Sampling and Science -- Could it Benefit Us?

I've technically already posted a blog for this week, but I really wanted to cover this area. However, if we've doing blog readings in class again, I recommend going to the post below this one, as that is the shorter one. However, I feel that this post will be more awesome. :p 

Also, in case it's not obvious, my posts are freestyle rather than following the prompt.

Apparently my version of becoming more concise is dividing up my ramblings into two separate blog posts. But anyway:

Since I’d like to keep my blog posts somewhat multi-modal, I’d also like to talk about a different kind of sampling—not of music, but of speeches and documentaries. This was briefly touched on in the video, but I’d like to go a bit more in-depth into it. 

Going back to my list of favorite YouTube artists, I'd like to focus on the user melodysheep, aka John Boswell (who apparently is from our lovely state--had no idea until writing this!) and particularly his Symphony of Science videos. "Symphony of Science" is basically original music, paired with samplings of scientists and speakers of various science documentaries, presentations, and interviews, that are autotuned to match the music.

Melodysheep has occasionally run into some issues with copyright, most notoriously for the use of one of the most well-known people to popularize science, Carl Sagan. Despite that Sagan's son loves the project, some of the current copyright holders had objections to the use of Sagan in these videos. Thankfully the copyright holders of Sagan's work are a little less uptight than some of the previous examples we've seen -- no one is getting sued, threatened, or downtrodden, and melodysheep is allowed to keep previous videos using Sagan's image and words on his channel, he is just currently forbidden from using Sagan in his newer works. Though rumor has it that negotiations are ongoing, and perhaps permission will one day be granted. (I've read all of this from comments from the user himself, but unfortunately it was long enough ago that I can't find the sources. Ah, sorry!)  I do hope Carl Sagan returns to "Symphony of Science," because there are many, myself included, who particularly love Sagan's incredibly poetic way of explaining science.

But what if melodysheep had been shut down completely, and forced to remove all of his videos containing copyrighted content? I feel like this would have been a great loss in many ways. 

Besides the songs themselves being enjoyable (in my opinion), I feel like they contribute something to the scientific community and to the public as a whole. Now am I going to learn any complex scientific theories from these songs? Nah. This is a tablespoon helping at best when it comes to concrete knowledge. However, what these videos do very well is present science in a very different light than many of us have seen it. 

To use my experience, in high school my thoughts towards science was probably average: kind of dull, occasionally some fun experiments, but otherwise nothing really interesting. Just another school subject that I had to learn enough about to pass my classes.

Music has always been a strong part of my existence though, so when I heard science put to song about two years after I graduated high school, I had a complete paradigm shift. At my first listen, I was giggling at how nerdy it was to put science documentaries to music, but then I gave it another listen, and I realized how incredibly poetic science could be. It's not all lab coats, dullness, and students being bored out of their minds. In these videos I saw sides of science I'd never seen before -- creativity, enthusiasm, and just the simple beauty and awe of the world around us. Not just through the music, but through the words and genuine enthusiasm of the orators themselves, and how these words had been combined into this one project.

I ended up looking up some of the documentaries that were sampled, and asking questions about myself, the universe, and existence as a whole that I'd never asked before -- that was definitely an interesting time for me! I definitely found myself wishing I'd paid more attention to my science classes in high school, and when I took astronomy last Fall, I definitely threw myself into it with an enthusiasm I've never had before.

These videos, or videos like this, could be an incredibly powerful tool if presented to schools and students. If students younger than I could experience the paradigm shift I had when I was 20, then we maybe could see a rise of budding scientists -- definitely something we desperately need. 

The point is, once again, we could be potentially be losing something quite powerful if we allow copyrights to get too restrictive. Not only as musicians and listeners, but there are gems out there, despite being based from copyrighted material, could contribute for our culture and society as a whole. Encouraging collaboration, even regarding copyrighted works, gives us the freedom to expand on creations in new and unexpected ways that can create something quite wonderful that can touch and inspire some of us in a way that the original product may not have been able to.