Opsound's Sal Randolph

Interview by Neeru Paharia
Photo by Muffin Todd
March 2003

Meet Sal Randolph, the New York-based artist behind Opsound, a new online record label that has adopted the concepts of open source and copyleft and adapted them to music production. Opsound invites musicians to contribute sounds to a "sound pool" licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. Others can then take sounds from the pool, mix them or use them as-is, and publish the results however they like: online, or under a real-world micro-label; for profit, or not. The project is a great example of how Creative Commons licenses can promote new kinds of collaboration and help build a digital resource people can use freely -- even for commerce.

Sal is kicking off Opsound with an open invitation to the world to submit works to the sound pool. Users will host their own sounds, and the Opsound site will feature a local indexing function that links to every sound in the pool.

Asked if artists would be moved to contribute works to the sound pool, Sal is optimistic. She says she senses, however, a disconnect in most artists' view of copyright: most understand how copyright protects their own work, but few appreciate how too much copyright can also hinder them from drawing upon others' work.

"Many artists download music but don't want to give up any protection on their own stuff. They see copyright as something that is primarily there to protect them. They are afraid that giving away some of that protection will diminish the value of their work, but it is my experience that allowing your work to be used and shared more freely actually increases its value -- certainly its social value, and under the right circumstances, its financial value. A lot of the Opsound effort will be to educate artists about copyright and how sharing can help them."

Opsound is Sal's newest open source social architecture project. She is also the mastermind behind many other open source art projects including the Free Words project, Free Biennial, Free Manifesta, and Opcopy. Opsound, like many of Sal's projects, is a constructed social situation based on a "gift" economy -- a kind of market that, like the open source movement, operates in part on non-financial motives.

In one of these such projects, Sal produced thousands of books simply entitled "Free Words" containing a collection of 13,000 randomly assorted words and phrases Sal had put together over 10 years as fuel for her poetry. Sal contributed "Free Words" to the public domain. "This text is placed in the public domain," reads the book's front cover. "No rights are reserved." The back states simply, "This book is free." She began to sneak the books onto shelves in bookstores and libraries around the world. Some people would find the book and take it, while others doubted that the book was indeed free. Sal says "It's that moment of confusion that is the art."