tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/sampling-33098/articlesSampling – The Conversation2023-08-01T19:00:16Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2087382023-08-01T19:00:16Z2023-08-01T19:00:16ZHow to read the political polls: 10 things you need to know ahead of the NZ election<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540317/original/file-20230801-271165-dv17h2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=22%2C0%2C4882%2C3603&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The closer we come to election day on October 14, the more media focus we’ll see on political polls. Poll results are often used to project the makeup of parliament, despite them being snapshots of the polling period rather than reliable predictions.</p>
<p>Indeed, the accuracy of past political polls in New Zealand has been <a href="https://theconversation.com/this-election-year-nz-voters-should-beware-of-reading-too-much-into-the-political-polls-198508">open to question</a>. And the way results are framed can sometimes <a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018899215/poll-analysis-unhitches-itself-from-reality">cause more confusion</a> than provide useful context.</p>
<p>No poll is perfect. But understanding the quality of a poll and the results it produces requires knowing something about how the poll was designed and carried out. </p>
<p>We recently completed a <a href="https://osf.io/pjzfb">guide to understanding public opinion polling in New Zealand</a> that describes the important features of polls to look out for. These factors determine their quality and should be considered when making conclusions about the results.</p>
<p>Technical details (sample size, margin of error and so on) about a given poll are usually available. So what information is important to consider? Here are ten things to think about when evaluating a political poll.</p>
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<h2>1. Sample size</h2>
<p>Contrary to common misconceptions, good quality results about the New Zealand population can be obtained from polls with as few as 500 to 1,000 participants, if the poll is designed and conducted well. </p>
<p>Bigger samples lead to less random variation in the results – that is, the differences between the results from a sample of the population compared with the whole population. But bigger samples are more expensive to collect, and they don’t make up for poor sampling design or polling process.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/this-election-year-nz-voters-should-beware-of-reading-too-much-into-the-political-polls-198508">This election year, NZ voters should beware of reading too much into the political polls</a>
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<h2>2. Target population</h2>
<p>It should be clear which group of people the results are about. Results about sub-groups (for example, women in a certain age group) should be treated more cautiously, as these are associated with smaller samples and therefore greater error.</p>
<h2>3. Sampling method</h2>
<p>Sampling design is crucial. It determines how well the poll sample matches the target population (such as people intending to vote). Polls should be conducted with an element of choosing people at random (random sampling), as this achieves the best representation of the population. </p>
<p>Polls that allow for self-selection and that do not control who can participate – such as straw polls on media and social media sites – will end up over-representing some groups and under-representing others. This leads to biased, inaccurate results.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/election-polls-are-more-accurate-if-they-ask-participants-how-others-will-vote-150121">Election polls are more accurate if they ask participants how others will vote</a>
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<h2>4. Sample weighting</h2>
<p>When characteristics about the population and the sample are known – such as the percentage of women, age or region – “weighting” increases the contribution of responses from groups under-represented in the sample to better match the population of interest. </p>
<p>This is achieved by making responses from under-represented respondents count more towards the results of the total poll. </p>
<p>Weighting cannot be used, however, to correct unknown differences between the poll sample and the total population. The distribution of population characteristics, like gender and age, are known through the census, and can be adjusted in the sample with weighting. </p>
<p>But we don’t have known population characteristics for other things that may affect the results (such as level of interest in politics). Good sampling design, including elements of random sampling, are the best way to ensure these important but unknown characteristics in the poll sample are similar to the whole population. </p>
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<h2>5. Poll commissioner and agency</h2>
<p>Knowing who paid for the poll is useful, as there may be vested interests at play. Results could be released selectively (for example, just those favourable to the commissioning organisation). Or there may be a hidden agenda, such as timing a poll around particular events. </p>
<p>Equally, we can be more confident in poll results when the polling agency has a strong track record of good practice, particularly if they follow national and international <a href="https://www.researchassociation.org.nz/political-polling">codes of best practice</a>.</p>
<h2>6. Poll timing</h2>
<p>Knowing when the poll was conducted, and what was happening at the time, is important. Poll results describe public opinion at the time the poll was conducted. They aren’t a prediction of the election outcome. </p>
<h2>7. Margin of error</h2>
<p>Margins of error are a natural consequence of taking a sample. The margin depends on both the size of the poll sample or sub-sample, and the proportion of the sample selecting a given option. The margin of error is largest for a proportion of 50% and smaller at more extreme values – such as 5% and 95%.</p>
<p>This makes knowing the margin of error for smaller results very important. Minor parties, for example, may be close to the 5% threshold for entering parliament. Knowing the margin of error therefore provides a more accurate picture of where they stand relative to this important threshold.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-margin-of-error-this-statistical-tool-can-help-you-understand-vaccine-trials-and-political-polling-151833">What is a margin of error? This statistical tool can help you understand vaccine trials and political polling</a>
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<p>Considering the margin of error is also vital for assessing changes in poll results over time, and differences within polls. </p>
<p>But the margin of error does not account for other sources of error in poll results, including those due to poor sampling methods, poorly worded questions or poor survey process. </p>
<p>The total error in a political poll consists of these other sources of error as well as the sampling error measured through the margin of error. Unless a poll is perfectly conducted (which is highly unlikely), the total survey error will always be larger than the margin of error alone would suggest.</p>
<h2>8. Precise question wording</h2>
<p>Responses to a poll question can <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/162815/support-euthanasia-hinges-described.aspx">vary markedly</a> depending on how it is asked. So, pay attention to what specifically was asked in the poll, and whether question phrasing could influence the results.</p>
<h2>9. Percentage of ‘don’t knows’</h2>
<p>Large percentages of “don’t know” responses can indicate questions on topics that poll respondents aren’t well informed on, or that are difficult to understand. For example, the percentage of “don’t know” responses to preferred prime minister questions can be <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/660935260/July-2023-1News-Verian-Poll-Report#">as high as 33%</a>.</p>
<h2>10. The electoral context</h2>
<p>The composition of parliament is determined by both general and Māori electorate results. Pay attention to the Māori electorates, where polls are often harder to conduct. </p>
<p>Māori electorate results are important, as candidates can <a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/election-results-2020-maori-party-back-in-parliament-as-rawiri-waititi-wins-waiariki/U2KUOHTTTYXCW3WMSN4U7IH25E/">win the seat</a> and bring other MPs (proportionate to their overall party vote) in on their “coat tails”.</p>
<h2>Finally – watch the trends</h2>
<p>Making sense of polls can be challenging. Readers are best placed to interpret the results alongside other polls, past and present. Keeping margins of error in mind, this helps determine the overall trend of public opinion.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208738/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicole Satherley works for iNZight Analytics which designs and undertakes research, but not market or polling research.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Sporle works for and owns shares in iNZight Analytics and Matau Analytics which design and undertake research, but not market or polling research. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lara Greaves consults to iNZight Analytics and works for/owns share in Demos and Data which both design and undertake research, but not market or polling research. She is a member of the Independent Electoral Review panel (this article in no way represents the views of the panel). </span></em></p>Political polls can make for dramatic headlines. But they are a snapshot of when they were taken, not a predictor of election outcomes. Follow these expert tips to make sense of the stats.Nicole Satherley, Honorary Academic in Psychology, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata RauAndrew Sporle, Honorary Associate professor, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata RauLara Greaves, Associate professor, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of WellingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1881872022-08-04T15:49:59Z2022-08-04T15:49:59ZBeyoncé is cutting a sample of Milkshake out of her new song – but not because she ‘stole’ it<p>There was lot of excitement leading up to Beyoncé’s album Rennaissance, which was <a href="https://variety.com/2022/music/news/beyonce-renaissance-leak-1235327192/">leaked two days before it release</a>. Maybe it could have done with a bit more time, as two songs are set to be rerecorded and released. The song Heated will have <a href="https://www.insider.com/beyonc-remove-ableist-lyric-heated-renaissance-2022-8">ableist language</a> removed from it, while the song Energy will be rerecorded without one of the samples on which it is built.</p>
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<p><em>You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/audio-narrated-99682">here</a>.</em></p>
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<p>This second change has been portrayed as a response to the singer Kelis calling the use of the sample “<a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/beyonce-removes-kelis-interpolation-energy-1235121669/">theft</a>”, and to Beyoncé “allegedly failing to seek permission for usage”. But that’s not actually true. While Kelis might not have been paid for the sample – and that is an issue – that’s to do with her legal contract with her producers, not a failure on Beyoncé’s part.</p>
<p>Kelis is the performer of Milkshake, which was released in 2003. Now you might think she should be getting money for any use of the song. However, the credits and the royalties for Milkshake go to Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams, together known as The Neptunes, who reportedly wrote and produced it. </p>
<p>In the music industry, when a song is recorded it has two rights attached to it. One in the actual sound recording and one in the song itself. This is why Taylor Swift re-recorded and release her music to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB1nyP_O7II">reclaim her rights</a> in the sound recordings. She was the owner of the songs themselves but not the recordings, so she made new recordings. </p>
<p>These different rights are often owned by different people and are governed by contracts. So who owns what and how much they earn depends heavily on the agreement between the people involved.</p>
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<p>In 2020, Kelis revealed in an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/30/unmasked-singer-kelis-on-music-men-and-her-missing-money">interview</a> that she doesn’t make any money from her two albums produced by The Neptunes. She said that she was told everything would be split three ways and so didn’t double check when presented with the contract.</p>
<p>She was 19 at the time of signing the contract and claimed that she was “blatantly lied to and tricked” but didn’t notice at first because she had other sources of income, like from touring. “Their argument is: ‘Well, you signed it.’ I’m like: ‘Yeah, I signed what I was told, and I was too young and too stupid to double-check it.’” So, due to the contract, Kelis doesn’t have any copyright in the song Milkshake, or indeed much of her first and second albums. </p>
<p>In an <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2022/05/producer-chad-hugo-neptunes-interview-pharrell.html">interview </a> earlier this year with the culture publication Vulture, Hugo brushed off these comments: “I heard about her sentiment toward that. I mean, I don’t handle that. I usually hire business folks to help out with that kind of stuff.”</p>
<h2>Different type of samples</h2>
