Interviewing the musical sample

Digital technologies and Musical Instrument Digital Interface-sampled instruments have emerged as one of the most significant technological shifts in musical consciousness in western society. Digital music has introduced new epistemologies of music as it raises questions of authorship and creativity, while also challenging the ontological presumptions about what it means to be a musician. Through interviewing the sample by applying various posthuman heuristics, I explore my own relationship to digital music samples and sampling technology as a composer and musician. I engage in a phenomenological inquiry that surveys the various ways the sample affects my ecological milieu of music-making, and more broadly, I explore how a musician is at all times enacting an intra/actional relationship as negotiated between themselves and their instrument.