Poetics & Protocols of Sampling

May 12, 2026 Fall 2025

What's wrong with noise?

In the first week of Poetics and Protocols of Sampling, I laid out the intentions of the course: to propose a kind of 'expanded field' of musical sampling. One goal of the course being open to all who are interested in using sound as a medium (including poets, performance artists, DJs and video artists), was showing how the methods of audio sampling and the philosophies that have developed around it over the decades across many genres and cultures, have kin from genres outside of music and conversely may even be applied to mediums that are not music. Our class began with the acknowledgment that the first genre and culture that really embraced sampling was hip-hop, and various critics in the 1980s alleged that hip-hop and rap music was just noise, that it was barely musical, or lobbed other wayward, racist or classist insults towards it and its practitioners.

We asked ourselves: what’s wrong with noise? Whose criteria can be relied upon for distinguishing noise from music or other forms of sound, and is there a necessary value hierarchy to be placed on the various categories and sub-categories? If sampling is making music that includes sounds that were pre-recorded, or media that otherwise had other lives before their use in the given composition, we can also see the connection between sampling spirit and that of many sonic cultures that existed long before recorded media, where mimicry of animals, plants, weather and more had powerful roles in storytelling, ritual, celebration, and the many occasions where sound was made to mark a time and place socially.

I introduced free tools for audio editing, free online archives, and throughout, space was open for the participants to contribute as well. I also introduced methods of ripping audio from social media platforms (given how much audio material is distributed there, we can potentially consider this a contemporary site for 'digging in the crates'). Alongside that introduction were newer technologies of 'stem splitting' (breaking a musical recording down into its constituent parts based on which section of the audio frequency spectrum it resides in, so that one can extract and repurpose melodies, drums, bass lines, etc). 

Creating together and exchanging ways of understanding how to navigate the current media landscape was central to this class: I presented video clips, texts, tools, and sound and we based our discussions around it.

We also shared the ways in which we grappled with our moment in time through sound. The space of group critique was very important, not as a means of evaluation, but as an exercise in trying to gain understanding, and engaging closely with the projects and approaches of others as well as our own. I shared a text by Leslie Dick entitled “Soft Talk”, where she traces out a model for a specific kind of constructive criticism and community-building that she facilitated in her fine art classroom context. Finally, I introduced the first assignment: the sound collage.

Assignment: Sound Collage (90 seconds)

For this project, you will create a sound collage 60-90 seconds in length. The goal is to explore how sound can be layered, juxtaposed, and arranged to create meaning, mood, or even rhythm and musicality. Think of this as “audio collage” in the same way visual collage works—bringing together fragments from different sources into a new whole.

Requirements:

• Your final collage must be 60-90 seconds in duration.
• You may use Audacity (free software) or any other audio editing program you prefer.
• You must keep a folder of the original clips you use to build your collage. This should include all sound files before editing.
• The clips you choose may be recorded by you, found, or sampled, but be thoughtful about how they interact when layered together. Aim for shorter clips, no longer than 10 seconds max.

This assignment was a way to get people to dive right into playing with/working with/listening to/writing with sound fragments free from the restraint of having to make something recognizable as a song. The history of sound collage is rich as well, and with its own tropes and parameters, even if they may seem more loose than musical composition. Working in this way centers the process–how we choose to gather and use the materials, not what the final result is.

The first week, then, was an introduction to a wider potential understanding of sampling, which included ancient and precolonial practices, in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, all the way through the historical avant-garde in the global North and beyond.

Cold reading, close reading

The second week was an exercise in overlapping timelines, and the close cousins of conventional understandings of musical sampling: from tape manipulation, the cut-up technique, the Mellotron, and more. We looked at the 1977 NYC Blackout, early hip-hop music and DJ culture, Jamaican soundsystem culture, dubplates, and versioning, the difference between sampling and interpolation into the wider usage of samplers and sampling keyboards in the 1980s within pop media and underground club culture.

In the following week, Assistant Teacher M. Tucker and I facilitated the first group critique. We used a modified method borrowed from visual art critique: the ‘cold read.’ We encountered the pieces being presented without background context and tried to discuss its characteristics as descriptively as possible, avoiding the discussion of what elements we enjoyed or had a distaste for. The purpose of this is to encourage a kind of ‘close reading’ or deeper listening approach to the sounds, attempting to rigorously articulate things that make themselves apparent to us. As we all have different frames of reference and proclivities, different elements will appear at different times, and getting a sense of this is very useful to the maker, who often is in a relative bubble caused by the immersive nature of creation.

Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees, and having other hikers allows us to understand and appreciate all that is there which we may not have given thought to. This first assignment (sound collage) and the final assignment (self-directed project) were the only things that were critiqued, but our critical faculties were active throughout the course, as I asked students to consider the historical, legal, ethical, cultural, political, and philosophical implications of various forms of sampling over the past 70 years.

The next week, we took a look at excerpts of Copyright Criminals, Scratch, and Beat Diggin’, all of which chronicle different aspects of sampling for recording and performance by musicians of various genres, and backgrounds.

Is AI-generated music hypersampling?

During the 6th and 7th week, we started talking about a veritable boogieman of the contemporary moment: AI generated music. We looked at the 30+ year of generative ambient music, the invention of MIDI, and went all the way up to contemporary genres like vocaloid, the various models of vocal synthesis and AI generated audio and tools taken up by artists such as Brian Eno, Metro Boomin, Holly Herndon, and patten. We discussed the ethical implications of AI generated pop and rap and its support from major labels and particular streaming services. We discussed the following questions sparked by AI generated music: what is a sample and how far can it be atomized and still be considered as such? Is AI-generated music hypersampling? How does it overlap with or diverge from other forms of electronic and sample-based music?

This week was also the week prior to our special guest visitor Jessica Meiselman, a musician, writer, and lawyer specializing in intellectual property, with sampling being one of the topics of her expertise, so we collectively read a few of her texts published on music journalism platforms and discussed different parts of them in preparation for her visit. A mixture of synchronous and asynchronous approaches using text documents I wrote or selected, conversations on Discord, and conversations live over Zoom helped create the terrain on which we roamed. Jessica Meiselman talked about her work in the music industry, and the ways in which copyright infringement in visual culture is treated differently than with sonic material in the US legal system, and the ways that corporations and estates of well-known musicians are often responsible for creating precedents for what is a ‘fair use’, a grey area exploration, or illegal, touching on how these laws vary from country to country as well.

The showcase was a wonderful, wistful experience, and I took on a bit of a host role: giving introductions to each participant, sharing the students' work, and then giving the creator an opportunity to share a bit more about how their last weeks had culminated. Afterwards, we shared our emotions with one another, as it was our last gathering, and we closed a chapter and turned the page with the friendships, creative colleagues, and community we had built.

Sketching out a concept of an "expanded field" of sampling (to borrow a term from postmodern art historian and theorist Rosalind Krauss) is a way to consider the creation of sample-based music and sound art both on a continuum with and at times distinct from other collage-based practices. During the class, we traversed the history and the surrounding philosophies that encompassed the major changes in music production and consumption habits in the 40-50 years since the introduction of new tools and instruments such as audio production software, sample packs, and AI-generation tools. In this exploration, we realized that taking elements of what already exists, and creating new material from it, is crucial to disrupt totalizing and limiting notions of what is possible.

If we consider the internet as a place of cultural exchange as well as information exchange, these kinds of activities reveal themselves to be necessary, and sound is a great place to do it. For this reason, and many more, I was grateful for the opportunity to be a part of the Poetics and Protocols of Sampling at the School for Poetic Computation.