<p>The sample of “Milkshake” in Beyoncé’s new song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9rk6ldyFkA">Energy</a> is credited to Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams, but not Kelis. The Milkshake singer commented on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CgcSNyHsTVW/">Instagram</a>: “My mind is blown too because the level of disrespect and utter ignorance of all three parties involved is astounding.” And said that she found out about the sample use at the same time everyone else did.</p>
<p>This has happened because of the way that sample licensing works alongside the song rights and the sound recording rights. </p>
<p>When you sample directly, you take the sound recording and cut and paste it into a new song. This means you are using both the sound recording and the musical work, and so need permission from both owners. </p>
<p>For example, the artist Ashnikko recently directly sampled another hit song performed by Kelis – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3JFwd1bk4Q&ab_channel=KelisVEVO">Caught Out There</a>, taken from the same debut album Kaleidoscope – in her song <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=DXGelmwqfm4">Deal With it (feat. Kelis</a>). Williams and Hugo also both appear in the writing credits.</p>
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<p>Beyoncé, on the other hand, did not directly sample the sound recording, but instead recreated the sound herself, known as an interpolation. There are a number of reasons why a song creator might choose to use either a direct sample or an interpolation. It can relate to budget (unlikely in Beyoncé’s case), or artistic choice based on the meaning behind the use of the sample or the formation of the song. </p>
<p>For example, in a dance track it’s common to use the sound recording and lean towards more of a remix. Whereas an interpolation can be more about building on a theme or making a cultural reference. </p>
<p>An interpolation only requires clearance for the musical work that is usually owned by the publisher and credits the songwriters. Kelis is not credited as a songwriter and doesn’t own any of the publishing rights, so legally there was no requirement to clear the sample with her.</p>
<p>So Beyoncé may have decided to remove the sample due to the public backlash, or because she sympathised with Kelis. But it does not appear to have been for legal reasons and it certainly wasn’t the case that she stole the sample.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188187/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hayleigh Bosher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s not a copyright infringement, it’s a far more complicated and personal issue.Hayleigh Bosher, Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law, Brunel University LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1357842020-04-13T12:18:53Z2020-04-13T12:18:53ZWant to know how many people have the coronavirus? Test randomly<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327210/original/file-20200410-62889-1j61xqf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Polls and surveys use random sampling. Why not pandemic testing?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/pharmaceutical-gamble-royalty-free-image/116040073?adppopup=true">Gerville/E+ via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Consider these two questions: What percentage of Americans are, or have been, infected with the coronavirus? And, what is the probability of dying from the virus if you catch it? One of the most unsettling aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic is that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html">these two fundamental rates – the coronavirus infection rate and the case fatality rate – are not known</a>.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=Qkeb19oAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">political scientist</a> and an <a href="https://faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/daniel-rockmore">applied mathematician</a>, we are frequently asked to find rates of beliefs or opinions within larger groups. The same approaches we use for political polling can be used to answer how widespread and how deadly the coronavirus is. </p>
<p>Given infinite resources, the simplest way to find out how many Americans have the virus and what risk it poses would be to test every person in the United States. But there are not infinite resources, and testing for the coronavirus has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/21/coronavirus-testing-strategyshift/">been much more selective</a>. As of April 8, the CDC’s top priorities for testing are <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/priority-testing-patients.pdf">hospitalized patients and medical staff with symptoms</a>, and overall it is generally symptomatic people who have been tested.</p>
<p>Because of this selective testing, epidemiologists and public health officials in the U.S. simply do not know the true extent of the coronavirus’s penetration into the country – that is, the virus’s infection rate. And without knowing how many people have been infected, the case fatality rate – the probability of dying from the virus if you catch it – and many other statistics associated with the coronavirus are impossible to calculate. Fortunately, there is a straightforward way to learn how widespread and deadly COVID-19 really is: Test randomly.</p>
<h2>Testing the sick and symptomatic</h2>
<p>So why isn’t it possible to calculate the coronavirus’s infection and case fatality rates from the <a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily">millions of COVID-19 tests that have already been performed</a> in the United States? The problem lies not in the number of tests but rather in who has been tested. </p>
<p>Testing symptomatic patients reflects a classic error in sampling. Researchers want to know who has coronavirus, but since most of those tested have symptoms, medical professionals have been sampling from a group with higher rates of infection than you’d expect in the population as a whole. People with symptoms of COVID-19 are more likely to have COVID-19 than a person chosen at random.</p>
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<span class="caption">People who go for voluntary testing are more likely to be sick than a person chosen at random.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-Oklahoma/c533d6aa37dd4d5e8f8f84a8d052cc37/33/0">AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki</a></span>
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<p>The reasons for this selective testing are completely understandable. When testing is a scarce resource, people with COVID-19 symptoms should get tested so that <a href="https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/04/02/covid-19-science-why-testing-is-so-important">proper treatments can be offered and contact tracing can begin</a>. Additionally, time and numbers of health workers are both limited, and it is convenient to test people who show up at hospitals and doctor’s offices requesting to be tested. But people who show up at health facilities are more likely to be symptomatic and have COVID-19 in the first place.</p>
<p>The people tested for the coronavirus are not a good representation of the U.S. population at large. Therefore, the rate of infection and case fatality rate in this group do not represent the larger U.S. population. </p>
<h2>Random testing is representative testing</h2>
<p>The ability to test the entire population for the coronavirus <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-widespread-coronavirus-testing-isnt-coming-anytime-soon">may be a long way off</a>, but it isn’t necessary to test everyone in the U.S. to get accurate numbers. By testing a large enough number of people randomly, it is possible to get a sample group whose demographics are representative of the whole country. This is exactly how surveys and polls are done. </p>
<p>Public health officials could start randomly picking people from across the United States, testing them for the presence of the coronavirus, and then following up to see what fraction of those who tested positive for the coronavirus died from COVID-19. If random testing is done right, the infection and case fatality rates in the random sample should be very close to the actual rates in the whole U.S. population.</p>
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<p>So how many people do you need to randomly test to get data that can accurately describe the whole U.S.? Fortunately, the mathematics behind this question have long been worked out, and the number is probably smaller than you might think. </p>
<p>Presidential approval polls often <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/">sample roughly 1,000 people</a>. This produces a margin of error of approximately 3%, meaning that random chance could make the results off by up to 3%.</p>
<p>A margin of error of 3% may be fine for estimating presidential approval, but it is probably not accurate enough for the coronavirus pandemic. If 10,000 individuals in the U.S. were tested for the virus, the margin of error for the virus’s infection rate becomes 1%. In practice, these margins of error are conservative. Actual margins of error from a random sample of 10,000 individuals will probably be much smaller and likely accurate enough to start giving public health officials useful information about the total number of infected and case fatality rates for those who have the coronavirus.</p>
<p>Ten thousand may seem large, but as of April 8 the United States has <a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily">already tested more than 2 million people</a>. The key is in random selection. A sample of 10,000 Americans is most useful if those being tested are chosen by lottery.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327238/original/file-20200410-111327-72mbcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327238/original/file-20200410-111327-72mbcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327238/original/file-20200410-111327-72mbcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327238/original/file-20200410-111327-72mbcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327238/original/file-20200410-111327-72mbcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327238/original/file-20200410-111327-72mbcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327238/original/file-20200410-111327-72mbcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327238/original/file-20200410-111327-72mbcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">With good information about geographic and demographic distribution of the virus, aid can be redirected to areas that need it most.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-Washington/c39168fd374247328d3acb24de7a4f88/36/0">AP Photo/Elaine Thompson</a></span>
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<h2>Why these statistics matter</h2>
<p>With a national random sample, epidemiologists would be able to learn much more than just the total number of coronavirus cases and the virus’s case fatality rate in the U.S. People who are infected but not sick would be tested and the rate of asymptomatic cases could be determined. </p>
<p>This sample would also provide information with respect to geography, ethnicity and other demographic variables. There is already some data showing that certain demographics - namely <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/coronavirus-race.html">African Americans</a> and <a href="https://time.com/5815820/data-new-york-low-income-neighborhoods-coronavirus/">lower-income individuals</a> – are disproportionately affected by the virus. This suggests that the rates of infection of COVID-19 and its case fatality rate vary across different regions of the U.S. and across different subgroups of the country’s population. Random sampling could illuminate trends like these before the worst damage is done, and public health officials could enact targeted and nuanced policies to help high-risk groups or regions.</p>
<p>While random testing has not been part of the national discussion of the coronavirus, this may be changing. On April 4, Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton announced that her state is working with the CDC to <a href="https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/continuing-coverage/coronavirus/ohio-could-begin-random-covid-19-testing-of-general-population-in-near-future">develop a random sampling plan</a>. The goal of this project is to determine the true <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/04/ohio-plans-random-population-testing-to-help-determine-how-many-people-have-coronavirus.html">extent of the coronavirus in Ohio</a> without testing the whole state. </p>
<p>Public health officials have used randomization in other settings, such as monitoring the spread of <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.3201%2Feid0905.020428%20">typhoid fever in parts of Egypt</a>, and it works. The mathematics behind random sampling is foundational to many areas of polling and statistics. The only thing public health officials need to do is figure out the execution. Random testing is certainly possible in the U.S. and would provide valuable information to the public health officials who are fighting the coronavirus crisis.</p>
<p>[<em>Get our best science, health and technology stories.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/??utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-best">Sign up for The Conversation’s science newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135784/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Researchers and public health officials still don’t know how widespread nor how deadly the coronavirus really is. Random testing is a way to quickly and easily learn this important information.Daniel N. Rockmore, William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science, Associate Dean for the Sciences, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth CollegeMichael Herron, William Clinton Story Remsen '43 Professor of Government and Chair, Program in Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1344932020-03-26T14:58:32Z2020-03-26T14:58:32ZFunky Drummer: How a James Brown jam session gave us the ‘greatest drum break of them all’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/322611/original/file-20200324-155640-1ei5oj4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C10%2C1710%2C1609&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul VanDerWerf via Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Brown-American-singer">James Brown</a> released a seven-inch single called Funky Drummer in March, 1970 – a loosely arranged jam session showcasing the talent for improvisation of drummer <a href="https://www.moderndrummer.com/article/august-2017-clyde-stubblefield-remembered/">Clyde Stubblefield</a>, who was employed in Brown’s band at the time. </p>
