The Brown & White

Music, like all art forms, is an art that is constantly evolving. In recent years, new technology has invoked the emergence of an entirely new genre of music - one that has decidedly substituted instruments and vocals for laptops and computer software. Take a stroll past any residence hall or fraternity, and it is more than likely that you'll hear this music that is at once unoriginal and yet strikingly creative - a collage of noises and songs that paints a catchy portrait: the mash-up.

"Mash-ups" are pieces of music created by layering and piecing together the vocals, beats and melodies from multiple songs. With computer software programs like Audacity and Virtual DJ, mash-up DJs can produce a musical concoction of several audio snippets by seamlessly blending the vocals from one song with the instrumentals from another.

If you thought you would never hear Kanye West rapping along with Queen and The Jackson 5, think again. Mash-up music often takes classics from past decades and combines them with recent Top 40 hits to create a mélange of different sounds destined to make listeners dance.

Lehigh students experienced the genre firsthand on Thursday when popular mash-up artist Girl Talk performed at the Lehigh-Lafayette bonfire.

Lehigh-based mash-up duo John Formica, '13, and Greg Kantor, '13, started making mash-ups together in June 2009 under the alias 5 & A Dime. Since then, the duo released their first album "College Daze."

Creating something fresh from something that has already been done is the recipe for a good mash-up, said Formica.

"You have to take two songs and make it sound like one - like it's a brand new song. My favorite thing is when someone walks into a party, hears a song and is like, 'Hey I know this song!' and then it turns out to be a completely different song than what they thought," Formica said at the Nov. 7 mash-up tutorial session held by the Technology in Society house.

"I like taking songs I despise and making them good. I'll take a Lady Gaga song and mix it with Lil' Wayne, see if it works out and if bringing the two together makes it actually listenable," Formica said.

Mash-ups are all about making your audience dance, he said.

"We're just two guys trying to make you dance," write Formica and Kantor on their Myspace profile.

Many copyright law proponents and experts, however, are neither dancing nor feeling the music.

Mash-ups are considered "derivative works," which is when someone creates something new out of another person's copyright-protected work. According to the US Copyright Law Office Web site, it is illegal to prepare derivative works without the consent of the copyright owner. Because mash-up DJs use other peoples' song clips without the original musicians' consent, it is argued that mash-ups are in fact a product of copyright infringement.

"People think that mash-ups are in some ways in a grey area, but legally they're really not," journalism and communications professor Kathy Olson said.

Olson, who teaches Media Ethics and Law, received her law degree from the University of Virginia after receiving her master's in journalism from the University of Texas.

"Those strongly in favor of copyright law want to be able to have full control of who is using their work and how it is being used," Olson said.

Mash-up artists tend to cite the fair use doctrine as a defense, Olson said. The fair use doctrine grants people the limited rights to copyrighted materials without permission of the right's holders.

"The fair use doctrine looks at the market for a particular work. Is the market for Frank Sinatra damaged or swiped in any way if someone chooses to mash it with NWA, for example?" Jonathan H. Steinberg, an intellectual property partner at a large Los Angeles firm, said in a phone interview.

What is covered by the fair use doctrine, however, is unclear, Olson said.

"I'm a big believer in the fair use doctrine, except it is too broad. It is impossible to define. No one knows what's OK to do and what isn't," she said. "I don't think that the fair use doctrine needs to be accommodated. It isn't a way for us to deal with mash-ups. It's starting to get twisted. I think a whole new law is needed."

Olson said copyright laws need to change with our culture.

"There has been a recent increase in engagement in the remix culture, and I think that copyright law needs to catch up with it," Olson continued. "We need to think of what our culture is doing now and make a legal shift."

Steinberg said mash-up artists face problems with copyright laws.

"Under the current copyright law, the mash-up people are in trouble. The laws are quite bad for people who want to create that type of music," Steinberg said. "Right now, as the law currently stands, simply reproducing a few notes is too much."

In the documentary "RiP! A Remix Manifesto," Girl Talk and others in favor of reducing the restrictions of copyright law contend that the U.S. Copyright laws impede creativity.

According to Steinberg, these "copyleft" proponents believe that "the cultural and artistic patrimony of this country ought to belong to all of us - that there exists a large scope for us to share in the common heritage of creation and ideas."

Olson feels that both sides are too extreme in their goals.

"Remix Manifesto is a little extreme on one side, but I think that the film and music industry companies are extreme on the other side," she said. "Creating mash-ups - taking working parts from someone else and putting it together with other parts to presumably make something new - is an interesting new art form, and we shouldn't be shutting down this creativity."

Steinberg agrees to a certain extent.

"I'm not a complete let-it-run-free guy, but I think we need to assess how much protection is best for people to produce creative works," he said.

Brittany Wiesen, '12, said she doesn't think mash-up artists should have rights to taking clips of music.

"If Girl Talk doesn't have permission to use people's songs, then I don't think that he should be allowed to make his music," she said. "If I write a book and someone takes a chapter from my book and places it into a new book with different chapters, that's not OK. I still wrote that chapter. Just because the rest of the book is different chapters, you're still taking my chapter that I wrote."

Girl Talk and the mash-up debacle is at the epicenter of a larger concern that the download generation doesn't quite respect or understand intellectual property. The manifestation is in the large number of people who illegally download music and films from the Internet.

"I think an important question we need to ask ourselves is: How do you respect art as intellectual property and what are the ways in which we can respect someone's intellectual property?" asked Emily Shreve, an English instructor. Shreve taught an Intellectual Property course in the spring 2009 semester.

"Do you show respect by paying for the music?" Shreve said. "By telling other people about it? By taking the music to create a new art form? Is using someone's work in an active way more respectful than buying something and keeping it as is? I think this is a conversation that we need to have."

Regardless of legal debate, mash-up music will continue to have a market. Lehigh proved this by bringing Girl Talk to the Lehigh-Laf Bonfire celebration.

"I don't care if someone decides that mash-ups are illegal. I'm still going to listen to them," Janice Escobar, '12, said.

Mash-up music has been met with much success. Mash-up DJs such as Girl Talk and Super Mash Bros. have toured the country, laptop in hand, to disperse their music.