This piece has been much more sample-driven than any I have made before (with the potential exception of the one I made for Specialising and Exhibiting Element 2 last year), and it’s made me develop a weird sort of imposter syndrome. I’m generally used to generating my own sounds that I use in pieces, and while I have used samples quite a few times in the past, I haven’t relied on sound library sites such as Freesound to the extent I have in this piece. I sourced all the celebrity gossip articles myself and did my own processing on them, and I also generated the gloomy soundscape the piece starts off with. The only elements I used Freesound for were for the samples of oil rigs and war. This is because I don’t really have a realistic way of recording these sounds. I could try to recreate them through foley however I don’t think I’d achieve the same effect and it’s also not my strongest skill, I would probably have to collaborate with someone on it.

At times I felt a bit lazy using Freesound as I felt that I should be making the sounds myself, however I think the use of sound libraries is acceptable and doesn’t harm your artistic integrity when they are genuinely sounds you wouldn’t be able to produce otherwise and you use them in a creative way with other elements to create a wider piece. I feel that I have tried to use these sounds creatively and still added quite a bit of processing to them so they are not the exact sounds that I downloaded.

There are also whole genres such as plunderphonics that rely on using samples to create something new, and I don’t believe it’s controversial to say that artists in these genres are creating something entirely new from what they have already found, and they have the same level of integrity as any other producer. I think because my background before coming onto this course was in playing musical instruments, I didn’t have any experience with sampling so sometimes it can feel a little counterintuitive for me as I’m still, somewhere in my subconscious, used to playing and composing on an instrument rather than gathering lots of materials to make something new. However I’m really happy that I’ve developed skills in using and manipulating samples to effectively tell a story.