question about electronic music

if we use samples from the internet for our piece, will it be our own music?

or if we use downloaded effects like 'wind-effect', will it be our own work?

freesound :: view sample :: wind.ogg

im looking forward your answers and opinions

Gollam12,

It sounds to me like you're working on a concr

I'm working on a sonata for cello and tape. I have only two (hard) cello piece, although i'm a cellist.. so now (i mean in a year) i'll do a third one.

Why cello and tape?

Especially if the tape is just wind sounds, which can easily be mimicked by the cello.

of course not just wind sounds.. :D it was just an example. i know all the effects and extended techniques on the cello, you can be sure :P

there will be different space-effects, buzzings, and i-dont-know-whats, i will see.

and i started a cello+piano piece too, but i won't have a pianist from september, so that i wont be able to play that :) (of course there are pianists, but they dont really know contemporary music well, and my half-dissonant of dissonant pieces are hard to understand without experience.

Gotcha.

Is this your first work with electronics? Be careful about collecting tons of sounds. You may think "gee I have so many sounds, this will be so simple", but you'll end up thinking to yourself "oh man, what am I going to do with all of this?" Typically when I work with found sounds I tend to use 1 sound source. Maybe 5 at the max. I find that this fosters much more creativity.

Sure Cage's "Williams Mix" uses what 600+ samples? And "Rozart Mix" uses around 100. And "Poeme electronique" uses tons of samples. And I'm sure we could name thousands of other works. But to be honest, aside from "Williams Mix", I find those works to be just an overload of sounds with not much else behind the music. I find electronic works to be more interesting when the composer actually manipulates fewer sounds.

of course :) thanks

I guess it all comes down to how you treat those samples. If it's about a careful exploration of the properties of certain sounds, you might be better off not overloading the piece with too much material. If your work however focuses on huge soundmasses, where the individual sounds don't even matter so much, working with a ton of samples might be the most logical thing. For the only piece I wrote that is entirely based on recorded sounds, I recorded hundreds of them and used them in a matter, where the individual sounds pretty much are indecipherable in the first place, and it's more about how these fragments combine to form new sonic objects. But that's just an example. I'm sure there are tons of valid reasons to use a shitload of sounds for a certain piece, as well as to restrict yourself to just one or a few.

I personally also can't really agree on the assessment of "po

I personally also can't really agree on the assessment of "po

Just some general stuff:

Of course it's your work.

With freesound, remember that it's a CC license, which means you do have to give credit. (Technically. I don't.)

As to huge numbers of soundfiles -- I'd say either way works. I think you can do a lot with just a 3-second clip of sound, but I'd argue you need more sounds than that for an effective piece. This isn't 1960, computers can run so much more than people like Varese or Robert Ashley or Gordon Mumma could ever dream of. You're also not working with tape (unless you are?), so your work-time is cut severely.

One final quick point: use your plug-ins (VSTs, AUs, RTASs, whatever). Play with the sounds, don't just use them.

of course but cello+tape sounds better than cello+.wav :)

thank you all

Sound libraries provide a lot of standard samples that are not unique art. Anybody can record a car horn or wind or glass breaking or a sneeze. It's what you do these samples that makes music.

It's almost like asking, I've used other people's scales and triads. Is that plagiarism?

On the other hand... if someone captures a cool sound in an interesting way that might be proprietary.

I'm not saying that Varese just piles sounds upon sounds upon sounds or anything like that (which seems to be what you think I'm saying), and I would hope that ANY piece uses its materials carefully throughout. However, his use of all the samples sounds more to me like "hey, check out this, now check out this". Many thought out pieces are written that exploit extended techniques, however, with the exception of Lachenmann, they tend to be more about how clever the composer is. That's what I get from "Po