But the world's collective consciousness still won't equate the two - we still haven't accepted the digital as "the real." And it's not. But it's a perfect simulacrum of the real--meaning it resembles the real so accurately as to take its place--and therefore, as far as we can tell, it is the real. That could be why the courts can't change the laws just yet - it is so seemingly real, whereas a reorchestration is somehow so different (but really not). I agree that Girltalk is recontextualizing the hits he mashes up to the point of fair use, or de minimis, or however you want to classify it, but I'm pretty sure if he was taken to court, it'd be copyright infringement for sure. The point at which the legal system's assault on this particular component of our creativity will stop is when it and the record labels realize that allowing this type of creativity is more profitable than the court settlements that prohibit it. Maybe that's finally happening right now--I wouldn't be surprised if Girltalk is getting courted by a couple big labels, or will be soon.

This quote from the NYTimes opinion piece sounds quite familiar: "All aspects of creativity are basically reconstituted bits and pieces of things we've seen, heard and experienced, finely or not-so-finely chopped and served in a form that hopefully blends the ingredients into something 'new.' The ancient Greeks seemed to know this, expressed in their belief that the Muses of creativity were the daughters of Mnemosyne, Titan goddess of memory."
It resembles Fredric Jameson's extensive writing on originality and "death of the subject" from the 1980s. He apparently agreed with the Greeks. But now, over 20 years after he wrote about these topics, I wonder what he thinks, though I hear he still buys the same music that Adorno was praising in the early to mid 20th century. Still, every piece I've read by Jameson has amazed me with its foresight and analogies. But the realization that Girltalk really is original, that the digital age has spawned an original form of originality in itself, is something that the courts haven't grasped yet, and Jameson couldn't in the 1980s. What the current discussions of originality today are missing is that a) originality has changed--we can't discuss it today with the old definition, and b) it's pointless to discuss originality at all today, because it either doesn't exist, if you buy into Jameson, or it has changed so much in the last few decades that we need a new word for it. Furthermore, maybe Jameson is right--subjects are dead--how can anyone today begin to claim that she's 100% original with no outside influence?

I personally stick to the word "innovation," and wholeheartedly believe in the obsolescence of the greedy, money-driven copyright industry--and that's why I spent most of the day remixing the final movement of Mozart's 40th.

Girl Talkin'

New Hampshire Public Radio interviewed DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) and Girl Talk (Greg Gillis) recently, about Spooky's Antarctic recording project and Girltalk's new album, Feed the Animals. Spooky's project sounds interesting--though his aim to "create the sound of ice" is a little dubious--and you can hear an extended interview on American Public media here. He'll actually be playing a preview version of this multimedia work at the Democratic National Convention in Denver later this summer.


Girltalk continues to put out polished, wildly popular, fast-paced mashups. This time, in his fourth album, he's appropriately made it available for free download. I'm surprised, because he uses exclusively others' hit songs as source material, that he hasn't done this in the past. Particularly effective is the track "What's It All About," which combines Busta Rhymes and the Police at one point. GT, as the world's premier mashup artist, has developed an extremely successful genre; the legal system has a lot of catching up to do so musicians like him don't have to publish their work on illegal-art.net.

He does compose these tracks, with nice transitions and various dynamic and energy levels. My main criticisms have to do first with timing and second with flexibility. He's so good at mixing that I'd actually rather hear some of his superimpositions last a little longer; he tends to get bored quickly, and may underestimate his audience's attention span.
His numerous combinations of tracks are virtuosic, but maybe not as virtuosic as they seem, because he rarely superimposes singing from one song over harmony or basslines from others. Usually, he opts for rap, which, largely unpitched, can sound good on top of anything in the same tempo. I'd like to hear him use more vocal tunes over other tracks that go well with them. Still, this shit is tight. I'm diggin' it. And plus, the cover art is perfect: a giant tag on a suburban lawn.

The genetics of sound

Computers are starting to hear just like we do.

I learned about Melodyne software from Andrew Hearst's great site, panopticist. Melodyne is a piece of sound editing software made by the German company, Celemony. It's good for things like high quality time-stretching and pitch shifting, processes other software can also accomplish. Probably, Melodyne does it a little better than most. However, this fall they're planning to release Melodyne plugin 2 (full version plus plugin will go for $399), which many say is gonna revolutionize the sound studio. I think it's gonna revolutionize music, period. View their promo video if you want.


I've said "holy shit" a lot more than I normally do on a Friday morning. Melodyne's new feature, Direct Note Access, is the ability to analyze polyphonic audio content and separate notes within a chord. Once they're separate, you can alter each individually, shifting, stretching, muting little parts of the audio, not the whole file. And it really does. About 11 minutes into the video below, creator Peter Neubacher moves a trumpet melody around without changing a thing about the (minimal upright bass) accompaniment. Right now, the software might be hard pressed to pick a flute line out of a giant orchestral texture, but based on what it can do now, they'll surely advance the software in the next few years. Even within solo lines over accompaniment, glissandi are harder to deal with as opposed to straight pitches.



Mashups have become wildly popular (and sadly illegal). Those who adhere to antiquated value systems don't think Girltalk is artistic. They say the software is meant for altering one's own recording, but this new program will inevitably make the complex mixing and editing that Girltalk does a lot easier, and will therefore explode the genre. It will make more disparate songs easier to mold together. If more people can do what he does, then he'll have to step it up. This is great for DJ culture. Now we can change chord progressions, add dissonance, or any number of other things to existing recordings instead of just juxtaposing unrelated songs. It could be a great way to comment on other artists. Maybe a mashup explosion will push people to reevaluate what they consider original in music and--way, way, down the road--when a giant consumer market presents itself that would outweigh profits from untouched originals, the legal system will adapt to what people want to pay to hear.

Celemony may have deliberately called this plugin Direct Note Access because of its acronym, DNA. Much like the discovery of smaller and smaller parts of our genetic code, this audio DNA is pulling out smaller and smaller parts of audio information, and altering it. In biology, a genetic mutation usually means a catastrophe, but in digital sound, it can be quite the opposite.

Usually, theories are theories, and often evade reality. I like Neubacker's reversal of this norm: "the more I pondered the subject [of DNA], the more I began to see that what doesn't work in theory can still work in reality." This post seems like an advertisement for this company. It's not. I'm just excited.