Currys Tech Talk has a fantastic little research project that produced an interactive tool called Music Samples Through Time. You know what sampling is, but unless you’re really into this stuff, you may not know how entangled all this stuff can get.
Things get particularly interesting when you explore music in the new millennium. Who doesn’t know “Toxic” by Britney Spears? The smash hit track is one of Spears’ best-remembered songs. Yet if you know what to listen out for, a cookie-cutter dance number is transformed into something much more layered, much more impressive.
The distinctive hook is lifted from a Bollywood track, “Good Sign, Bad Sign”. Go back to “Toxic” with this in mind and suddenly the Indian influences are hard to miss. It’s then that you discover that the writer of “Good Sign, Bad Sign” also helped compose the original 1962 James Bond theme song. By sampling a relatively unknown Bollywood track, “Toxic” unintentionally channels the spirit of Bond.
When you dig beneath the surface, there’s a story everywhere you look. With its disarmingly simple beat and catchy chorus, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” is hard to get out of your head. But did you know that the original hook upon which the song rests was originally in a folk tune, “Seville?”
Dozens of stories abound and Music Samples Through Time, an initiative between Currys PC World and the Bose SoundLink Micro Bluetooth speaker, explores these stories in greater depth. Tracing sampling’s roots, its rise and its highlights, the campaign serves to illustrate just how widespread the practice is.
Sampling music – the art of taking a song, cutting it up, and weaving its threads through a new track – is common practice in modern music. But it’s by no means new. In fact, the artform goes back more than one hundred years.
Get a better feel for this history by examining the graph on the home page. The graph illustrates the number of tracks that have used samples – and been sampled – since 1910.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
