13 posts tagged “remix”

In celebration of the Supreme Court of California's recent ruling.

Assume for the sake of this post that ART means "audio reversed in time", i.e. any audio clip played (and saved) backward. This is an invertibly lossless transform.

Consider this mix, track times approximate:
00:00 -00.00 ART version of: "Barber - Adagio for Strings - Bernstein and L.A. Philharmonic "
02:00 -00.00 "William Orbit - Barber Adagio for Strings Techno Remix"

This mix goes from strangely familiar mourning straight to techno, and in between a short eight bars where you get the original theme. Were it not an overplayed piece you could insert the original (non-ART version) in the middle and go in and out of techno and/or the ART version.

ART tracks are more appropriately named by using the original name, with all the letters back to front, i.e. "cinomrahlihP .A.L dna nietsnreB - sgnirtS rof oigadA - rebraB".

Note that the reversed name is unique for all uniquely named tracks, and the capitalization is a hard-to-miss clue. Note also lack of misrepresentation and improper taking of credit where none is due. Also, no need to define a new abbreviation for this transform, which can be very confusing:

Another favorite example of this technique is the mix:
00:00 -00:00 "nialecroP - yboM"
00:00 -00:00 "Moby - Porcelain"

This is a pure "audio-palindrome" if you will; the ART version is undeniably musical and listenable. Key points: start with the ART version of a very familiar ART-friendly track, followed by the original track.

The question of applicability of Copyright law to ART-transformed tracks is an open one. It is quite complex, and assuming copyright did apply automatically, what of an ART-transformed sample? It seems unfair to think that ART-transformed tracks would be automatically limited, as they are NOT the same as the original at all. There is also a good bit of skill in knowing beforehand what tracks will sound like reversed, but of course this is a type of "recombination" art form, much as collage and remixing are.

A term I coined for unreversed backwards speech (* see below) is "Lynchified" with an abbreviation of single capital "L", but that does not really describe this transform: all [non-live] audio is ART-ible but only spoken or sung words are "Lynchifiable", furthermore "Lynchifying" begins at the time you make a recording, and cannot be applied after the fact since the vocalist must use phoneme-reversed words. And, ART reverses the entire track whereas "Lynchification" is the un-phoneme-reversal of many single words, but preserving the order of the words.

Related tidbits about reversal of glyphs, letters, phonemes, words, speech and audio:

• Phoneme reversal (phoneme-reversed words, or PRW): "it is not" becomes "tih zih tahn"
• Letter-reversal of text (letters reversed in time, or LRT): "it is not" becomes "ton si ti"
• Reversed letters (letter-reversed words, or LRW): "it is not" becomes "ti si ton"
• Word-reversal of text (words reversed in time, or WRT) "it is not" becomes "not is it"
• PRW, WRT, and ART together give you Lynchified speech. (Note: WRT and ART together restore word order)
• Reversed letter glyphs (flip single letters graphically on the X axis, or LRX): "p becomes q becomes p, b becomes d becomes b, z becomes s-like, s becomes z-like"
• "X-mirror" transform is related, allows you to make an "ambulance" sign readable in a rear-view mirror (hint: LRT with LRX)

Exercise left for the reader: Explain why one can't use ART transform with live audio, or LRT transform with live text/speech

[* Note: David Lynch invented the technique as far as I'm aware, used very effectively in Twin Peaks]

Related post: Lane Hartwell & The Richter Scales
Related link: Thomas Hawk: More Crappy Censorship From Your Friends at Yahoo!

Dear Mr. Lessig,

Thank you for your reply a long while ago regarding my frustration over wikipedia photos! Now, let me try another tack in light of recent events. Apologies for the length.

Could it be made legal to... expand and merge clear fair use, quotation, transformative use, allowable "under the limit" use with "damaged" use:

• lo-fi audio (unpleasant, noisy, covered by other sound, tinny, bassy)
• lo-fi speech (almost or partly incomprehensible)
• lo-fi image (important detail missing, no color, no color fidelity, small part of image)
• lo-fi text (tiny, unreadable)
• lo-fi video (fuzzy, tiny, misshapen, jerky, lower frame rates)

If the use is clearly not fair use, or not agreed to:
the less "fair" the use is, the more you have to degrade the thing you are using, so it is absolutely undeniable that you are using the work because you must, but not stealing the thing.

In Hartwell v. Richter, let's assume there is only one photo of the subject, and no permission (but at least some sort of access.) Then, you have a painter or illustrator work from the photo, creating a new independent work. That may not always be possible, affordable, practical, scalable.