<p>Although it failed to crack the top 50 pop charts on release, Funky Drummer was rediscovered in the 1980s by a generation of pioneering hip-hop artists. These have included Kool Moe Dee, Grandmaster Flash, Eric B. & Rakim, Run DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys – who all sampled Stubblefield’s infectious drum break. The Funky Drummer breakbeat soon spread far beyond hip-hop, appearing on well over 1,000 recordings by pop artists ranging from George Michael and Sinead O’Connor in the 1990s right up to Emeli Sandé and Ed Sheeran in the past decade.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-the-funky-drummer-the-most-exploited-man-in-modern-music-73473">The story of the funky drummer: the most exploited man in modern music</a>
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<p>Funky Drummer is one of the most sampled drum breaks of all time – and also one of the most discussed (including in my new book, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/kick-it-9780190683870">Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit</a>). It’s also a prime example of how copyright law has historically failed to compensate drummers. Stubblefield <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/arts/music/clyde-stubblefield-a-drummer-aims-for-royalties.html">famously never received any royalties</a> from all the hits his drum break was used on. </p>
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<p>James Brown typically <a href="https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=umeslr">paid his musicians on a “work-for-hire” basis</a> for recording sessions, and generally credited himself as the sole author of the resulting songs. This was the case even if the music was largely improvised, as in the case of Funky Drummer. It was also in keeping with copyright law conventions at the time, which usually recognised the legal author of a musical composition as the person who wrote <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42790899_Copyright_the_Work_and_Phonographic_Orality_in_Music">the topline melody and lyrics</a>.</p>
<h2>Anchor for a new sound</h2>
<p>Funky Drummer has various musical elements: simple repeating horn and guitar riffs, a syncopated wandering bass line, occasional instrumental solos on organ and saxophone, as well as vocal improvisations by Brown. We also hear Stubblefield’s performance underpinning the jam session, including the glorious moment when Brown orders the band to drop out while Stubblefield keeps drumming his highly inventive groove unaccompanied – the isolated drum “break” that hip-hop artists love to sample. </p>
<p>But Brown would have deemed all the above musical elements as insignificant compared to his own role as the artistic leader and frontman – this wasn’t necessarily fair, but neither was it uncommon. Ringo Starr did not receive co-writing credits for his drumming contributions on Beatles songs, for example, even though his drum parts have often been <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150707132204/http://www.pas.org/About/the-society/halloffame/StarrRingo.aspx">retrospectively deemed by musical peers</a> to constitute a distinct compositional element of the band’s work.</p>
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<p>Five decades on, in a pop soundscape utterly transformed by hip-hop culture, we now tend to recognise just how important a compelling drum beat is in making a chart hit. Most commercially successful music in the 21st century is anchored by the sounds of the kick drum, snare and cymbals (or electronic percussion serving similar functions). You can now point to plenty of contemporary chart hits that don’t feature an electric guitar, but there are almost none that don’t prominently feature a beat between kick and snare – whether acoustic, sampled or synthesised.</p>
<p>In the hit factories of the present day, the most successful pop artists <a href="https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191126-the-hidden-beat-makers-behind-musics-big-hits">often bring in producers</a> who have gained reputations by creating alluring beats. They often receive a formal share in songwriting credits as “co-writers” and “producers”. </p>
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<p>We also live in an era when it is increasingly expensive to gain legal permission to sample drum breaks from rights holders (usually songwriters and/or record companies, as opposed to drummers). This has led to a relatively hidden ancillary industry of “sample replay” companies that are hired to painstakingly rerecord well-known drum breaks (and other parts from guitar riffs to vocal samples). These are designed to resemble the original recordings as much as possible.</p>
<p>The rights to these copycat recordings are then bought wholesale and sampled instead of the originals (at least by the handful of pop stars with deep enough pockets to afford such tactics).</p>
<h2>Musical value</h2>
<p>One drummer making a living from sample replay is <a href="http://dylanwissing.com/">Dylan Wissing</a>, an American session musician who has re-recorded impeccable covers of famous drum breaks for the likes of Jay-Z, Kanye West, Drake, Eminem, Rick Ross, John Legend and Alicia Keys. Wissing also runs a website, <a href="https://www.gettingthesound.com">Getting The Sound</a>, which offers tutorials on how to “digitally recreate famous breakbeats” resulting in “a new recording of an existing audio recording that is sonically indistinguishable from the original”.</p>
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<p>Unsurprisingly, one such tutorial demonstrates how to reproduce Funky Drummer – “from choosing the instruments, tuning, muffling, and performance to miking the kit, treating the room and recording the drums for this iconic breakbeat masterpiece.”</p>
<p>The sample replay industry relies on the premise that a particular performance of a work cannot in itself be subject to copyright. Yet part of the legacy of Funky Drummer is the discourse and debate it has generated on exactly this point: everyone seems to agree that Stubblefield was not fairly remunerated for his creativity. But what would be the implications for musical culture if music copyright legislation was changed in his favour?</p>
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<p>Drumming performances are generally considered not to be musical compositions – and this is both a good thing and a bad thing. If every element of musical creation was locked down as a form of intellectual property – from a standard blues chord progression (upon which most blues songs are constructed) to a swinging ride cymbal pattern (the underlying rhythmic pulse upon which countless jazz compositions were built from the 1940s onwards) – we might conceivably be left with no freely available musical building blocks to make new compositions.</p>
<p>It’s a good thing that musicians can borrow, repurpose and build upon previous musical ideas without the fear of getting sued – that’s how new music gets made. But Funky Drummer raises a crucial question: where do we draw the line between a generic part and an original musical composition? This is the tension that Funky Drummer brings sharply into focus, and it is at the heart of understanding how we make sense of musical creativity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/134493/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matt Brennan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Clyde Stubblefield’s drumming has been sampled or imitated more than 1,000 times since it was recorded in 1970.Matt Brennan, Reader in Popular Music, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1057072018-11-01T10:49:34Z2018-11-01T10:49:34ZNumbers in the news? Make sure you don’t fall for these 3 statistical tricks<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243330/original/file-20181031-122177-1g4ryme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=565%2C195%2C3812%2C2802&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">If it seems too good to be true, maybe it is.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/asian-indian-business-people-holding-coffee-335519321">szefei/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/como-entender-las-cifras-en-las-noticias-tres-trucos-estadisticos-106206">Leer en español</a></em>.</p>
<p>“Handy bit of research finds sexuality can be determined by the lengths of people’s fingers” was <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/7512067/finger-length-sexuality-simon-cowell-norton/">one recent headline</a> based on a peer-reviewed study by well-respected researchers at the University of Essex <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1262-z">published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior</a>, the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/journal/0004-0002_Archives_of_Sexual_Behavior">leading scholarly publication</a> in the area of human sexuality. </p>
<p>And, to <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=UtiewDkAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">my stats-savvy eye</a>, it is a bunch of hogwash. </p>
<p>Just when it seems that news consumers may be wising up – remembering to ask if science is “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/014107680609900414">peer-reviewed</a>,” the sample size is big enough or who funded the work – along comes a suckerpunch of a story. In this instance, the fast one comes in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.292.6522.746">form of confidence intervals</a>, a statistical topic that no lay person should really ever have to wade through to understand a news article.</p>
<p>But, unfortunately for any number-haters out there, if you don’t want to be fooled by breathless, overhyped or otherwise worthless research, we have to talk about a few statistical principles that could still trip you up, even when all the “legitimate research” boxes are ticked.</p>
<h2>What’s my real risk?</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243017/original/file-20181030-76416-1d7g8gn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243017/original/file-20181030-76416-1d7g8gn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243017/original/file-20181030-76416-1d7g8gn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243017/original/file-20181030-76416-1d7g8gn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243017/original/file-20181030-76416-1d7g8gn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243017/original/file-20181030-76416-1d7g8gn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243017/original/file-20181030-76416-1d7g8gn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243017/original/file-20181030-76416-1d7g8gn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Yum?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/kaige/9989706193">Leo/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<p>One of the most depressing headlines I ever read was “<a href="https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/diet/eightyear-study-finds-heavy-french-fry-eaters-have-double-the-chance-of-death/news-story/1a557be079d7947380c90924dc2f0d15">Eight-year study finds heavy French fry eaters have ‘double’ the chance of death</a>.” “Ugh,” I said out loud, sipping my glass of red wine with a big ole basket of perfectly golden fries in front of me. Really?</p>
<p>Well, yes, it’s true according to a <a href="https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.117.154872">peer-reviewed study published</a> in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Eating french fries does double your risk of death. But, how many french fries, and moreover, what was my original risk of death? </p>
<p>The study says that if you eat fried potatoes three times per week or more, you will double your risk of death. So let’s take an average person in this study: a 60-year-old man. What is his risk of death, regardless of how many french fries he eats? One percent. That means that if you line up 100 60-year-old men, at least one of them will die in the next year simply because he is a 60-year-old man.</p>
<p>Now, if all 100 of those men eat fried potatoes at least three times per week for their whole lives, yes, their risk of death doubles. But what is 1 percent doubled? Two percent. So instead of one of those 100 men dying over the course of the year, two of them will. And they get to eat fried potatoes three times a week or more for their entire lives – sounds like a risk I’m willing to take.</p>
<p>This is a statistical concept called <a href="https://understandinguncertainty.org">relative risk</a>. If the chance of getting some disease is 1 in a billion, even if you quadruple your risk of coming down with it, your risk is still only 4 in a billion. It ain’t gonna happen.</p>
<p>So next time you see an increase or decrease in risk, the first question you should ask is “an increase or decrease in risk from what original risk.”</p>
<p>Plus, like me, could those men have been enjoying a glass of wine or pint of beer with their fried potatoes? Could something else have actually been the culprit? </p>
<h2>Eating cheese before bed equals die by tangled bedsheets?</h2>
