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Sample Based Music Plagiarism Essay

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I intend to look into the ethics of sample based music and music plagiarism in the use of making music and the benefits of sampling music or borrowing from other artists to help generate a creative spark. Some may also argue that the quality of the music may have suffered due to this, this maybe true but is it only a problem that lies within sample-based music or has music on the whole suffered?.
“Musical borrowing is a pervasive aspect of musical creation in all Genres and all periods.
(J.C. Bach to Hip Hop: Musical Borrowing, Copyright and Cultural Context Olufunmilayo B. Arewa”

Intro
I don’t think anybody steals anything; all of us just borrow, (BB King) The words of the multi talented, guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer and …show more content…

This revolution in music education also allowed
Improving in the research of new ways of transmitting musical knowledge.
However, today, music education has to adapt to a dynamic and diverse social context and, therefore, prescriptive
Educational guidelines that will succeed in every reality cannot be proposed. The need to adapt to the particular context is therefore increased, and music education must therefore evolve Music making: A bridge joint of students’ cultural and musical
Diversity’.
Alberto Cabedo Mas a 1, Maravillas Díaz Gómez b.
Which in todays context and music you could translate as to clasp all technology that is around you, to embrace sampling or loop manipulation and the usage of other people’s ideas and build upon those if they give you inspiration as we have the tools to do so. If somebody samples a 1 bar loop but makes a whole new composition from that loop is that any worse then any of the great classical composers of the past who have based some of their most popular work on other peoples ideas? In the world of classical music it was widely excepted it was about “mastered technique” as opposed to original compositions. Music making has evolved and the times are exciting with the technology we have at hand to make music. Zed Adams noted in reference to sampling in relationship to copying in this quote from Gracyk on the dominant views of sampling: …show more content…

The vast storehouse of existing public domain music means that many of those choices have been exhausted (Margit Livingston* and Joseph Urbinato** p227)

We also add to the mix that there are only so many notes in a scale, so many chords and progressions in a sequence so with that added fact there is sometimes going to be similarities when writing new western music compositions. Our brains seems to have been predominantly hard wired to 4x4 beats with the standard i-iv-v-vi chord progressions with repetitive melodies and bass lines and a verse chorus verse arrangement so no mater what genre of western music you are writing most will be based around this kind of formula resulting in similarities sometimes whether intentionally or not.

In conclusion id say that you can never get away from Musical plagiarism, it has always been there and will continue to be there, sampling is just another form of creating music and where as there are still a lot of issue surrounding sample clearance and it being a very murky area still I think it has its positives far out weigh the negatives in relationships of the creative practice, getting ideas down and developing as a musician. In terms of the musical quality suffering I would say that this is more of a problem with traditional music i.e. music played with conventional instruments and happens more than people actually admit in my

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