ABSTRACT
The current technological situation in music has brought sampled sound increasingly into the compositional domain where it is at once both familiar and problematic. The widespread availability of digital samplers and digital recording seems to bring to a grassroots level the modernist credo that all sounds are potentially musical material or, to give it a liberal political twist, that all sounds are created equal. At the lowest level of acoustic pressure function or digital sample stream, there may be a certain truth to this equality but, at any level above that, irreconcilable differences become evident. Although it is clearly possible to mitigate the consequences implicit in the use of environmental sound through such prophylactic means as abstraction or sound effects, it will be my contention in this paper that the serious use of environmental sound in music is potentially disruptive and even subversive to the established norms of the artistic field.