<p>Baby boxes have become a <a href="https://www.ajc.com/news/national/what-baby-box-and-why-are-some-states-giving-them-new-parents/5Hh8Zk1AvhQd6p6IcNhXQI/">trendy state-sponsored gift</a> to new parents, meant to provide newborns with a safe place to sleep. The initiative grew from a Finnish effort started in the late 1930s to reduce sleep-related death in infants. The cardboard box includes a few essentials: some diapers, baby wipes, a onesie, breast pads and so on. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243021/original/file-20181030-76402-7atk0g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243021/original/file-20181030-76402-7atk0g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243021/original/file-20181030-76402-7atk0g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243021/original/file-20181030-76402-7atk0g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243021/original/file-20181030-76402-7atk0g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243021/original/file-20181030-76402-7atk0g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243021/original/file-20181030-76402-7atk0g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243021/original/file-20181030-76402-7atk0g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Contents of a Finnish ‘maternity package’ before a newborn baby moves in.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/roxeteer/2037806537">Visa Kopu/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<p>Finland’s infant mortality rate decreased at a rapid rate with the introduction of these baby boxes, and the country now has one of the <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?locations=FI">lowest infant mortality rates in the world</a>. So it makes sense to suppose that these baby boxes caused the infant mortality rate to go down.</p>
<p>But guess what also changed? <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39366596">Prenatal care</a>. In order to qualify for the baby box, a woman was required to visit health clinics starting during the first four months of her pregnancy.</p>
<p>In 1944, 31 percent of Finnish mothers received prenatal education. In 1945, it had jumped to 86 percent. The baby box was not responsible for the change in infant mortality rates; rather, it was education and early health checks.</p>
<p>This is a classic case of <a href="http://senseaboutscienceusa.org/causation-vs-correlation/">correlation not being the same as causation</a>. The introduction of baby boxes and the decrease in infant mortality rates are related but one didn’t cause the other.</p>
<p>However, that little fact hasn’t stopped baby box companies from popping up left, right and center, selling things like the “Baby Box Bundle: Finland Original” for a mere US$449.99. And <a href="https://ssir.org/articles/entry/us_states_embrace_baby_boxes">U.S. states use tax dollars</a> to hand a version out to new mothers.</p>
<p>So the next time you see a link or association – like how eating cheese is linked to dying by <a href="http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=7">becoming entangled in your bedsheets</a> – you should ask “What else could be causing that to happen?”</p>
<h2>When margin of error is bigger than the effect</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.htm">Recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics</a> show national unemployment dropping from 3.9 percent in August to 3.7 percent in September. When compiling these figures, the bureau obviously doesn’t go around asking every person whether they have a job or not. It asks a small sample of the population and then generalizes the unemployment rate in that group to the entire United States.</p>
<p>This means the official level of unemployment at any given time is an estimate – a good guess, but still a guess. This “plus or minus error” is defined by something statisticians call a <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability/confidence-intervals-one-sample">confidence interval</a>. </p>
<p>What the data actually says is that it appears the number of unemployed people nationwide <a href="https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpssigsuma.pdf">decreased by 270,000</a> – but with a margin of error, as defined by the confidence interval, of plus or minus 263,000. It’s easier to announce a single number like 270,000. But sampling always comes with a margin of error and it’s more accurate to think of that single estimate as a range. In this case, statisticians believe the real number of unemployed people went down by somewhere between just 7,000 on the low end and 533,000 on the high end.</p>
<p>This is the same issue that happened with the finger length defining sexuality study - the plus or minus error associated with these estimates can simply negate any certainty in the results. </p>
<p>The most obvious example of confidence intervals making our lives confusing is in polling. Pollsters take a sample of the population, ask who that sample is going to vote for, and then infer from that what the entire population is going to do on Election Day. When the races are close, the plus or minus error associated with their polls of the sample negate any real knowledge of who is going to win, making the races “too close to call.”</p>
<p>So the next time you see a number being stated about an entire population where it would have been impossible to ask every single person or test every single subject, you should ask about the plus or minus error.</p>
<p>Will knowing these three aspects of statistical misleads mean that you never get fooled? Nope. But they sure will help.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105707/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liberty Vittert does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Shrewd media consumers think about these three statistical pitfalls that can be the difference between a world-changing announcement and misleading hype.Liberty Vittert, Visiting Assistant Professor in Statistics, Washington University in St. LouisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/869192017-11-30T19:06:13Z2017-11-30T19:06:13ZFriday essay: the art of the pinch – popular music and appropriation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196826/original/file-20171128-28892-fob7n4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Rolling Stones performing in Hamburg during the 'No Filter' European tour: the band's legacy is entwined with the pioneers of black American music.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Morris Mac Matzen/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Everything old is new again. Today the Rolling Stones release <a href="http://www.rollingstones.com">On Air</a>, a collection of much-bootlegged BBC live studio broadcasts taped for a variety of programs between 1963 and 1965. The remastered set provides a rare glimpse of the young musicians playing to order the songs that defined their early hybrid sound and telegraphed – much like <a href="https://youtu.be/NO-HK_csGwk?t=2m39s">The Beatles</a> – their love for African-American music. </p>
<p>The recently restored archival recordings map their transition from astute performers of seminal black American blues and roots music to legitimate codifiers of its (mostly white) bastard offspring. From I Can’t Be Satisfied to (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, from Route 66 to 2120 South Michigan Avenue. Full circle, full steam ahead.</p>
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<p>The release of these archival recordings, following on from last year’s bristling <a href="https://youtu.be/lrIjMzBr-ck">Blue & Lonesome</a> set and the recent <a href="https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-rolling-stones/2017/u-arena-nanterre-france-3e3c5af.html">nostalgia-laden</a> #NoFilter tour are a reminder of how entwined the band’s legacy is with the pioneers of black American music. From their Delta roots to their electric spirit animal offspring - Chicago and West Coast blues, Stax and Motown soul and early Sun and Chess rock ‘n roll - the old masters had cast a wicked spell over the young lads from Dartford. This, of course, is in stark contrast to the saccharine <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/lfsxC11Rjlppn1kDfNxYBc/how-to-listen-to-radio-2-50s">radio programming</a> Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had grown up with in the 1950s in which appropriating another person’s culture and creative output had turned an artistic endeavour into a form of soft-manufacturing. </p>
<p>Music production became a <a href="http://50spopmusic.com/50snoveltysongsmore/50scoverrecordings.html">lucrative industry</a> with straight-edge white performers like <a href="https://youtu.be/ZgdufzXvjqw">Bill Hayley</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/IEtBdOpM3MY">Perry Como</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/Z8dx0oE--VI">Pat Boone</a> cutting sanitised versions of <a href="https://youtu.be/jqxNSvFMkag">Little Richard</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/Y9wTQsAgktg">Big Joe Turner</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/xbfMlk1PwGU">Fats Domino</a> records when the original renditions were still fighting their way up the pop charts. As Richard explained in the Chuck Berry documentary <a href="http://www.bnd.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/answer-man/article134070984.html">Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Then here come Pat Boone. The white kids wanted mine, ’cause it was real rough and raw, and Pat Boone had this smooth version. And so, the white kids would take mine and put it in the drawer and put his on top of the dresser. I was mad. When Pat Boone covered my record, I was mad, I wanted to get him. I said, ‘I’m goin’ to Nashville to find him’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cultural appropriation in a musical context doesn’t have to be at the exclusion of the original artist or the culture from which they carved their path. Pinching musical phrases and stylistic approaches – when done thoughtfully and with a desire to connect with the original work’s unique properties – has always been a part of the <a href="https://austinkleon.com/steal/">art making</a> process. </p>
<p>And yet, as artists like the Stones and the Beatles have demonstrated, it should not be a closed circuit. It should manifest itself as a social and artistic conversation across languages, across media, and across generations - a form of cultural exchange. Although, as Keith Richards discovered when working with Chuck Berry in the late 1980s, getting it right <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/chuck_berry_takes_keith_richards_to_school_shows_him_how_to_rock_1987.html">ain’t always easy</a>. There is inevitably a price to pay, and Richards more than anyone knows the score. For every lift, there is a link to the past – a debt owed and a palm to grease. With every lick comes a nod and a cheeky wink.</p>
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<h2>A medium of social exchange</h2>
<p>The production of culture is very much informed by the technology that enables it.
The Philadelphia and New York disco movement, for instance, were as much a technological evolution as a dance floor phenomena. Legendary DJs such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie_Knuckles">Frankie Knuckles</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Levan">Larry Levan</a> would isolate, cut, loop and layer sounds using reel-to-reel tapes to create <a href="https://youtu.be/VFjJo4Id0_k">extended remixes</a> to maximise a track’s <a href="http://www.dummymag.com/lists/the-10-best-original-disco-remixes-according-to-joey-negro">dancefloor credentials</a>.</p>
<p>In much the same way, hip hop culture helped facilitate the emergence of the remix as a technological act via turntablism, scratching and later sampling. Inevitably, pinching the break or the intro or a signature moment and re-purposing it would evolve into an art form. By dropping musical fragments into new material arrangements, disco and hip-hop DJs from <a href="http://www.sfweekly.com/music/allshookdown/hey-dj/jim-hopkins-significance-san-francisco-disco-preservation-society-project/">the Bay</a> to <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/8/11/16130976/44th-anniversary-birth-hip-hop-google-doodle">the Island</a> devised an accessible production methodology that would translate seamlessly into the post-analogue world. </p>
<p>Producers like Danger Mouse (<a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/SoulCoolRecords/danger-mouse-the-grey-album/">The Grey Album</a>) and The Avalanches (<a href="https://youtu.be/qLrnkK2YEcE">Since I Left You</a>) and mash-up artists like Girl Talk (<a href="https://youtu.be/HprWyS25um4">Feed the Animals</a>) and Tom Caruana (<a href="https://tomcaruanamashups.bandcamp.com/album/black-gold-11">Black Gold</a>) are the millennial cut and paste inheritors of this practice.</p>
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<p>The digital remix not only accelerated modes of cultural exchange but made possible an almost infinite splintering of sub genres and associated sub cultures. What makes hip hop culture so important – and this is analogous to the Stones – is that in the beginning, DJs like DJ Kool Herc borrowed from music that was not only underrepresented on mainstream radio, but was made by revered funk and soul artists - the so called “<a href="https://youtu.be/Rm3J5640jXo">the sacred crates</a>. Kool Herc championed records by James Brown, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Castor">The Jimmy Castor Bunch</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymande">Cymande</a> (UK), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incredible_Bongo_Band">The Incredible Bongo Band</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Huey_%26_the_Babysitters">Baby Huey & The Babysitters</a>.</p>
