Plunderphonics..... my thoughts,

While the essay may seem a little convoluted with the 2 billion comas, I was very impressed by the topics.

What is considered "illegal" and "legal"? What should be considered "copywriting" or stealing someone's creative genius? I felt like the whole essay was coming down to the conclusion that all of "sound" and what is "Music" is built on it self, making the idea of "copywriting" almost non existent. One example that he used (or eluded to) was the idea of the piano. The piano has 88 keys. Who owns those sounds? Is it the manufacturer of the original piano and thus any sound/ song produced from it would be copywriting/ stealing his sound? Essentially, the piano gives us 88 tones, specific in timbre, shape, dynamic etc. So in essence, if a person uses a combination of those 88 keys (in what ever fashion) to create a song/ melody, that would be stealing the sounds of Bartolommeo Cristofori, the creator of the piano. (1655-1731). Essentially this is the same as a person sampling a few sounds or parts from a Kanye West sound and putting them together in their own creation. They are taking the sound that Kanye has created (think of the different parts of the song as the 88 keys on the piano), and have made their own creation. Yet society today tells us that this is illegal.

I can relate to this argument and theory and see the validity in the point. To me, what I took away from this essay was the fact that plundering sounds (plunderphonics) isn't simply a black and white issue, there is a lot of middle grey. The only counter argument I would have would be to reference writing literature. Essentially you can relate the alphabet to the 88 keys of the piano and say that anything written from the alphabet is illegally copywriting the original works of the alphabet creator. I know this is far fetched seeing as the meaning of those letters only comes from the integration of them into words, where as the musical notes can stand alone and still create a musical understanding, but you get the idea I am hinting at.

Again, I think this discussion/ argument is very interesting and one that goes far beyond the polarized black and white.

-Tim