Ongoing History Daily: Sampling vs. interpolation

Modern electronic sampling has been with us since the early 1980s. This is when you use some specialized hardware and software to surgically excise a passage from an old piece of music that you later use in the construction of a new song. You’re dealing with the actual recording.

Then there’s something similar called an “interpolation.” It sounds like you’ve sampled something, but you haven’t. Instead, you’ve painfully reconstructed the original sound with a new recording. A sample is the use of the original recording. An interpolation is a reasonable facsimile—a recreation of the original recording.

So? For a sample, you have to pay the owner of the original recording (usually the record company) and the owner of the composition (usually the publisher). That can get expensive. With an interpolation, you only have to pay the publisher. This is why many artists now elect to “interpolate” rather than “sample.”