What is a Sound Collage? Learn its roots, techniques and modern impact
The sound collage has profoundly reshaped how musicians work. From the roots of musique concrète to today’s vaporwave and plunderphonics, artists are continuing to push the creative boundaries in digital sound.
by Sonia Chien via Chartmetric
What happens when culture is not just the inspiration for art, but also its physical medium? In music, this takes the shape of sound collage: a recording technique in which sampled sound materials are combined to create a rough layering effect, culminating in a new piece of art.
Keith Rankin, the sound collage and vaporwave artist behind Giant Claw and one third of death’s dynamic shroud, notes that the sound collage technique has profoundly reshaped how artists work behind the scenes.
“Collage principles and techniques have created a whole cultural paradigm,” Keith told Chartmetric. “It has pervaded people’s natural workflow, almost in the way that an old composer would decide to use a minor key in their composition.”
Keith gives the example of time stretching, an early vaporwave trend in which artists would use an audio software program like PaulStretch to take a preexisting composition or sound, and slow it down to extreme measures. This has the effect of turning something like a Justin Bieber song into a whole other piece of music.
“[The program] actually retained some of the timber and quality of sound,” said Keith. “So it didn’t just sound like digital mush, it sounded like a beautiful ambient tapestry. To me, that’s an example of technology and inspiration meeting and making a new mode of working. And you see that all the time.”
Time stretching is one of many collage techniques that artists can use to modify pre-existing sound materials. To Keith, technological advancements like these are all part of the fun of making music. “I feel like music follows art and art follows technology. I really look forward to new technologies, they’re sources of inspiration for me.”
What Is Sound Collage?
The sound collage technique follows the tradition of visual collage stemming from the late 19th century, when people first started gluing photographs together to create new compositions.
A significant predecessor work in sound collage can be attributed to the composer Charles Ives, with his 1906 piece “Central Park in the Dark.”
Scored for a chamber orchestra, Ives approached the piece with the intention of creating the sensation of the chaotic urban environment of Central Park at night. The piece unfolds slowly, with a loose and unpredictable structure. As more instruments are layered on top of each other, it becomes increasingly polytonal, until everything is stripped away again, leaving only a few serene strings.
“The strings represent the night sounds and silent darkness…interrupted by sounds from the Casino over the pond…a fire engine, a cab horse runs away…again the darkness is heard — an echo over the pond — and we walk home,” described Ives of the roles of the instruments.
Other early influencers in “Mash-Up” culture — which here refers to the interrelated genres and techniques of sound collage, musique concrète, remixing and plunderphonics from the 1940s-1990s — include artists like Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, DJ Kool Herc, The Beatles, Negativland and John Oswald.
With The Beatles song “Revolution 9” for instance, a musique concrète piece which overlays a combination of sound effects, overdubbed vocals, and short tape loops of speech and musical performances, John Lennon aimed to recreate the feeling of a revolution through sound.
Early experiments in sound collage also included physically gluing together different sections of vinyl records, after commercial vinyls were first made available in the 1930s. Nowadays this is more often done through sampling, though the phrase “gluing” in music production has remained as a relic.
In the 21st century, many artists have continued to use techniques evolved from sound collage. With their turn of the century debut album “Since I Left You,” plunderphonics and art pop group The Avalanches used multiple Akai S2000s to capture samples from vinyl records, culminating in an album with over 3,500 individual samples. The result was a refreshing and timeless piece of work, distinct from any pre-existing album, despite including parts from 3,500 of them. “What can’t be denied is a group of friends made a love letter from found sound,” said Amar Ediriwira for The Vinyl Factory about the album.
Since its 20th anniversary edition release, the album has maintained a Spotify Popularity Index hovering around 48, just a few points under its score at the height of re-release.
Setting the Record Straight
In the modern day, separations between sound collage, musique concrète, plunderphonics, epic collage and vaporwave may come across a bit blurry, despite some distinctive differences. Sound collage, for example, specifically refers to the compositional method, namely layering sound samples in a way that auditorily resembles a visual art collage, whether that sound is instrumentals, speech recordings or other sound objects.
As music curator earfeeder points out in this post comparing sound collage and plunderphonics, in terms of actual listening experience sound collage can land anywhere between the ethereal modern classical album “Everyone Alive Wants Answers” by Colleen, to the sounds of high-pitched scraping, echoey abyss and unsettling voices of children found in “Homotopy to Marie” by Nurse With Wound.
As might be gathered from this chart depicting the playlist counts of some of these albums, while all experienced an increase in playlist additions since their release on Spotify, overlaid recordings of string instruments may invite a second listen to the average listener just slightly more than reverberated maniacal laughter.
