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Article: Airshafts, loudspeakers, and the hip hop sample: contexts and African American musical aesthetics.
- Article from:
- African American Review
- Article date:
- December 22, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 African American Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The art of digital sampling in (primarily) African American hip hop is intricately connected to an African American/African diasporic aesthetic which carefully selects available media, texts, and contexts for performative use. Thomas Porcello explains that digital sampling allows one
to encode a fragment of sound, from one to several seconds in duration, in a digitised binary form which can then be stored in computer memory. This stored sound may be played back through a keyboard, with its pitch and tonal qualities accurately reproduced or, as is often the case, manipulated through electronic editing. (69)
And Porcello concludes, perhaps rightly, but in any ...