디지털시대의 새로운 창작문화

A New Culture of Creation in the Digital Age: On Sampling Technology and Its Artistic Identity

This study is to investigate ‘sampling’ technology as a new culture of creation in this digital age, and to advocate its artistic identity. With those aims, this thesis introduces ‘digital sampling technology’ along with traces of culture/art/music concerned, and then attempts to relate it with (post)modern aesthetic concepts such as pastiche, hypertext, technological reproduction, the aura, simulacre, etc. While the concepts concerned visual arts and literature most, these are also relevant here in the new way of music making in 0’s and 1’s. Digital sampling is a type of computer synthesis in which sound is rendered into data, highly manipulable data that in turn comprise instruction for reconstructing that sound. The range of music material from which composers draw is vast, including speech and environmental sounds, as well as live and recorded music; the practice raises difficult questions about every aspect of composition, from aesthetics to ethics, even to law. Now the legal or ethical criteria for judging quotation or plagiarism seem relatively well established, and so sampling can clear itself of suspicion when done right. Sampling still tends to be criticized as basically uncreative because of the way of musical borrowing. Too often discussions of sampling treat the practice simply as technological quotation. Sampling, however, is most fundamentally an art of transformation. A sample changes the moment it is relocated. The sampled sounds are really only raw materials, waiting to be minded and refined. The sampling technology at once “decontextualizes and recontextualizes” prerecorded sound, giving it a new functions and meanings while sustaining unity. How can we underestimate this art of “fragmentary reproduction”? Some say modern art works are poor in contents and rich in philosophy, but sometimes aesthetics or art philosophy supporting the way of creation can be employed in order to narrow a distance between the work’s form and its interpretation. That is the reason this study is carried out.