Olympic Sampling
I’m not big on television. As a matter of fact, about the only screen time I get is when I’m captive in a hotel room on family trips. As I’m now headed home after twelve days in Scotland, there one TV image that keeps coming back… a Samsung cellphone commercial where a DJ captures the sound of different sporting events, loads them in a beat box and loops them, making a very cool groove with these “found” sounds. See below:
At the beginning of the twentieth century a composer named Luigi Russolo authored a manifesto called The Art of Noises, where he called for a new pallet of sounds for music that would reflect a more modern time. The early 20th century way of pulling this off was to bring bells, sirens, and motorized gadgets on stage with an orchestra –check out George Antheil’s Ballet Mecanique. While this served as the inspiration for a minor musical movement in the 1920’s, the whole idea soon faded away. That is until samplers came along in the 1980’s. Once the sample genie was let out of the bottle, everyone from rappers to synth poppers made music out of any sound you could imagine.
So what makes this Samsung commercial so compelling to me? It’s really remarkable that an idea that was so radical in the last century can now be put front and center before a prime-time, mass market audience on mainstream TV. The idea that you can grab just about any sound, loop it and make music may be familiar to electronic musicians, but putting in front of the summer’s biggest ad market is pretty darn cool.
Has anyone else seen this?