<p>Music is also a medium of social exchange, we can see (and hear) this in the evolution of not only disco and hip hop but also in Jamaican sound system culture of the 1950s. <a href="http://www.mixdownmag.com.au/musicology-history-sound-clash-culture">Sound clashes</a> were inherently socio-political events organised as mass gatherings around big speakers and big sounds and big ideas. In essence, a sound clash was a competition between sound system crews who marshalled speaker stacks, often on the back of trucks, spinning imported American R&B records and later dub plates of exclusive <a href="https://youtu.be/D3DAHAPLaVI">Ska</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/jPbxW_TAdz0">Rocksteady</a> mixes. It was sonic <a href="https://youtu.be/Emo_R_oiyhw">warfare</a>. DJs and MCs - like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Matchuki">Count Machuki</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxsone_Dodd">Clement "Coxsone” Dodd</a> - became local superstars who cultivated their own sounds. From Jamaican Sound System culture we can mark the emergence of brand new sonic techniques like scratching (Lee “Scratch” Perry), beat boxing (Machuki), the break (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Kool_Herc">Kool Herc</a>) and the remix (<a href="http://www.factmag.com/2015/05/19/king-tubby-beginners-guide-dub-reggae/">King Tubby</a>). </p>
<p>These musical innovations became statements of Caribbean identity. Like African and Cuban rhythms that migrated to the Americas, these sounds became migratory too, travelling with West Indian migrants to the UK, leaking into the sonic palette of predominately white groups such as <a href="https://youtu.be/T_srIE-YAb8">Madness</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/GNglPFYjFGA">The Pretenders</a>, The Specials, <a href="https://youtu.be/zPwMdZOlPo8">The Police</a> and of course <a href="https://youtu.be/nLVJQFJJQjc">The Clash</a>. These would later mutate into more distilled contemporary forms such as Dub, Jungle and Drum & Bass. </p>
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<h2>A cultural awakening</h2>
<p>The release of On Air by the Rolling Stones is indicative of a recurrent theme of the group not only appropriating African American musical stylings, lyrical patterns and performative techniques but pointing audiences to the source. Whether it be in the mimicry of Chuck Berry <a href="https://youtu.be/0Dv_z_99rJg">guitar phrases</a>, the <a href="https://youtu.be/dqiHRYjePBk?t=1m17s">jungle rhythms</a> of Bo Diddley, the vocal mannerisms of Jimmy Reed or the lyrical misogyny of <a href="https://youtu.be/GtRxJDb3vlw">Sonny Boy Williamson</a>, the band has always worn its passion for the source material like <a href="https://youtu.be/gWBS0GX1s9o">a badge of honour</a>. </p>
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<p>The Stones’ breakout tours of the US and Europe (1967-72) are indicative of this dogged commitment to the form. They stacked their support act packages with African American artists such as Taj Mahal (1968), Ike and Tina Turner (upon whom Jagger is <a href="https://www.biography.com/video/tina-turner-mick-jaggers-moves-6816835702">rumoured</a> to have based his raunchy stage persona), BB King (1969), Buddy Guy (1970), and Stevie Wonder (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones_American_Tour_1972#Tour_support_acts">1972</a>). As Guy <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/buddy-guy-on-the-rolling-stones-they-were-so-damn-wild-20150707">remarked recently</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>They were bigger than bubble-gum … when they came to America, they recognized some of the greatest musicians that I had admired – Ike and Tina Turner, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf – and let America know who we were. They let white America know what the blues is. We owe those guys all the thanks in the world. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The American tours of the early 1970s took place in a politically charged atmosphere of racial division, sexual awakening and inter-generational conflict. A time when white American audiences were still reconciling with the notion that culture was a form of identification, of exchange, a mode of storytelling rooted in race, identity, faith, sex and – after Dylan via Guthrie – politics. </p>
<p>It was also a period of cultural awakening, as a rich lineage of African American music - which had given the world fiercely original artists such as Robert Johnson, Billy Holiday, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Chuck Berry - was now being commodified for new audiences by a new industry and a new genre of musical expression. </p>
<h2>An open source ‘cookbook of rock’</h2>
<p>The musical tool kit the latter artists laid bare – open tunings, a swinging back-beat, bending notes, long form improvisation, call and response, vocal phrasings, urban storytelling, spiritual empowerment, stage theatrics and of course overt sexual bravado were all mutated into this musical progression.</p>
<p>Bands like the Stones, The Animals, Fleetwood Mac, Cream and later Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead appropriated many of these elements to design an open source Cookbook of Rock – flexible enough that it would facilitate decades of experimentation and manipulation, yet well-enough defined so that it would require devotion and authenticity to pull off a lick with your chops and dignity still intact.</p>
<p>Bo Diddley, the original “guitar slinger” – and by his own admission, “the man” – was one of rock and roll’s true technical innovators who has a very <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/arts/pioneer-of-a-beat-is-still-riffing-for-his-due.html">different take</a> on this. </p>
<p>Speaking to the New York Times in 2003, he made it quite clear who were the beneficiaries of this process: “I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob”. </p>
<p>Accusations of appropriation have, of course, dogged Led Zeppelin, with several claims that they lifted song parts and lyrics without <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/4/12/11413242/led-zeppelin-rip-offs">accreditation or acknowledgement</a> (although <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-36611961">a court cleared the band of plagiarism </a>in relation to Stairway to Heaven in 2016). The argument they proffer in their defence, that the pinch was more like a sample and that the result was a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/apr/12/led-zeppelin-other-peoples-records-transformed-borrowed">considerable transformation</a> of the original, is consistent with the conceit of musical appropriation as an artistic prerogative. Yet it would seem that Zeppelin were <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/led-zeppelins-10-boldest-rip-offs-20160622">more brazen than most</a>.</p>
<h2>Cultural forms as fashion accessories</h2>
<p>The brashness of <a href="http://turnmeondeadman.com/led-zeppelin-plagiarism-the-lemon-song/">Page and Plant</a> displays a degree of insensitivity and perhaps white privilege that lies at the heart of the contemporary <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/magazine/is-cultural-appropriation-always-wrong.html">cultural appropriation debate</a>. </p>
<p>We have seen recently – from bindis at <a href="http://www.thegloss.com/fashion/selena-gomez-kendall-jenner-coachella-bindis-photos/">Coachella</a> to American Indian regalia at <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/feathers-not-allowed-at-burning-man-2013-9?r=US&IR=T">Burning Man</a> – how racial and cultural forms have been commodified and trashed as fashion accessories to serve bizarre notions of connectedness, freedom and belonging. Most prominently, this is exploited by art directors and marketing departments to window dress pop music by highly visible major label music acts who probably should know better in the Twenty-Teens.</p>
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<p>Indian and Hindu culture gets the full treatment in the ethno-confused art direction of Coldplay and Beyoncé’s promo clip for the song, <a href="https://youtu.be/YykjpeuMNEk?t=2m56s">Hymn for the Weekend</a>, that portrays <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music/96505762/artist-challenges-cultural-appropriation-in-coldplay-and-beyonce-music-video">Indian stereotypes</a> – like “levitating gurus, slum dogs, and throwing coloured powder” – in a manner that, according to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/01/coldplay-beyonce-hymn-for-the-weekend-cultural-appropriation-india">Rashmee Kumar</a>, stifles critical thinking about India’s social and political climate. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Coldplay’s video romanticizes Hinduism to further exoticize India as a westerners’ paradise unsullied by harsh realities.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We see this time and again in the mish-mash of Asian referencing in productions featuring <a href="https://youtu.be/YqeW9_5kURI?t=2m12s">Major Lazer & DJ Snake</a> (India), <a href="https://youtu.be/cI1A405jBqg?t=30s">Iggy Azalea</a> (India, again) and Katy Perry’s <a href="https://youtu.be/iXqcjgX-I9E">bizarre appearance</a> as a Geisha at the American Music Awards. </p>
<p>Epitomising this trend is John Mayer’s video clip, <a href="https://youtu.be/NyCst7We6Uw?t=46s">Still Feel Like Your Man</a>, a musical performance he <a href="https://splinternews.com/john-mayer-veers-very-close-to-becoming-woke-before-pla-1793859259">confusingly labels</a> “disco dojo” and “ancient Japanese R&B”. Although the clip is emblematic of this creative clumsiness by major artists, the music press at the time went along for the ride. <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/watch-john-mayer-dance-through-colorful-still-feel-like-your-man-video-w475183">Rolling Stone</a> magazine called the clip “colourful” while <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/7751633/john-mayer-still-feel-like-your-man-video">Billboard</a> magazine repeated Mayer’s mixed Japanese metaphor, adding that the Mister Whitmore directed clip is “decorated with kimonos, dancers in panda bear costumes, swordfighting and bamboo trees” despite the obvious contradiction that Panda bears are traditionally from China.</p>
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<p>Music journalist Touré cuts to the chase saying Mayer is “not racist, he is dumb on race”. In just <a href="https://twitter.com/Toure/status/8908255074">one tweet</a> Touré calls out Mayer’s ill-informed approach to not only the video’s production design but even the song’s origins, which evidently have more to do with Katy Perry’s old <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/john-mayer-katy-perry-song-about-hoarding-shampoo-bottles/">shampoo bottles</a> than the origins of global Asian culture. The West’s colonial view of the East however has always been perverted, as Malek Alloula wrote in <a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/210962991/Alloula-Malek-The-Colonial-Harem">The Colonial Harem</a> back in 1981, the Orient</p>
<blockquote>
<p>has fascinated and disturbed Europe for a long time. It has been its glittering imaginary and its mirage.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pop culture is the messiness between the concentric orbits of personal identity and collective history. When appropriation is done well, with a quest for knowledge or to seek out an emotional core or a narrative truth, this messiness can create new meanings and new partnerships. It might even construct new narratives and spawn new beginnings.</p>
<p>When it is done in an ill-informed, shallow, tokenistic manner, it only serves to perpetuate tired yet stubbornly persistent colonial, racial and patriarchal stereotypes.</p>
<h2>An informed practitioner</h2>
<p>Jagger and Richards are not alone in their quest for authenticity and musical integrity. Many productive relationships were forged between African American musicians and their British disciples in the Sixties. Studious artists such as The Beatles, Eric Burdon, Ray Davies, Eric Clapton, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mayall">John Mayall</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Green_(musician)">Peter Green</a> well understood the burden of institutional oppression and the insult of segregation that framed the Blues narrative. Eric Clapton in particular, when not flirting with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_(Eric_Clapton_album)">radio schmaltz</a>, has spent a large part of his career trying to perfect the performance stylings and musical arrangements of artists such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_King">Freddy King</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson">Robert Johnson</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Fulson">Lowell Fulson</a>. </p>
<p>Listen for instance to Clapton’s extraordinary <a href="https://youtu.be/70sPbNJt5ZQ">vocal</a> performance and brutal <a href="https://youtu.be/g_WUdmwC9Y8">guitar</a> playing on his late career electric blues covers album <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Cradle">From the Cradle</a>.</p>
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<p>In the swinging London of the Sixties, Clapton’s chariot swung low, he understood better than anyone the importance of cultural exchange – of being in the moment, of finding the sound, of going deep. For Clapton, the moment had to be real. He devised his own version of the power-trio band format after seeing the Buddy Guy trio tear up a club in London in 1965. </p>
<p>A year later, at the Regent Street Polytechnic, the roles were reversed when he witnessed the <a href="https://youtu.be/KPJgtQwtVVA">Hendrix phenomena</a> first hand. At the bequest of manager Chas Chandler, Hendrix was invited to jam with Clapton’s new outfit, The Cream. However, Hendrix’s incendiary version of <a href="https://youtu.be/hMkdhVQMBHY">Killing Floor</a> shocked Clapton so completely that he retreated backstage, later confronting Chandler with the <a href="https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/12/hey-jimi">immortal line</a>: “You never told me he was that fucking good.”</p>
