The Elusive Allure of “Aura”: Sample-based Music and Benjamin’s Practice of Quotation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses both sample-based and electronic music in relation to Walter Benjamin’s infamous text, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The applicability of “aura” to such music is questioned, in favour of other considerations, such as practices of collecting, remembering, selecting, and connecting. The relationships between performance, “liveness,” and technologically enabled forms of music are explored. Authors who have written about Benjamin’s text in relation to modern audio (re)production are compared and contrasted. I also reference interviews I conducted with a group of sample-based sound artists from Montréal, Canada, between 2004 and 2005. My discussion brings me to Benjamin’s use of Leonardo da Vinci’s disparaging comments about music compared with painting in the latter’s Paragone. I conclude by asserting that Benjamin’s practice of quotation is more relevant than his conception of “aura” in terms of discussing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in relation to contemporary, reproduction-based artistic practices such as electronic and/or sample-based music.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".