Tested a small amount of something to assess its quality; in music, reused a portion of a sound recording in a new recording.
From 'sample', which comes from Old French 'essample' meaning 'example'. In music production, 'sampling' emerged in the 1980s as technology allowed recording and reusing audio.
Hip-hop revolutionized music by legally sampling—reusing—small pieces of old songs; it proved that creativity isn't about originality but about remixing and recontextualizing existing culture.
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