Sound collage
music term and genre; technique where newly branded sound objects or compositions, including songs, are created from collage
In music, montage (lit. "putting together") or sound collage ("gluing together") is a technique where newly branded sound objects or compositions, including songs, are created from collage, also known as musique concrète. This is often done through the use of sampling, while some sound collages are produced by gluing together sectors of different vinyl records. Like its visual cousin, sound collage works may have a completely different effect than that of the component parts, even if the original parts are recognizable or from a single source. Audio collage was a feature of the audio art of John Cage, Fluxus, postmodern hip-hop and postconceptual digital art.
History
The origin of sound collage can be traced back to the works of Biber's programmatic sonata Battalia (1673) and Mozart's Don Giovanni (1789), and certain passages in Mahler symphonies as collage, but the first fully developed collages occur in a few works by Charles Ives, whose piece Central Park in the Dark (1906) creates the feeling of a walk in the city by layering several distinct melodies and quotations on top of each other.
Earlier traditional forms and procedures such as the quodlibet, medley, potpourri, and centonization differ from collage in that the various elements in them are made to fit smoothly together, whereas in a collage clashes of key, timbre, texture, meter, tempo, or other discrepancies are important in helping to preserve the individuality of the constituent elements and to convey the impression of a heterogeneous assemblage. What made their technique true collage, however, was the juxtaposition of quotations and unrelated melodies, either by layering them or by moving between them in quick succession.
A first documented instance of sound collage created as electronic music is Wochenende (in English, Weekend), a collage of words, music and sounds created by film-maker and media artist Walter Ruttmann in 1928. Later, in 1948, Pierre Schaeffer used the techniques of sound collage to create the first piece of musique concrète, Étude aux chemins de fer, which was assembled from recordings of trains.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sound collage” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.