Chi Wang
A99056298
CAT 1
Sound Recording
For this music composition, I wanted to create a mash-up work that does not sound like a mash-up. The intention of this project is to see how close we can get from being called a musician as opposed to a plagiarist, as I recently read about a Korean musician being accused of plagiarism by copying a few notes. Sound recording enabled the recording and altering of audio tracks, which could either be seen as, in For the actual creation of this piece, I used parts of a several popular Korean music tracks from both Hip Pop and classic genre, remixed them, and made it sound completely different, in which one must think very hard to associate my piece with the original pieces of music. The result was that other people cannot tell which music piece I got it from, and the piece and fully stand as its own if I do call it. 
In terms of Aram Sinnreich’s research, I believe that my piece of remix could be categorized into his Performance vs. Composition dilemma, in which, despite that I nevertheless created a different music, the pieces that I used were composed by others, so can my piece really be seen as a composition, or is it just a performance? 
I, like Sinreich, would argue that my remix piece is a performance instead of a composition. The reason is because that I did not actually compose anything. Because of sound recording, I can mix and match the music I like and transform them into something completely new, but I the process I did not write any music scores, nor did I played any instruments. An analogy can be made with plagiarism in writing. My remix is similar to copying and pasting phrases and paragraphs from different books, reorganizing and adding transitions to make my essay smoother. Most people would agree that this would be plagiarism: I did not pitch in my ideas into the essay itself—I am rehashing and using other people’s writing (in this case, music compositions), to mix and match. I believe that my work is more like a performance of other people’s work. Despite that I did not perform this remix music live, the sound recording and editing technologies allowed me to perform pieces of the music. This is similar to parody movies. For example, in the new Korean drama “My Love from the Stars”, because the min actress is the lead from the other drama “My Sassy Girlfriend”, the director had many scenes that closely resembled “My Sassy Girlfriend”, and the audiences are able to tell the striking similarities; the director paid the team of “My Sassy Girlfriend” for the property rights of those scenes. Therefore, it is not unjust to argue that “the physical act of copying or reproducing a score does not give the copyist any right to alter its contents—the originality and uniqueness of the underlying composition are preserved regardless of the mode of expression of that composition.” (Sinnreich, 104) 
Therefore, my remix music builds on the framework of composition vs. performance, and re-emphasizes problems faced by configurable culture, where the definite definitions of compositions and performance become a grey zone. However, I think that even more so with the rise of sound recording technologies, “no longer did composition comprise a mere element of performance; it became something necessarily prior to performance, and thus more essential. (Sinnreich, 106)



Works Cited
Sinnreich, Aram A. Configurable Culture: Mainstreaming the Remix, Remixing the Mainstream. N.p.: U of Southern California. Libraries, 2007. Print.

