A closer look
Decades before hip-hop producers started mashing up samples on an MPC, a French radio engineer named Pierre Schaeffer built a Frankenstein machine called the Phonogene. In the 1950s, he rigged a customized tape recorder to a musical keyboard, allowing him to trigger and pitch-shift loops of recorded street noise and train whistles by pressing keys. It was a massive, incredibly clunky piece of hardware that constantly jammed, but it officially birthed the concept of sampling using nothing but patience and stolen railway audio.