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<p>Clapton was knowledgeable enough, however, to understand the lineage back to Buddy Guy and to Otis Rush <a href="https://youtu.be/j082opb4AZo">and the rarefied realm</a> within which these artists operated. Like Clapton before him, Hendrix’s brief London period was very much about research and experimentation. He grabbed what he could – sounds, rooms, gadgets, people, the air itself – to create the colours he saw in his head and by doing so blowing everyone’s mind in the process. </p>
<p>Keith Altham a writer for the New Musical Express at the time, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/aug/08/jimi-hendrix-40th-anniversary-death">remembers Hendrix</a> as </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a magpie. He would take from blues, jazz – only Coltrane could play in that way – and Dylan was the greatest influence. But he’d listen to Mozart, he’d read sci-fi and Asimov and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Today, if Hendrix were to be studying his Masters at the Melbourne Conservatorium, we would call him an informed practitioner. Back then he was a seasoned professional working in relative anonymity in the hotbed of London with the support of Misters Clapton, Chandler, Jones and McCartney.</p>
<p>Today, magpie extraordinaire Bob Dylan – rock’s first <a href="https://theconversation.com/bob-dylans-nobel-speech-a-splendidly-eccentric-performance-78998">poet Laureate</a>, pirate, cowboy, the joker and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/06/bob-dylan-nobel-spark-notes-plagarism/530283/">the thief</a> in the night – has spent the last two decades reverting to the ramshackle rhythm and blues template of the old masters. His Never Ending tour has become a quest for authenticity via a re-imagining of his back catalogue through the DNA of rhythm and blues. Purists take note.</p>
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<p>So, it comes down to this notion of being informed and knowledgeable about the origins of cultural idioms that are being appropriated that defines music making and performance. Its evolution is an often lawless and contested process of cultural and technical mutation - a hack of the circuits, a pinch of the code. </p>
<p>In the first instance, something has to be identified as being worthy of emulation or adaptation, and in turn, something then has to be gained from the act of appropriating it. The art form must evolve, diversify, move forward, or – as the case is with Hendrix – take a giant leap into the future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86919/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mitch Goodwin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Pinching musical phrases and stylistic approaches has always been a part of art making and can be a respectful exchange. But shallow, ill-informed appropriation only perpetuates tired stereotypes.Mitch Goodwin, Curriculum Design Lab, Faculty of Arts, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/749352017-03-24T16:36:24Z2017-03-24T16:36:24ZThe sound of SID: 35 years of chiptune’s influence on electronic music<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162070/original/image-20170322-31187-qso1wa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=16%2C21%2C783%2C622&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The MOS 6581 or SID to his friends.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">C64wiki</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It can be hard to write about the music of videogames while we are bathed in the projected glory of today’s high-definition, 4K, 60-frames-per-second photorealistic graphics. And given that in the roots of videogaming we find an often eerily quiet world, perhaps it’s not surprising that we sometimes forget that there’s an audio in audio-visual. </p>
<p>The earliest videogames, such as <a href="http://museum.mit.edu/150/25">Spacewar!</a>, created at MIT in 1962, had no sound at all. While this might be seen as a ruthless dedication to authenticity (after all, in space no one can hear you scream) in reality, it was due to technical limitations. A decade later, things were not much different: the first home console, the <a href="http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1302004">Magnavox Odyssey</a>, introduced a generation to the thrills of electronic gameplay without so much as a beep. This was a quiet revolution. Even the phenomenally successful <a href="http://oldcomputers.net/atari-vcs.html">Atari VCS/2600</a> put graphics before sound and sound before music. It did a good line in raucous engine noises and explosions but was <a href="http://www.tagg.org/xpdfs/kcflat2.pdf">not especially musician-friendly</a>, nor particularly listener-friendly.</p>
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<p>Quoted in <a href="http://www.ipgbook.com/commodore-products-9780986832260.php?page_id=32&pid=VAR">Brian Bagnall’s history of Commodore</a> electronics engineer Rob Yannes summed up the situation: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I thought the sound chips on the market, including those in the Atari computers, were primitive and obviously had been designed by people who knew nothing about music.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fortunately, Yannes did know something about music, as well as semiconductors and designing chips. And so in 1981 he began work on what would arguably become the most important milestone in videogame music and one whose influence still resonates to this day: the MOS Technology 6581, also known as the Sound Interface Device, but much better known as the SID. </p>
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<span class="caption">The C64 home computer was, in the right hands, a powerful synthesizer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Commodore64.jpg">Bill Bertram</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>As the sound chip in the <a href="http://oldcomputers.net/c64.html">Commodore 64</a> – <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/05/09/commodore.64.reborn/">the best-selling home computer and games machine of all time</a> – the SID was remarkably sophisticated: a well-specified synthesizer with features more usually found on cutting-edge electronic keyboards of the time such as the <a href="http://www.vintagesynth.com/moog/moog.php">Mini Moog</a> and <a href="http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/jup8.php">Roland Jupiter 8</a>. Although it was designed to be part of a home computer, the SID chip was above all a musical instrument – but at US$595 for a C64 compared to US$5,195 for a Jupiter 8, it came at a fraction of the price.</p>
<p>Technically the SID is a three-voice synthesizer module – it can play three sounds simultaneously. They can each be one different note, played together as a three-note chord. Or they can be three different sounds, such as a bass, a melody and a harmony. But three voices, and only three – that is until a glitch in the chip was discovered that allowed <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfYsDQqzhk8">a fourth voice to play sampled drums or speech</a>. </p>
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<span class="caption">The MOS 6851 chip, or SID.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MOS6581_chtaube061229.jpg">Christian Taube</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Each of those voices can generate a sawtooth, variable pulsewidth, triangle or noise waveform, or an intriguing, unique and not well-documented combination of them. Various modulation effects can be applied to these voices to give bell-like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrQuR1LHAVI/">or other metallic effects</a>, or voices may be “hard-synced” together to create a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc91S1lrU1I">characteristic rasping sound</a> common in early electronic music solos. </p>
<p>The sound of the voices can be further contoured using an envelope generator capable of altering the sound’s attack (how quickly the sound grows once the note is played), decay (how quickly it tails off from peak to sustain level), sustain (the level while the note is held), and release (how quickly it tails off to nil), or through various filters (which due to manufacturing tolerances vary immensely in sound between different versions of the SID).</p>
<p>While the same “subtractive” synthesis techniques are used today, for anybody who has used even entry-level music production software such as Apple’s <a href="http://www.apple.com/mac/garageband/">Garageband</a>, with its huge library of acoustic and electronic instruments, drums and loops, the SID probably looks horribly limited. </p>
<h2>Musicianship vs limitations</h2>
<p>To surmount its limitations, one of the simplest strategy was to rapidly switch between sounds to simulate the effect of a larger palette of instruments. Listen to a piece like Rob Hubbard’s <a href="https://archive.org/details/C64GVA250-MontyOnTheRun">Monty on the Run</a>, for instance, and you’ll hear numerous short passages of just a few bars, shifting between different sounds which share the main melody. It’s as though members of a big band take turns to stand up and riff around the solo. </p>
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<p>Or composers could dig deeper into the SID’s synthesis capabilities, adding movement and interest by modulating the pulsewidth of a sound over time, creating a thicker, more dynamic effect. Composer Martin Galway was a master of this technique, which can be heard in tunes such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JScqpJ3XWw">Parallax</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRksQbrDprA">Wizball</a>, and his seminal <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3COzhLzfKoc">Ocean Loader music</a> that made waiting for a game to load from cassette a pleasure rather than a chore.</p>
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<p>More than any other technique, though, the use of arpeggiation was the SID chip’s – and by extension videogame music’s – most evocative and enduring sonic fingerprint. If you don’t recognise the term <a href="https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/understanding-music/arpeggios/">arpeggio</a>, you’ll recognise the effect: an often rapid sequence of rising and falling notes. From contemporary music a good example is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d020hcWA_Wg">Clocks by Coldplay</a>, but on the SID and other sound chips from home computers of the era, it’s the warbling sound of two or more <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLp8ErRj8s0">extremely rapidly alternating notes</a>. Rather than play the C, E, and G of a C-major chord and use up all three of SID’s previous voices, composers rapidly triggered each note in turn far faster than even the most nimble-fingered of musicians could perform. And thus, a three-note chord plays from just one voice.</p>
<h2>Musicianship vs programming</h2>
<p>If that seems straightforward remember that the SID wasn’t a synthesizer with a piano keyboard, but merely a chip inside the C64. There was no audio workstation software like <a href="https://www.steinberg.net/en/products/cubase/start.html">Cubase</a> or even a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9zmLQGBTIw">Tracker</a> to sequence the SID’s sounds. Although <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_W5kjEKaU">consumer programs and add-on devices would come later</a>, these were too inefficient for composers eking out every drop of the C64’s performance and embedding their music into games. For early C64 composers there were, in fact, no libraries, no middleware, no tools at all. The only way to make SID sing was through programming. </p>
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<p>If you wanted to be a videogame musician in the early 1980s, having a fantastic tune and even a Royal College of Music diploma meant nothing without some lateral thinking and a <a href="http://www.1xn.org/text/C64/rob_hubbards_music.txt">significant amount of programming skills</a>, because the SID chip <a href="http://www.ffd2.com/fridge/chacking/c=hacking5.txt">needed special software routines</a> to turn its potential into sound. You had to know how to compose both melodies and machine code.</p>
<p>Given these achievements, it’s no wonder that C64 musicians were well-known and well-respected. Alongside features on programmers such as Jeff Minter or Andrew Braybrook, SID composers such as Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway and Ben Daglish would grace the pages of magazines like <a href="http://www.zzap64.co.uk/">Zzap!64</a>, satisfying gamers’ interest in the technical prowess of their musical heroes.</p>
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<p>Each composer had their own unique and identifiable style that exploited different aspects of the SID chip and brought different musical sensibilities. Where Hubbard was the master of percussion with an ability to tease out complex rhythms, Galway’s deceptively simple, melodic compositions revealed the softer, more mellow side of the SID chip. So revered were their compositions that many players would buy games just for the music. In the world of 1980s computer gaming, these musicians were superstars.</p>
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<h2>A musical legacy Bob and SID would be proud of</h2>
<p>And they still are. The chiptune culture of music made with SID and other computer sound chips is alive and well. In fact, it’s probably stronger today than ever. The original themes are rearranged by their original composers and others and <a href="https://c64audio.com/collections/live-events/back-in-time-live">played live at concerts</a>, even with <a href="http://www.gameconcerts.com/en/welcome/">symphony orchestras</a>. The <a href="http://www.hvsc.c64.org/">High Voltage SID Collection</a> has collected nearly 50,000 SID tunes, which can be replayed with <a href="http://www.hvsc.c64.org/#players">emulators made for modern computer and mobile platforms</a>.</p>