But, let's assume you are willing to torture the thing you want to use without permission.
Why can I not take the photo, print it on poor paper, get it wet, step on it, leave it in the sun, then scan it at poor fidelity, so that I have an indisputably inferior derivative "copy." Can I not use that, without permission?

My point here is that I think it would be a huge help if we could say that there is always more abuse, more squashing, more scratches, more dust, more noise, more distance, you can apply until you reach the point where a claim of infringement is so ridiculous as to make even the most aggressive lawyers blush. It becomes "fair use" because it's no longer aesthetically intact.

Take the Richter video into an editor, identify the Hartwell content, apply some censorware to the video, so that you see it strobe, or reverse, visually, so you see the censor marks but also sort of see underneath. Anyway, Ms. Hartwell might welcome a reversal of the take-down, and perhaps they could try to discuss compromise. Perhaps everyone wants to see it now. Perhaps its not as good as all that.  But, a single challenge should not mean sudden death and amnesia (take down and forget.)

Maybe people will realize satire and parody have the easy legal argument, and in fact have to be very close to the original to have that protection. 

Disney, Warner Bros., now with many decades of paid-for mythology that we'll be paying to see again on the screen or in the park. And, don't use Mickey or Bugs, or they will sue you, but they will use them promiscuously and greedily.

Perhaps social pressure will make people stop enforcing copyright when the real goal is to silence others and maintain a monopoly. A runaway success in remix culture may get clout and cash and permit creation of hi-fi derivative works.

Or, we can do nothing and wait for the corporate singularity (I'm trademarking that right now) to occur. That's when for obvious reasons different conglomerates merge geographically, so that entire states are serviced by one phone company multi-monopoly, one content provider, one retailer, et cetera.

We need to prevent the "owners name their own prices, at the last possible moment" bargaining, and try to force a uniform sane fee for a tortured derivative work, so you can retreat enough to be safe, then go forward. Each case should not be another fight to the finish over claims of infringement that call for death and amnesia. (and never offer reasonable licensing terms)

Their properties are not hated, people hate the way they are used like a bludgeon... And if they could just relinquish some control and see what develops.

Am I living in a fantasy to think this could be possible?

The kind Mr. Lessig responded:

From a practical perspective, it is a great solution. From a legal perspective, it is weaker, since copyright protects a "work" and not any particular copy of it. In some contexts, I agree this would be a great solution.

Coldcut Site
Coldcut on Google
Coldcut on Wikipedia

Quoting Wikipedia:

Coldcut first came together in the autumn of 1986. Computer programmer Matt Black carried a tape recording that featured the inception of "Say Kids, What Time Is It?", a track he had made for a Capital Radio mix competition, browsed in the Reckless Records store on Berwick Street, in London. Ex-Art teacher Jonathan More, who worked in the store at the time, listened to the mix, suggesting a separate edit be made of the Jungle Book's "King of the Swingers" - Black had mixed this with the break from James Browns "Funky Drummer". Using his contacts from his Meltdown Show on Kiss FM and his club night, in January 1987 this mix was released on a white label and "Say Kids, What Time Is It?" became their first single.

Later that year, spurred on by an enthusiastic rep from Island Records, they released their influential remix of Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full," which made the top 20 and was voted best remix of the year. Featuring a prominent Ofra Haza sample and many other vocal cut ups, it is now regarded as both a hip hop classic and a breakthrough in the remix field. The looped rhythm at the heart of the remix can be seen as an early precursor to the Breakbeats genre (one has merely to speed it up to note the similarity). The tracks "Beats and Pieces" and "That Greedy Beat" were soon to follow on the duo's self-run "Ahead Of Our Time" label (a forced acronym results in "AHOOT", and the duo wittily catalogued one release as "AHOT 14U"). All of these tracks were made by the painstaking assembly of spliced tape edits that would sometimes run "all over the room". The duo showed originality and resourcefulness by sampling Led Zeppelin as well as James Brown.

In 1987 Matt Black joined KissFM with his own mixed based show, the pair eventually joining forces, More and Black produced their own radio show, Coldcut Solid Steel.