Although as Keith Rankin notes, ‘listenability’ is a relative term, and sound can easily be considered as an art in itself. When it comes to his own creative approach, he doesn’t see making sounds versus making tracks as rankable activities. “I don’t view one process as better than the other,” he told Chartmetric. “It’s just that most people enjoy listening to composed melody and harmony.”
Musique concrète, which was first coined in the 1940’s by Pierre Schaeffer with his piece “Étude aux chemins de fer,” specificially refers to sound collage that manupulates natural and human-made sounds through the use of techniques like pitch alteration, looping and reverb.
With the technology of the 70s to 90s came plunderphonics, which refers to music that uses recognizable samples much like an instrument to create a new composition. While the term was coined by Canadian composer John Oswald, the group Negativland was one of the first to use audio piracy as a core aspect of its composition, in what they termed “culture jamming,” or altering existing media in order to highlight its propagandistic nature.
Layered samples of advertisements, TV announcements, and sound effects create a hyper-stimulating atmosphere, with the intent to emphasize corporate omnipresence in daily life. The band is also known for creating an album called “U2,” which got them hit with a lawsuit from U2’s recording company. “[The lawsuit] was a nightmare, but a fascinating experience,” said founding member Mark Hosler. “We realized there was something wrong with corporations saying they owned culture.”
Vaporwave, another sample-based genre, arrived in the early 2010s. The name comes from the 1980’s term “vaporware,” referring to the failed release of a hardware or software project. The genre often evokes a dreamy, mystical or hyper-real quality, and pulls from mass media and computer culture of the 80s and 90s.
As referenced in earfeeder’s starter guide, the death’s dynamic shroud.wmw album “I’ll Try Living Like This” represents an overlap between vaporwave and plunderphonics, in that it uses plunderphonic technique to achieve a vaporwave effect.
The album’s opening track “너 땜에 맘이 맘이 맘이 맘이 괴로워요” has seen consistent growth in Spotify streams since its release. In order to achieve a steady income, the group also released a version of the album through their digital Patreon-style platform on bandcamp, NUWORLD, where they deliver an ambitious one album per month.
A Conversation With Keith Rankin
When it comes to genre, Keith Rankin finds that it is on his mind more as a social concept than the way he thinks when he makes music as Giant Claw or for death’s dynamic shroud.
“I usually don’t have a genre in mind,” he told Chartmetric. “Maybe more like a sound palette, or this abstract feeling.”
He does believe, however, that naming things gives them power. “[Genre] is a linguistic tool. There’s definitely a phenomenon where if you name something, it spreads more.”
Alongside co-owner Seth Graham, Keith also runs the label Orange Milk Records, for which Keith designs much of the album art of the signed artists.
In his own musical pursuits, Keith also noted that his work in sound design, such as recreating physical sound, to him is just as prioritized and enjoyable, if not more so, than putting out music.
“The idea of sound itself is really cool. And the fact that we can sculpt sound and have access to samples, is insane. The modern toolbox is enormous.”
Keith described his work in sound design as imitating the physical word, such as through observing the sound of an animal or a machine, then using a program to break down the physics of each sound and recreate it.
“I’m not even thinking of a composition. I’m thinking in terms of generating the sound itself as the piece. That is the art in that moment.”
Keith often posts his sound creations online, such as this video drilling into a water balloon.
For the last months of 2024, Keith also mentioned death’s dynamic shroud’s plans to produce a followup to their critically acclaimed album “Darklife,” which was the last time that the group worked together on a long-term basis. In their activity for NUWORLD, they typically handle releases as individual parts of a collective.
“Proximity and goals are human binding material. When you’re with friends, and have this really specific goal [of creating an album], it’s peak fun,” he described of his creative process with the group.
Sound for the Sake of Itself
In the same way that Charles Ives sought to evoke a sensory experience through orchestral instruments, modern artists are using the many digital techniques at their disposal to push the boundaries of collage music and explore sound for the sake of itself. Through treating cultural knowledge as the materials for creation, this adventurous, hyper-experimental, and self-referential cluster of genres has become about as future-thinking as music can get. On this front, Keith believes that in order for modern collage technique to naturally evolve, artists must not be legally stifled.
“Copyright should only protect individuals against corporate exploitation. The other way should not apply. [Laws around sampling] should not hurt smaller artists working in a plunderphonics style.”
There is clearly no shortage of creative ability and passion in collage music, however in order for collage music to continue in its progression, a legal framework that nurtures artistic freedom is essential.