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<p>This isn’t just nostalgia. New SID tunes are being written by composers re-discovering the chip’s distinctive sonic quality. Chiptunes’ influence can be identified across electronic music through direct sampling, such as <a href="http://www.whosampled.com/sample/1032/Zombie-Nation-Kernkraft-400-David-Whittaker-Stardust/">Zombie Nation’s</a> use of <a href="http://www.c64.com/interviews/whittaker.html">David Whittaker’s</a> tune from the C64 game Lazy Jones, producer Timbaland’s sampling of a <a href="https://casetext.com/case/kernal-records-oy-v-timbaland">SID tune by Finnish musician Janne Suni</a> for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Asy6Cpbtwfs">Do It by Nelly Furtado</a>, or <a href="http://drownedinsound.com/news/3491735-glitch-thieves--crystal-castles-admit-8-bit-theft">Crystal Castles’ pillaging of 8-bit chiptune sounds</a>. </p>
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<p>But more so, the hyperactive sounds of the SID have become part of the lexicon of electronic music-making. Sample libraries for modern music software <a href="https://puremagnetik.com/products/eight-bit-sid-commodore-ableton-live-pack-kontakt-instrument-apple-logic-samples">include SID and chiptune sounds</a> alongside other archetypes of modern electronic music such as the classic sounds of the <a href="http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/303.php">Roland TB-303</a> bass station and <a href="http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/808.php">TR-808</a> and <a href="http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/909.php">TR-909</a> drum machines. In fact, such is the popularity of the SID sound that you can buy <a href="http://twisted-electrons.com/therapsid/">hardware devices that include genuine SID chips</a> pulled from vintage C64s that can be integrated into <a href="http://busycircuits.com/alm012/">modular synthesizer</a> and studio setups, or <a href="http://www.plogue.com/products/chipsounds/">software emulations</a> that allow the gloriously lo-fi, 8-bit, ultra-fast arpeggios and barely intelligible digitised speech to be <a href="https://www.native-instruments.com/en/reaktor-community/reaktor-user-library/entry/show/8572/">reproduced with pristine fidelity</a>.</p>
<p>And as for Bob Yannes, father of SID, he was far from done. After Commodore he co-founded music technology company Ensoniq, which would go on to make an enormous impact on music-making again with the release of the <a href="http://www.vintagesynth.com/ensoniq/ens_mirage.php">Mirage sampler</a>. The Mirage was the first affordable digital sampler – one that musicians would use to capture and mash-up snippets of C64 tunes, ensuring that SID would never be silenced.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>James Newman will be hosting <a href="http://www.ludomusicology.org/past-events/ludo-2017/">Ludo2017, the Sixth Easter Conference on Video Game Music and Sound</a>, April 20–22 at Bath Spa University, UK.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74935/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Newman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From niche player to chart hit, the characteristic sound of videogames has had a considerable influence on music.James Newman, Professor of Media, The Digital Academy, Bath Spa UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/734732017-03-02T10:51:39Z2017-03-02T10:51:39ZThe story of the funky drummer: the most exploited man in modern music<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158774/original/image-20170228-13104-6vw9xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Former James Brown drummer Clyde Stubblefield playing in 2005.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pavdw/5580394474/in/photolist-9v7YRQ-8Ub1MB-8Ue6ud-8Ub1mi-8YgFJk-Kz7qj-716jCM-71ae3b-716oCa-4JeKPi-8Ue6zh-71agGf-716avX-71aaEm-716o2V-716m6v-71amrA-71abY3-716omx-716cnp-8xgYzy-696M6J-vpmahQ-usSYnd-71am2A">Paul VanDerWerf/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Give the drummer some”, said the voice of funk soul pioneer James Brown as it rang out above his band on the 1967 recording of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bztE5IbQOo">Cold Sweat</a>. The drummer in question was Clyde Stubblefield who <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/arts/music/clyde-stubblefield-a-drummer-aims-for-royalties.html">was said to be one of the most sampled and exploited musicians of all time</a>. </p>
<p>His playing on Cold Sweat established the rhythmic template for funk and is rightly regarded as being pivotal in the history of popular music. But it was his work on Brown’s Funky Drummer that would echo through the ages. A 20-second drum loop that would go on to be sampled <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/clyde-stubblefield-james-browns-funky-drummer-dead-at-73-w467805">on over 1,300 songs</a>, from <a href="http://www.whosampled.com/James-Brown/Funky-Drummer/sampled/?cp=11">Public Enemy and Beastie Boys to George Michael, Britney Spears and Ed Sheeran</a>. </p>
<p>So why did a musician who created one of the most memorable pieces of music of all time end up dying in relative poverty?</p>
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<p>Stubblefield’s position in music history is assured. But the fact remains that he was never properly compensated financially for his talent and innovation. He died on February 18 but before the end of his life had unpaid medical bills of $90,000. Before he died, Stubblefield revealed that his bills were settled by the late great Prince in an act of charity. He was one of the drummer’s greatest fans. So questions are now being asked as to what it was that Stubblefield was actually “given” by his employers and by the generation of musicians that seemingly so often took his labour for granted.</p>
<p>Stubblefield worked with James Brown from 1965-1971 having previously been the sticksman for soul legend Otis Redding. He was no newcomer to the music business and it was normal practice for musicians like Stubblefield to be paid a one-off fee for the recording. Despite making a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_55a_Sje0lY">critical contribution</a> to the record, he would not have retained any of the rights to his performance or his compositional contribution. Stubblefield spoke about Brown in the <a href="https://vimeo.com/9958864">PBS documentary Copyright Criminals (2009)</a>, saying: “He didn’t tell me what to play … I played what I felt but he owned it.” </p>
<p>His story may have gone unnoticed by the wider world were it not for the recording of Funky Drummer on November 20, 1969. It was a minor hit for for The Godfather of Soul. But five minutes and 34 seconds into the song, Stubblefield embarks upon a solo drum feature that launches both him and his drumming into the future, becoming a primary source in hip-hop’s development. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Funky Drummer drum loop.</span></figcaption>
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<p>This 20 seconds of music is propelled by a very straight and repetitive semiquaver/16th note hi-hat pattern with the bass drum emphasising the first two quavers/eighth notes of the bar. However, it is in the snare drum part where Stubblefield makes the magic happen. Its roots come from the New Orleans marching band tradition and it blends syncopations, ghost notes and rimshots into a compulsive rhythmic mix. The snare bounces off and against the straighter parts creating an addictively danceable beat that would prove irresistible to legions of hip-hop producers, DJs, rappers and pop artists. </p>
<p>“Breakbeats” (looped two-bar audio snapshots known as samples) from the solo became one of the rhythmic foundations of hip-hop and were used hundreds of times on tracks by artists including Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Ice Cube and Run DMC. The affordable new sampling technology such as the E-mu SP-1200 percussion sampler that emerged in the mid 1980s made this possible, building on the vinyl mixing innovations of hip-hop innovator DJ Kool Herc.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Public Enemy - Fight The Power.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, in the excitement surrounding the new hip-hop culture and associated technologies, few stopped to think about paying or crediting the artists who were being sampled. Stubblefield said:<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/arts/music/clyde-stubblefield-a-drummer-aims-for-royalties.html">“People use my drum patterns on a lot of these songs … They never gave me credit, never paid me. It didn’t bug me or disturb me, but I think it’s disrespectful not to pay people for what they use.”</a> It wasn’t long before the sample was being picked up by pop and rock producers – and so Stubblefield’s uncredited influence grew and grew.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5HswEQWMV24?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Ed Sheeran - Shirtsleeves which also samples Funky Drummer.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In another <a href="https://vimeo.com/995886">interview</a>, Stubblefield spoke about how the samplers sometimes tweaked his drum part, adding: “They can change the tone … they’ve got so much technology today they can make the speed go up … whatever they want to do with it, and I won’t even know it’s me … I prefer to get my name on the record saying this is Clyde playing … the money is not the important thing, just to get myself out in the world.”</p>
<p>Stubblefield was not alone in having his work sampled and reassembled into someone else’s creative vision. 1960s funk outfit The Winston’s “Amen” break from their track Amen, Brother, performed by drummer GC Coleman, has been used by acts as varied as NWA and Oasis and has been the basis for many hits. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32087287">Coleman also died homeless and broke</a> in 2006 without ever having been paid a cent for his efforts.</p>
<h2>Unsung heroes</h2>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqgjIdgyND","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Stubblefield and Colman were working in an era when it was hard for even big name artists to get the money they were owed – so for mere session musicians it would have been impossible. The music business is built upon the exploitation of copyrights and neither musician had any ownership of their most important work.</p>
<p>In some ways, that is still the accepted lot of the session musician. You sell your creativity and instrumental or vocal skills for a one-off fee. But without these musicians’ extraordinary rhythmic imaginations, the records that we have all been dancing to for the last 30 years would have been lacking that crucial funk factor. We should take our hats off to these unsung heroes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73473/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adrian York does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The recently deceased funk drummer Clyde Stubblefield created arguably the most sampled drum track in the history of popular music – but he rarely got the credit, or the payment, he deserved.Adrian York, Senior Lecturer in Commercial Music Performance, University of WestminsterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/685042016-11-09T21:52:47Z2016-11-09T21:52:47ZReports of the death of polling have been greatly exaggerated<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145314/original/image-20161109-19085-h0d3mg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Polls are best guesses, votes are real.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/South-Korea-2016-US-Election/9cfd103892dd4a5d98480b7cbbd63a87/1/0">AP Photo/Lee Jin-man</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The first words anyone spoke to me once the election results came in were “What went wrong?” To which I replied, “I was tired and had trouble tying my tie. I’ll fix it before I get to class.” Far from being sartorially flippant, the point I was making was this: Nothing went “wrong.” The polls worked like they were supposed to work. If there was a problem, it was in how they were used – and the fact that we all forgot they deal in probabilities and not certainties.</p>
<h2>Polling theory dictates the process</h2>
<p>In political polls, like those we’ve been subjected to for the past 11 months, pollsters seek to estimate the position of those who will vote in the election. This is a notoriously difficult target to hit; until we vote, we cannot be certain if we will vote. Because the population of “people who’ve cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election” does not yet exist, pollsters must draw their sample from some other – hopefully related – population. They could choose adults, registered voters, or likely voters. None of these sampled populations are identical to the target population. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145310/original/image-20161109-19062-1sj0xco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145310/original/image-20161109-19062-1sj0xco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145310/original/image-20161109-19062-1sj0xco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145310/original/image-20161109-19062-1sj0xco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145310/original/image-20161109-19062-1sj0xco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145310/original/image-20161109-19062-1sj0xco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145310/original/image-20161109-19062-1sj0xco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145310/original/image-20161109-19062-1sj0xco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">All these actual voters are the population pollsters are trying to approximate in their efforts.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/2016-Election-Michigan-Voting/99b8431004c248fe86ad2dbe3f81360a/56/0">Jacob Hamilton/The Saginaw News via AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>No sample can be exactly the same as the population of interest – and that difference is the source of a poll’s first structural source of uncertainty. However, methods exist to reduce structural bias by increasing the likelihood that our small sample is representative of the larger population. </p>