Their first major hit as Coldcut was the top 10 hit "Doctorin' The House" in 1988, featuring singer Yazz. In the same year, under the guise "Yazz featuring The Plastic Population", they released "The Only Way Is Up", a cover of a Northern Soul gem which brought the song into the House Music era. The record reached no.1 in the UK charts, and the success of this funded more studio equipment for the duo. Their other most well-known hit single was the UK top 20 hit "People Hold On", released in March the following year. It featured singer Lisa Stansfield, whose band Blue Zone UK had been creating a mild buzz with the single "Jackie", and whose charismatic video presence was getting noticed within the industry. She would go on to have a UK chart number one in her own right later that same year, with "All Around the World". Prior to that major hit, Coldcut and Mark Saunders had produced the single "This Is the Right Time", which appears on her debut album "Affection".

The subsequent 1989 album "What's That Noise", released on Ahead of Our Time and distributed by Big Life records, featured reggae vocalist Junior Reid, the fictional George Jetson (on the single "Stop This Crazy Thing") and Mark E Smith. The United States version was distributed by Tommy Boy Records and featured Tommy Boy artist Queen Latifah rapping over the (previously instrumental) track "Smoke This One". Latifah's rap was decidedly anti-drug, while Coldcut's reggae dub-ish instrumental had tongue-in-cheek connotations of marijuana appreciation by virtue of its title.^{[citation needed]} Its UK follow-up, "Some Like It Cold" released in 1990, also featured a collaboration with Queen Latifah.

In 1991, whilst touring Japan, they conceived and started their second record label, Ninja Tune, which continues to release diverse music by a small army of like-minded artists. In 1997 the duo unveiled their own real-time video manipulation software, VJamm. Coldcut's current live and DJ sets rely on video as much as records, taking the concept of multimedia performance into largely uncharted territory.

Conceptually, Coldcut owes as much to the ideas of beat writer and cut-up theorist William S. Burroughs, 1970s art / industrial group Throbbing Gristle, and the religious writings of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs as they do to Hip Hop originators like Grandmaster Flash or later innovators Double Dee and Steinski.

Recognizing the power inherent in Burroughs' cut-up technique and its presence in hip hop music, Moore and Black have relentlessly pushed the D.I.Y. ethic and an understanding of play as a means of fostering greater interaction with and understanding of the world. The similarities between this ethos and that of hacking need hardly be stated. Ninja Tune uses a corporate facade to communicate via the marketplace itself, an idea first implemented by Throbbing Gristle via their own Industrial Records imprint.

One of the key aspects of the Ninja Tune ethos, Stealth, implies that their following of DJs and listeners are "agents" in a Burroughsian sense, propagating the D.I.Y. ethic of play as an essentially subversive act by replaying and manipulating media under the radar of mainstream culture. In 2003, Black worked with Penny Rimbaud (ex Crass) on Crass Agenda's Savage Utopia project. In 2006, Coldcut released the album Sound Mirrors which has helped build up a massive underground audience thanks to the popularity of the single True Skool. The song itself features an Indian sample from a cult Bollywood era making the track incredibly popular on the bhangra and desi scene and with much of British Asian urban culture.

In 2008, Coldcut remixed ourselves, a #1-hit song by Japanese popstar Ayumi Hamasaki. This mix was included on the album Ayu-mi-x -GOLD-, which gave Coldcut a big increase in worldwide popularity.

Molly Wood, who people may know from CNet's Buzz Out Loud, just started up a blog on an important topic:

The Culture of Ownership (dot org)

Hey Molly, I've been enjoying your BOL stuff for a while now, and I just wanted to drop by and say hello.

I also am interested in questions of ownership and its adverse effects -- as you can see by this comment I left for a fellow blogger (on making a painting from a photo.)

I've been following Lessig for years now, and I've learned enough to know the current mess is certainly unprecedented and definitely bad for the people and the culture.  Other than that, everything is up for debate.

Remember, sound recordings were going to ruin songwriting (sheet music).  VCRs were going to ruin TV.  Cable TV was a pirate operation initially.  Referencing established master works was once the norm. The first printing press owners did not pay or get permission from authors.

Copyright and patent law was meant to protect the creator's financial interest for a few (15?) years only.  Mickey Mouse was derivative of Steamboat Willie. All but Disney himself are work-for-hire. Now, it is the Mouse who is in control.

Musicians who do "covers", DJs who make mixes should be "work for hire" too.  Points (royalty) can be awarded for big success, or in lieu of cash.

But, punitive damages, the courts, and the behavior of the Media Megalopolies has turned the entire thing on it's head, and made greed and fear the primary motivators in the creative arts.

A sorry state of affairs, indeed.

(Hey I'm going to re-post this on my blog and point to yours Ok? ok)

-Richard