starting at the end

I am almost done with the written portion of my thesis, I thought I would share a draft of a conclusion of my paper as it has information on further directions I would like to go in my research:

In This is Your Brain on Music, professor and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin suggests that the desire to engage in collective music making may be an evolutionary response to support social bonding. Mashup artists may be working with computers with powerful processing power, but what they seem to value most is contributing to a community. Though the tools to create are constantly evolving, we still have the same impetus to create and share. Remix culture is an important area of study as it emphasizes sharing over our networked culture. Mashups are a prevalent example of those remix culture and serve as markers for this connection.

The study of mashup culture still has a long way to go. Production techniques are under documented. Individual mashup artists are rarely interviewed unless they have some sort of mainstream success. The learning process that accompanies mashup creation has not yet been fully documented. Rather, we assume its presence as finished mashups often exhibit a high sophistication of technical literacy. Many mashup tutorial sites exist yet there is no academic documentation on their effect on remix culture or their efficacy. We do not know yet if there is a dominant creative pedagogy. It has not yet been established if there is a typical music mashup artist. A wider net must be first cast to establish this.

Personal areas of interest for future research include investigating cross-cultural music mashup works such as Brazil's tecno brega. Tecno brega often combines hits from the United States or Europe with locally produced Brazilian percussion. Ideally, some some tecno brega artists could be interviewed in person and observed performing as most of these works are geared towards live performance at large outdoor dance parties.

Mashups of visual culture are also an area of interest. Mashups are often compared to collage. Many contemporary artists have engaged in this kind of work. The artist Wangechi Mutu is of particular interest as she appropriates a diverse array of imagery – from clippings from fashion magazines to images from medical textbooks. These images are then incorporated into new forms, often of a figural nature.

New media artists known as video jockeys or VJs are another interesting area to possibly research. VJs improvise with visual information in much of the same way mashup artists can improvise with songs. VJs are firmly entrenched in remix culture. Most appropriate found footage to create new interactions and meanings. They also seem to largely define themselves as self-taught.

beginning

From 1960s Jamaican dance hall culture to today's contemporary plunderphonics music has relied on the sample. Sampling is the act of taking a portion of an existing piece of music and using it within a new piece of music. Sampling crosses all genres of music. Sampling has also been an area of contention from a legal perspective.

I would like to do more research on sampling culture. This would include interviews with music experts and the creation of both analog and digital samples. This research would culminate in a performance where I present a piece chronicling the history of the sample from its early roots to the now established culture.