Wednesday, December 20, 2006

During my two-year tenure as an in-house sound designer for Native Instruments in Berlin, I got to work on a lot of really cool projects. The one that I was probably the most proud of, however, was a bank of sounds for "Akkord", one of the instruments in the Electronic Instruments Vol. 2 collection of Reaktor ensembles. What was nice about this instrument is that it combined a really excellent synthesizer with a very innovative step sequencer. My patches ended up being a couple dozen combinations - that is, I programmed the synth, and then wrote a short step sequencer pattern that would demonstrate a possible usage of that synth sound.
It's understood that all of the library sounds that ship with NI projects are free for artists to use as they wish - they can be used completely without modification in commercial releases if desired. And this is technically true for Reaktor ensembles as well, which (as in the case of Akkord) can also include sequences of actual music. But I never thought I'd ever hear anyone actually use one, without modification, in a finished track.
While browsing Beatport just now, I came across a track by a fairly well-known artist on a fairly well-known label that uses one of my Akkord patches, with the addition of some drums, as an entire track. I'm not angry about this - after all, my sound design work doesn't entitle me to any sort of artistic control over how the sounds are used, and this artist is certainly allowed to do what they've done. But I do think it's a more than a little weird. This is an artist whose work I really respect, and I'd like to think they're actually making it. Copping a demo sequence from a factory library is just lazy. I'm flattered that they thought it was good enough to use...but without tweaking it at all?
This brings up all sorts of questions about creative ownership that maybe aren't so interesting in 2006 since the hip-hop community has already been dealing with them for years. In a sense what happened here is not so different from sampling a record and using that as the basis for an original work. But it somehow FEELS different (at least to me, since I'm the guy who wrote the music in the first place). An appropriated sample is generally recontextualized, and gets a new life because of how it relates to the material around it. My sequence, on the other hand, IS this track. Just add drums, master, and release.

I'm strangely honored and also weirded out. I can't even imagine being proud of music I knew I didn't write, and then releasing it into the world with my name on it as if there was no problem. Even though there's nothing illegal about it in this case, it's still creepy.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis @ 05:49 PM EST

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