ABSTRACT 

 This paper examines sampling’s HAHA (humour), AHA (insight), and AH (aesthetic appreciation) impacts on listeners, and situates sampling within broader debates on originality, labour, and cultural value. Through case studies, it shows how sampling can generate playful incongruities, foster critical commentary, and produce defamiliarized beauty. Drawing on Bakhtin, Kristeva, Koestler, Shklovsky, Bourriaud, and others, it explores sampling through the lenses of intertextuality, transposition, double-codedness, and bisociation, positioning it within a continuum of appropriation-based art forms such as parody. Noting that sampling challenges entrenched ideologies privileging labour-intensive originality, it calls for critical awareness of the cultural politics behind aesthetic judgments. Moreover, it examines the threats posed by platform governance to remix and sampling practices, urging closer scrutiny of the power internet platforms wield in shaping culture.

BIOGRAPHY 

Ragnhild Brøvig is Professor in Popular Music Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Parody in the Age of Remix: Mashup Creativity vs. the Takedown (MIT Press, 2023) and Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound (with Anne Danielsen, MIT Press, 2016), along with numerous articles on music production, music experience, and their societal entanglements. She is currently involved in three Norwegian Centres of Excellence: RITMO (time, rhythm, and motion), CreaTeME (creative use of technologies in music education), and MishMash (AI and creativity). She also holds an adjunct professorship at the University of Agder and serves as Assistant Editor for the Journal of Music Production Research.

 

Professor Ragnhild Brøvig