Cut-up — that recorded sound and culture can be fragmented and reassembled — is the conceptual root of electronic music

Modulations opens by framing the discovery of cut-up — that words, sounds, and cultural artifacts can be fragmented and reassembled in combinations that did not exist before — as the defining cultural shift of the 20th century, staged as more consequential than splitting the atom. The teachable idea underneath the rhetoric is that electronic music is the application of cut-up logic to sound: once recording exists, a recording is not a finished product but raw material for new meaning. This single principle unites tape splicing in musique concrete, breakbeat sampling, DJ cut-and-paste, and computer editing — they are all cut-up practised on sound.

Examples

Tape splicing in musique concrete, breakbeat sampling in hip hop, DJ cut-and-paste, computer loop editing: all are the same cut-up principle applied to recorded sound; Burroughs’ cut-up method is its literary parallel.

Assessment

State the cut-up principle in one sentence. Name three distinct musical practices the film treats as sharing this conceptual origin, and explain what they have in common.