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In the video that Deb links to, DJ Dahi says that three are three main techniques you can use to flip a sample: looping it, chopping it, and reversing it.
- Looping is the simplest of the three techniques, but its musical significance is deeper than you might think. In his must-read book Making Beats, Joe Schloss points out that looping a sample juxtaposes the sampled material with itself by connecting the end of a phrase with its beginning. In so doing, “looping automatically recasts any musical material it touches, insofar as the end of a phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with its beginning in a way that was not intended by the original musician. After only a few repetitions, this juxtaposition… begins to take on an air of inevitability. It begins to gather a compositional weight that far exceeds its original significance” (p. 137). Looping can take an idea that was meant to be linear and turn it into something circular, and that act can have political valence.
- Chopping means splitting a sample into segments (e.g. individual drum hits or notes) and then recombining the segments out of order, and/or removing some of them. Audio Two’s “Top Billin'” beat is a chop of the “Impeach the President” drums. Pete Rock created the beat in “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by chopping the drum intro to James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).”
- Reversing is the least common technique of the three, but when it appears, it’s conspicuous. The best example I can think of is the chorus to “Work It” by Missy Elliott. She follows the line “Put my thang down, flip it and reverse it” with that same line backwards, repeated twice.
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Now what's intriguing about this is that coming at things from the perspective of being a classical guitarist who studied what could be called Eurological compositional techniques each of these techniques arguably has correspondences with gestural transformation in what's colloquially known as classical music.
Looping can, in an irony almost too rich not to savor, be most readily compared to knupftechnik which is often translated as "linkage technique". In this technique the closure of a phrase or gesture is simultaneously transformed into the initiation of a new form of the gesture, a repetition of the gesture or some sequential extension of the gesture. You can find this all over the place in the shift from theme 1 through the transition in Beethoven's Op. 111, which I've written about in the past. Now why did I suggest that a conceptual correspondence between looping and knupftechnik involves an irony almost too rich not to savor? That would be because "knupftechnik" aka linkage technique was an idea formulated by ... Heinrich Schenker. As Steven C. Rahn defines linkage technique in a treatise on Brahms, the technique involves making the end of one phrase the beginning of the next, to put it in very colloquial terms. This can be done by way of elision or distinction but the core idea (and humor) is that looping in hip hop can, as DJ Dahi by way of Hein has defined looping, corresponds pretty readily with Schenkerian knupftechnik. The correspondence seems so clear and simple to me when I compare scholarly writing about compositional techniques across styles that I'd venture only purists for one or the other could object to observing that there's a conceptual correspondence between looping and knupftechnik as compositional techniques.
Now for "chopping", that could potentially correspond to what's known as "fragmentation" and the clarity and simplicity of the conceptual overlap almost seems too simple to belabor with examples.
However what is very clear is that the last technique "reversing" could not more obviously correspond to gestural retrogression. "Reversing" happens in J. S. Bach's Musical Offering where he has a single line that is designed to work in retrograde against itself when taken up by two instruments. So, the "Crab Canon" would be the example, for those who aren't already familiar with it.
With good cause Hein recommends you go consult Davitt Moroney on fugue and counterpoint (and Moroney did a spectacular job recording all of the keyboard music William Byrd in a box set you should absolutely grab if you're interested in Renaissance era keyboard music!).
Hein mentions later on in his post:
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So, here’s the comparison that Debbie is suggesting: if a fugue theme is like a sample, then the fugue itself is like an elaborate series of sample flips. Does the analogy make sense? There are certainly some big differences between a rap instrumental and a fugue. The goal of sample flipping is to create a groove with a few short and unvarying repeated elements. The goal of a fugue is to create a linear composition with almost no large-scale repetition at all. Also, fugue writing only alters the pitches and durations of the theme, while keeping its timbre intact. Sample flipping might alter pitches and durations, but is more often concerned with timbral manipulation. Those caveats aside, though, I do think the comparison holds merit.