<p>The gold standard in terms of lowering bias is “simple random sampling.” In SRS, a sample is polled from the target population, wherein each person has the same probability of being selected, and the estimates reported are based solely on those polled. The beauty of a truly random sample is that it will, on average, give great estimates of the population. Its main problem is that it is heavily dependent on who winds up in the sample itself. This creates highly variable polls. </p>
<p>To control this variability, polling firms may use stratification – a process that attempts to weight the polls to match the demographics of the overall population. For instance, if 30 percent of voters are Republican and only 10 percent of your sample is, you’d increase the weight given to your Republicans’ responses to account for your poll having too few of them.</p>
<p>When done well, stratification reduces the inherent variability of poll results by exchanging some of that variability for bias. You’re swapping random error for systematic error. If your estimates of the proportion of voters who are Republican is wrong, your estimates are incorrectly weighted. </p>
<p>To make this concrete, simple random sampling estimates are like a pattern from a well-aimed shotgun. The average of the pattern is the center of the target, even if none of the shot actually hit it. Stratified sampling is like the pattern of a rifle: tight, but perhaps not centered on the target.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145311/original/image-20161109-19085-z012zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145311/original/image-20161109-19085-z012zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145311/original/image-20161109-19085-z012zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145311/original/image-20161109-19085-z012zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145311/original/image-20161109-19085-z012zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145311/original/image-20161109-19085-z012zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145311/original/image-20161109-19085-z012zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145311/original/image-20161109-19085-z012zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pollsters have to figure out how to reach the people they’re targeting.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/joethorn/117886479">Joe Thorn</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Getting the answers</h2>
<p>A second issue arises in contacting the sample.</p>
<p>The 2012 election showed that relying solely on landline telephones produces estimates that <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150615142851.htm">tend to overestimate Republican support</a>. On the other hand, calling cellphones is much more expensive.</p>
<p>Some polling organizations – including <a href="http://www.theecps.com/">Emerson College</a> – stayed with calling only landlines. Others called a set proportion of cellphones. <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/">Public Policy Polling</a> stuck with calling 80 percent landline and 20 percent cellphone throughout the election cycle. <a href="https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/">Monmouth University</a> tended closer to a 50-50 split.</p>
<p>Other firms gave up on the telephone altogether. <a href="https://blog.electiontracking.surveymonkey.com/2016/10/19/surveymonkey-election-tracking-methodology/">Survey Monkey</a> relied on their large database of online users. The <a href="http://graphics.latimes.com/usc-presidential-poll-dashboard/">University of Southern California</a> created a panel of approximately 3,000 people and polled the same group online throughout the cycle.</p>
<p>Be assured that in the weeks ahead, polling analysts will be looking at these different methods to determine which gave estimates closest to the eventual result. We can already draw some preliminary conclusions. One is that <a href="http://cesrusc.org/election/">the LA Times/USC poll</a>, which polled the same panel of people online over time, seems to have overestimated Trump support. Their final estimates were 48.2 percent Clinton and 51.8 percent Trump (as proportion of the two-party vote). The current popular vote is split 50.1 percent Clinton to 49.9 percent Trump.</p>
<p>A second takeaway is that the polls from Marist University, which contacted a blend of landline and cellphone users, may have come closest at the national level. <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article112635048.html">Their last estimates on November 3</a> had the national race at 50.6 percent Clinton and 49.4 percent Trump, as proportion of the two-party vote. </p>
<h2>The interpretation</h2>
<p>Once the polling firms produce their estimates, interpretation is in the hands of the various users.</p>
<p>From the standpoint of researchers, the polls gave what we wanted: data from which to gauge public opinion. After an excellent 2012 season, analyst Nate Silver put his reputation on the line with some decisions he made about <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-users-guide-to-fivethirtyeights-2016-general-election-forecast/">his estimation process</a>: he adjusted a smoothing parameter late in the election cycle. The effect made his polls more responsive to changes in the polls. Statistically speaking, this means Silver is assuming that people are less likely to change position early in the election cycle, but may change more easily later. </p>
<p>Among others, the Huffington Post accused him of “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nate-silver-election-forecast_us_581e1c33e4b0d9ce6fbc6f7f">putting his thumb on the scales</a>” in favor of Trump. However, Silver made his adjustments <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollsters-are-putting-a-thumb-on-the-scale/">to reflect observed human nature and action</a>. The results support him. Where the Huffington Post had predicted a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html">Clinton victory with 98 percent confidence</a>, Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gave her <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-election-update-theres-a-wide-range-of-outcomes-and-most-of-them-come-up-clinton/">only a 71 percent chance of winning</a>.</p>
<p>Using the various polls, most major sites had the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html">probability of a Clinton victory around 90 percent</a>. My own model put the probability at 80 percent.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145272/original/image-20161109-19051-h3nl7u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145272/original/image-20161109-19051-h3nl7u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145272/original/image-20161109-19051-h3nl7u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145272/original/image-20161109-19051-h3nl7u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145272/original/image-20161109-19051-h3nl7u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145272/original/image-20161109-19051-h3nl7u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145272/original/image-20161109-19051-h3nl7u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145272/original/image-20161109-19051-h3nl7u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Estimated electoral vote count at each point in the election cycle. Blue and red represent Clinton and Trump, respectively. Dark colors indicate a strong likelihood of that electoral vote belonging to the candidate, light colors indicate a lower probability. Gray indicates tossup electoral votes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ole J. Forsberg</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From the standpoint of the media, the polls provided a great narrative, a story to tell and motivate their readers. Most major news organizations included <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/clinton-trump-even-in-ohio-and-florida-two-days-before-election-cbs-poll/">standard boilerplate</a> about the polls being estimates, that they have a margin of error and that the margin of error holds 95 percent of the time.</p>
<p>However, in many cases, journalists didn’t seem to understand what those words meant. If the margin of error is +/- 2.5 and the support for Clinton drops 2 percent, that’s not a statistically significant change. There is no evidence that it is anything more than background noise. If the margin of error is +/- 2.5 and the support for Trump rises 3 percent, that is a statistically significant change. However, as this margin of error is measured at the 95 percent level of confidence, even those “significant changes” are wrong 5 percent of the time.</p>
<p>To help solve these problems, I think journalists covering elections should take a statistics course or a polling course. There is information in the numbers, and it behooves us all to understand what it does and does not say.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145312/original/image-20161109-19089-1pq02wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145312/original/image-20161109-19089-1pq02wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145312/original/image-20161109-19089-1pq02wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145312/original/image-20161109-19089-1pq02wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145312/original/image-20161109-19089-1pq02wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145312/original/image-20161109-19089-1pq02wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145312/original/image-20161109-19089-1pq02wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145312/original/image-20161109-19089-1pq02wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Processing news that the polls didn’t seem to predict.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/SIPA-Anthony-Behar-Sipa-USA-A-PA-USA-18842987/585ec9e07a6441e29db1b7fd20373603/258/0">Sipa USA via AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Finally, as with the media, the polls gave the public a great story, one that could support their views – as long as they chose the “right” polls and ignored the “wrong” ones. In 2012, many on the right <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/251413-gop-takes-aim-at-skewed-polls">claimed the polls were skewed</a>. Once the election was over and the postmortems done, we found out they actually were, just <a href="https://www.campaignsandelections.com/campaign-insider/study-tells-pollsters-call-more-cellphones">not in the direction Republicans had claimed</a>.</p>
<p>The story line of skewed polls was never rebutted in the minds of the general population. As a result, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/donald-trump-polls-bias-224903">confidence in polls</a> remains very low. It’s becoming more common for people to see polling as unethical and as a tool that <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/10/12/pat-caddell-nbcwsj-poll-unprecedented-unethical-intended-push-trump-done-narrative/">advances a particular narrative</a>. </p>
<p>And in fact, many polls are performed to push a political view. The <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/mccain200411">push polling in South Carolina</a> by Bush supporters in 2000 is the most notorious example of this. In the days leading up to the South Carolina primary, a group supporting George W. Bush “polled” residents, <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/mccain200411">asking inflammatory questions about his opponent John McCain</a>. The responses of those contacted were never recorded and analyzed. The sole purpose of a push poll like this is to disseminate information and influence respondents. Is it any wonder many do not trust polls?</p>
<h2>Is polling dead?</h2>
<p>Today, many people are talking about <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeanne-zaino/the-death-of-polling-midt_b_6129654.html">the death of polling</a>. Apparently, we seem to forget that probabilities attach themselves to polling at every step in the process. The sample is a random sample from a sampled population. The target population does not exist until election day. People change their minds about voting. Everywhere in polling, there is probability.</p>
<p>Nate Silver’s model gave Trump a 29 percent chance of winning the presidency. My model gave him a 20 percent chance. What do those probabilities actually mean? Flip a coin twice. If it comes up heads both times, you just elected President Trump – two coin tosses in a row coming up heads has the same probability of happening that many of these polls gave for Trump moving into the White House.</p>
<p>And yet, polling is a science; we can always learn more. As we move forward, there are many things to learn from this election. Which polling organization was best in terms of its weighting formula? How can we best contact people? What proportion should be cellphones? How can we use online polls to get good estimates?</p>
<p>Those will be the questions at the forefront of polling research over the next couple years as we grapple with the causes of several recent high-profile polling “failures.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68504/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ole J. Forsberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>People around the world were shocked when Hillary Clinton, ahead in many polls, didn’t end up the U.S.‘ president-elect. But that doesn’t mean the polls themselves were wrong.Ole J. Forsberg, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Knox CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.