Sound collage

A sound collage is a sound document that results from a compilation of fragments or samples of underlying pieces of music and recordings. Similar to the related visual genre of collage , new effects can develop that are not yet contained in the individual components, even if they are recognizable as a whole.

Sound collages became technically feasible with the increasing spread of magnetic tape in the early 1960s. Recording technicians soon saw the possibility of cutting tapes with razor blades , re-arranging them, and incorporating additional sources. A short time later, the first musicians took on this process: Iannis Xenakis is considered the first well-known composer to work with sound collages, other pioneers are John Cage , Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs . The best known early examples in pop music are found in the music of the Beatles . For the piece Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! on the 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , their producer George Martin dismantled the recording of a carousel and reassembled the fragments in random order. Under the influence of his partner at the time, the Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono , John Lennon put together an eight-minute sound collage of noises and voices, which was published in 1968 under the name Revolution No. 9 was released on the album The Beatles .

In the 1980s and 1990s, two well-known copyright proceedings influenced the public perception of the term: In addition to the Canadian Recording Association, which sued John Oswald after the publication of the collage work Plunderphonics , the record company Island Records took legal action against the band Negativland , which produced a single called U2 with samples of the rock band of the same name .

The growing popularity of the rap and house music styles in the 1990s, which made sampling and thus the idea of ​​sound collages a stylistic device, encouraged interest in sound collages.