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When did Samples and Sampling become a thing?

A long time ago…

The 1st form of sample based music composition is referred to as musique concrète, (French: “concrete music”), experimental technique of musical composition using recorded sounds as raw material. The technique was developed around 1948 by the French composer Pierre Schaeffer and his associates at the Studio d’Essai (“Experimental Studio”) of the French radio system.

Similar using computers, people building music compositions in the late 40’s would do so using tape systems – they had the ability to synchronize multiple Tape machines, they were also able to multi track on a single real in some cases, they could manipulate the speed, and even physical cut or “Splice” pieces of tape together to create music. obviously these methods were considerably more time consuming than the tools we have within our computers!