A Glimpse Into the Journey
It is not lost on me that in my attempts to immerse myself with the textual terms assemblage and remix I myself was using assemblage to build upon discoveries I had already made and then remix them into new ideas. My work this semester has all been connected; you could call each individual project a sequel of the previous one, creating one semester-long anthology. This highlight page takes you through the most interconnected parts of each project to create a sort of "timeline" showcasing the journey to understand the multiplicities of assemblage and remix.
Reinventing
Kathleen Blake Yancey and Stephen J. McElroy, define and provide examples for the concept of assemblage across different disciplines, including art; critical theory; and rhetoric and composition; in the introductory chapter of their book Assembling Composition. “Assemblage refers to and sanctions the makingness that textuality affords and its use, reuse, and repurposing of materials, especially chunks of text, in order to make something new.” (Yancey, McElroy 4). This introductory chapter is a solid starting point to complicate the definition of assemblage and how it varies across different contextual settings, while simultaneously keeping with the interest of “media, combinations, and contexts.” (Yancey, McElroy 16). Yancey and McElroy later provide a quote from a MoMA press release about The Art of Assemblage exhibit, which featured works made up of clippings and pieces of material, reassembled into something new.
Recreating
Lawrence Lessig also takes an interesting approach to the creation of something new based on an existing source. In his work, The Social Media Reader, he uses the example of “The Superman” dance created by Soulja Boy and popularized across Youtube; the catchy sound and lyrical instructions on how to do the dance inspired thousands of people to record their own dancing videos and share them across the web. Lessig calls these forms of reproduction “conversations between young people from around the world.” (Lessig 159). However, he later explains that the issue with these sorts of “conversations” is, “that the laws governing quoting in these new forms of expression are radically different from the norms that govern quoting from text. In this new form of expression that has swept through online communities that use digital technology, permission is expected first.” (Lessig, 160). He goes on to describe the sort of “hybrid economy” we live in now, that tries to use outdated production/use principles to govern the modern, ever changing spread of digital media.
Voices of Authority
Copyright
"How do I get permission to use somebody else's work? You can ask for it. If you know who the copyright owner is, you may contact the owner directly. If you are not certain about the ownership or have other related questions, you may wish to request that the Copyright Office conduct a search of its records or you may search yourself."
"How much do I have to change in order to claim copyright in someone else's work? Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. Accordingly, you cannot claim copyright to another's work, no matter how much you change it, unless you have the owner's consent."
Via Copyright.Gov "Can I Use Someone Else's Work? Can Someone Else Use Mine?" FAQs.
After complicating my understanding of assemblage and remix as general ideas, I focused my angle in on the ways in which they manifest themselves into the world of music, transcending genre and time. Although our invention-creation-discovery process was supposed to be laid out in the order of the three main projects (Annotated Bibliography, Term-Based Visual, Text in Action Webtext), I actually flipped the order I worked in, finding it more generative to first seek out examples of how assemblage and remix already exist in the musical sphere before then creating my own visualization of it. (In other terms, I showed up to the Term-Based Visual workshop with my nearly finished project, and midway through I had the jaw-dropping realization that I had accidentally followed the parameters of the Text In Action project instead. Although it was quite literally the most terrible timing ever to decide you need to start over the class before something is due, this mistake was probably the best one I could have made for my enrichment with my terms.)
I compiled a Youtube playlist with a variety of songs (contemporary and modern) that showcased my terms in action. The rationale I wrote alongside the playlist explained why each example was selected and organized them into categories: Conventional Use of Samples, Controversial Samples (If the Artist Would Admit to It), Covers: Just How Transformative are They?, Slowed + Reverb, Official Remixes, and Unconventional Use of Samples.
Since I had narrowed in on music pretty early on in the discovery journey, it was important to me to look at the terms through as many lenses as possible within music itself. One of the examples that showcased conventional sampling were the two songs “Shooting Stars” by the Bag Raiders, and “Got Me Started” by Troye Sivan, which samples “Shooting Stars.”
"Shooting Stars" has turned into sort of a meme on the internet over the years and has been sampled many times. But, Troye Sivan was actually the first artist that the Bag Raiders ever granted permission to to use their song as a sample. Every other time “Shooting Stars” has been sampled or remixed was not permitted and infringed on the copyright holder.
-Timestamp for "Shooting Stars: 0:22
-Timestamp for "Got Me Started": 1:00 (0:45-1:15 to see how sample is incorporated into song)
The Lenses
"Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports. There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work. Whether a particular use qualifies as fair use depends on all the circumstances."
Via Copyright.Gov "Can I Use Someone Else's Work? Can Someone Else Use Mine?" FAQs.
Fair Use
Permissions and Exceptions
"Use of works protected by copyright in your dissertation or thesis will need either permission or a fair use justification. Fair use is an exception to the copyright holder's exclusive rights. In order to use copyrighted works under a claim of fair use, the following factors must be weighed: (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."
"Fair use provides an indispensable opportunity for scholarship, since so much of research involves building upon the insights of others."
Via Florida State University Libraries Copyright Resources for Students.
So What?
It was important now to take all of my newfound knowledge on the rules/limitations of reassembling existing copyrighted works and the breadth of examples that showcase these happenings in real-world media and actually DO something with it. Because, anyone can sit there and talk about how much they understand a concept, but without actually applying it to something new, it can come off as just being a load of bologna!
I created my own song in GarageBand, combining the use of samples, original instrumentals, and manipulation of GarageBand’s preset drum kits. The three tack sections in blue are samples from the Bag Raiders’s “Shooting Stars.” I manipulated elements such as ambience, reverb, EQ (equalization), frequency, and cut to distort the sample from its original sound. The five track sections in green are original software instrumentals I created using the “musical typing” feature. My instrumentals include a combination of different drum styles and keyboard styles. The two track sections in yellow are GarageBand preset drum kits from the “Electronic” and “Rock” genre packs. GarageBand allows users to customize the presets by either dragging a dial to make the sound softer, louder, more complex, or simpler, or by manually adding drum set elements such as kick, hi-hat, toms, and more.
© Brooke Singer