Sound collage is the production of songs or recordings using portions, or samples, of previously made recordings. Like its visual cousin, the collage work may have a completely different tone than that of the component parts, even if the original parts are completely recognizable.
Sound collage first became a possibility with the widespread use of magnetic tape in the early 1960s. Recording engineers soon discovered that tape could be cut with a razorblade and spliced back together in a different order, and even from different sources. It wasn't long before artists began to explore the new possibilities. Iannis Xenakis is the first well-known composer to have worked with sound collage; other early artists who experimented with it include John Cage, Brion Gysin, and William S. Burroughs. The most famous examples in popular music are to be found in the work of The Beatles: George Martin cut up and randomly reassembled a recording of a carousel in "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, and John Lennon included a long pastiche of sound effects and crowd noises on The Beatles titled "Revolution 9".
The cultural awareness of sound collage was greatly increased in the 1980s and early 1990s due largely to two lawsuits: the first by the Canadian Recording Association against John Oswald for his seminal collage work Plunderphonics and the second by Island Records against the band Negativland for their album U2 (ironically, the latter had nothing to do with sampling and was provoked by Negativland's misleading cover art). The popularity of two new musical genres that included elements of sound collage—rap and house music—over the same period also helped to popularize it.
Important sound collage artists include: