Human culture is always derivative, and music perhaps especially so. New art builds on old art. We hear music, process it, reconfigure it, and create something derivative but new-folk melodies become Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies; Roy Acuff's" Great Speckled Bird" becomes Hank Williams's" Wild Side of Life"; and Rodgers and Hammerstein's" My Favorite Things" becomes a John Coltrane classic.

Twentieth-century recording technology brought this pervasive culture of reuse to a new level. Artists can now build upon prior recordings themselves, turning the fixed artifact of an earlier artist's performance into raw material for new work. Early sonic collage, in the analog era, was painstaking and labor-intensive. It took John Cage a year to make his four-minute-long Williams Mix. ¹ William Burroughs spent untold hours constructing cut-ups with razor blades and tape. And of course, artists' raw materials for these projects were limited to whatever recorded sound was physically at hand. Digital recording technology revolutionizes and democratizes this recycling process, making complex manipulation of recorded fragments easy and relatively affordable. And the Internet and other digital communications media bring a treasure trove of recorded sound directly to the sonic cannibalinformation formerly fixed in discs or tapes now exists, in one critic's words,“as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions which one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or