We should always be careful not to try to “validate” hip-hop by comparing it to the Western European canon. Hip-hop is perfectly valid on its own terms. But there is value in comparing the two if the comparison is productive of new ideas. ...
Agreed, and there's a great deal of value in comparing the two if thinking through possible ways to bridge the often artificially constructed and culturally accumulated or reception-history developed gaps or boundaries between styles. What a George Oldroyd could observe about Bach was his monothematic fugues (we'll get to why that term exists maybe in some other post later) distilled contrapuntal development down to extending a few immediately recognizable gestures. Earlier approaches to fugue such as we might hear in Sweelinck or Buxtehude could be a kind of going from riff to riff and developing each riff in episodic terms along the lines of, say, an existing and well-known hymn tune. Sweelinck could compose a motet on a Psalm text by using one of the melodies from the Genevan Psalter, around which he could compose new material that highlighted harmonic and melodic and gestural possibilities that could be thought of as latent (at least to Sweelinck) in the appropriated material.
I might hesitate to say that fugues don't involve timbrel change because the opening fugue from the second movement of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms practically luxuriates in tossing the fugue subject and its complements around across different wind instruments. Yes, two flutes and two oboes ... but starting at 3:30 in the video you'll get to see and hear that the flutes take up lines in dramatically contrasting registers. So ... kinda ... with Baroque era music timbrel cohesion is often a bigger deal than it became in later eras, so that's a caveat about fugues keeping timbre in tact. It depends on the composer and the era. But of practical necessity fugues written on single instruments tend to preserve timbre because it takes a spectacular level of technique to manipulate timbre on, say, a guitar and it's not feasible on keyboard instruments, regardless of what pianists may tell you about "touch" and "tone". Hindemith, I think it was, said that they're still ultimately talking about the subtle distinctions between HOW you hit a string with a mallet, which is the kind of snarky thing a violist would probably say anyway.
Hein's case study of using Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" to take Wonder's initial vocal line and present it in a kind of canon of augmentation and diminution against the "prime" form of Wonder's vocal is ... a bit theoretical ... but since he's discussing theory it makes for a far-more-fun than usual example of how part of a well-known song can be used to demonstrate canon in augmentation and diminution. Besides which, I've said plenty of times I love Wonder's music and the contrapuntal possibilities and harmonic possibilities in his music are legion.
I can't resist giving a specific example. The verse melody in "Ordinary Pain" would make a great fugue subject. It has an elegantly simple set of hooks based on gestures that are easy to break apart and develop in sequential ways and thanks to the mellow harmonic rhythm you can very easily set that melody in canon against itself for later stretto passages. Let's pretend for sake of conversation that the melody shifts around in E major on the notes G#, B and C# before getting to the mixolydian-inflected second phrase that moves to subdominant function harmonies. You can not only set that melody in canon against itself you can invert the melody so that if the "prime" form of the melody starts on G# the answer in canon can start on G natural and present the gesture in canon by inversion. I think an entire polyphonic/fugal language could be pretty easily developed from the foundations of the hooks and harmonies in Stevie Wonder songs if you're steeped enough in his work and the work of J. S. Bach to know what the possibilities are--which is not to say Wonder's songs aren't perfect just as they are as songs.
One of my contentions at this blog has been that there are ideals of perfection within styles that don't have to be taken as set in stone across styles and that if there's been an enervating process in pop music and classical music alike as I sometimes feel there has been, it is because partisans for one or the other are basically opposed to any synergistic exchange of ideas and even more opposed to the very idea that such an exchange is possible. For those who want to be purists I don't exactly want to tell them they should stop being devotees of whatever they consider pure music. But for those interested in exploring potential areas of overlap, exchange and stylistic or formal fusion I'm very interested in promoting any kind of conversation in which musicians who want to talk shop and talk theory and compositional techniques across styles and traditions might want to compare notes.
I think Hein puts things well at the end of his post writing:
The idea of the lone genius composer conjuring ideas out of nowhere is specific to Romantic-era ideology. The reality of composition in Bach’s time (and before then, and afterwards too) is closer to the world of sample manipulation.
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