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Short abstract:

This paper explores the potential of creative sample manipulation in ethnographic fieldwork. While mangling samples recorded in CERN and on cross-border trains, we examine the newfound harmonies and rhythms we detect in our data and ask what epistemic role creative sampling may play in our research.

Long abstract:

Whereas sampling usually refers to the extraction of data, in music, sampling may also include the transformation of this data into something new. This sample-based synthesis, also known as sample mangling, is then used to inspire or form part of new compositions, giving the original samples new meaning. Although recording audio has long been important in ethnographic fieldwork, it is usually anathema to change samples in any way. In this paper we will challenge this taboo and explore the potential of sample-mangling techniques in ethnographic data creation and analysis.

Merging creative ethnology (Kockel 2011) with ludic anthropology (Dippel 2022) and sonic ethnography (Gershon, 2018; Mackie 2024) our aim is to play with sound in a creative way in close co-laboration with audio synthesis techniques. Sample-based synthesis presents us with various tools to transform audio samples, such as modulation, subtraction and addition, and the infusion of probability and chaos. As these creative techniques already rely heavily on scientific approaches, can we also borrow from them and add them to our ethnographich toolbox? And by exploring samples from this creative perspective, can we uncover new sides to them which otherwise we may have missed?

By mangling samples gathered in the Large Hadron Collider and the Anti-Matter Lab at CERN, and in cross-border trains in Europe, we will ask what kind of new harmonies and rhythms we can detect in our data and whether these may lead us to unforeseen insights, thereby exploring the epistemic role creative sampling may play in our research.