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In my work as a sound designer for theatre, video and film productions
I frequently find that the ambient sound of the place
where I am recording cannot be used because it is owned
by someone, and that someone is almost always
a large corporation.
Think about it. If the sound in your environment
comes from a radio, television, jukebox, iPod, iTunes, Muzak,
or any of a dozen other sources that deliver
copyrighted sounds into your space,
then that environment is owned by someone else.
It doesn't matter if you are the one playing the sounds, or your neighbor,
or the business that is trying to keep you in the mood to spend -
it doesn't matter if you enjoy the sounds,
or if they're driving you nuts - the intellectual property rights
have been reserved.
Okay, this makes sense when we're talking about big-budget movies.
It makes sense that Hollywood cannot just use
a great song in a scene just because it happened to be playing
in a real place when the sound crew happened by.
Most big-budget productions, after all, are carefully contrived
to deliver maximum emotional impact,
and sound, especially music, and above all pop music
is the signifier, container, vessel, and cue
of complex - yet conventional - emotions. And of course
a big-budget production rarely uses
the actual sounds that actually happen to be playing
in a specific place. The sound is broken apart into layers:
the dialog, the sound effects, the carefully distorted
music that is supposed to be coming from within the scene
and the swelling symphonic music
that comes from outside the scene, like an authorial voice,
telling us what to feel. So it makes sense for the builders
of such complex, mass-market, emotion-delivery systems
to respect the rights of each other's creative work. Or, to be exact,
it makes sense for the corporations that have bought out
the copyright as part of their distribution and marketing deals
to respect each other's property, and to force
their creative people, often very highly paid creative people,
to incorporate such respect into a professional ethic.
But what about those of us who live
in a world saturated by the intellectual property
of others? What rights do we have to the environments
in which we live? Do I, for example, have the right
to record the sound in my own living room?
Do I have the right to take my own living room as a specimen
of all the living rooms in America?
In other words, do I have the right
to portray, in an audio composition, my living room as a place
where the television is playing? Where a hundred channels
vie for my attention?
Do I have the right to mix and loop those sounds
into an original composition? Is such a thing original at all?
Do I have the right to treat
fragments of broadcast audio
as irreducible elements of a compositional practice?
As notes to be composed?
Does it matter if this is art? What if it's bad art?
Or play? Or politics? Does that affect my rights?
What if I figure out a way to "monetize this content"?
What about ordinary people
channel-surfing at home? What if they record themselves
watching TV?