Jose Valentino Ruiz, University of Florida In the fall of 1971, Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” landed like a quiet revolution. After two years of silence following the band’s mainstream success, fans expected more feel-good funk from the ensemble. What they got instead was something murkier and more fractured, yet deeply intimate and experimental. This was not just an album; it was the sound of a restless mind rebuilding music from the inside out. At the center of it all was front man Sly Stone. Long before the home studio became an industry norm, Stone, who died on June 9, 2025, turned the studio into both a sanctuary and an instrument. And long before sampling defined the sound of hip-hop, he was using tape and machine rhythms to deconstruct existing songs to cobble together new ones. As someone who spends much of their time working on remote recording and audio production – from building full arrangements solo to collaborating digitally across continents – I’m deeply indebted to Sly Stone’s approach to making music. He was among the first major artists to fully embrace the recording environment as a space to compose rather than perform. Every reverb bounce, every drum machine tick, every overdubbed breath became part of the writing process.

From studio rat to bedroom producer

Sly and the Family Stone’s early albums – including “Dance to the Music” and “Stand!” – were recorded at top-tier facilities like CBS Studios in Los Angeles under the technical guidance of engineers such as Don Puluse and with oversight from producer David Rubinson. These sessions yielded bright, radio-friendly tracks that emphasized tight horn sections, group vocals and a polished sound. Producers also prized the energy of live performance, so the full band would record together in real time. But by the early 1970s, Stone was burnt out. The dual pressures of fame and industry demands were becoming too much. Struggling with cocaine and PCP addiction, he’d grown increasingly distrustful of bandmates, label executives and even his friends. So he decided to retreat to his hillside mansion in Bel Air, California, transforming his home into a musical bunker. Inside, he could work on his own terms: isolated and erratic, but free.

Without a full band present, Stone became a one-man ensemble. He leaned heavily into overdubbing – recording one instrument at a time and building his songs from fragments. Using multiple tape machines, he’d layer each part onto previous takes. The resulting album, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” was like nothing he’d previously recorded. It sounds murky, jagged and disjointed. But it’s also deeply intentional, as if every imperfection was part of the design. In “The Poetics of Rock,” musicologist Albin Zak describes this “composerly” approach to production, where recording itself becomes a form of writing, not just documentation. Stone’s process for “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” reflects this mindset: Each overdub, rhythm loop and sonic imperfection functions more like a brushstroke than a performance.

Automating the groove

A key part of Stone’s tool kit was the Maestro Rhythm King, a preset drum machine he used extensively. It wasn’t the first rhythm box on the market. But Stone’s use of it was arguably the first time such a machine shaped the entire aesthetic of a mainstream album. The drum parts on his track “Family Affair,” for example, don’t swing – they tick. What might have been viewed as soulless became its own kind of soul. This early embrace of mechanical rhythm prefigured what would later become a foundation of hip-hop and electronic music. In his book “Dawn of the DAW,” music technology scholar Adam Patrick Bell calls this shift “a redefinition of groove,” noting how drum machines like the Rhythm King encouraged musicians to rethink their songwriting process, building tracks in shorter, repeatable sections while emphasizing steady, looped rhythms rather than free-flowing performances. Though samplers wouldn’t emerge until years later, Stone’s work already contained that repetition, layering and loop-based construction that would become characteristic of the practice. He recorded his own parts the way future DJs would splice records – isolated, reshuffled, rhythmically obsessed. His overdubbed bass lines, keyboard vamps and vocal murmurs often sounded like puzzle pieces from other songs. Music scholar Will Fulton, in his study of Black studio innovation, notes how producers like Stone helped pioneer a fragment-based approach to music-making that would become central to hip-hop’s DNA. Stone’s process anticipated the mentality that a song isn’t necessarily something written top to bottom, but something assembled, brick by brick, from what’s available. Perhaps not surprisingly, Stone’s tracks have been sampled relentlessly. In “Bring That Beat Back,” music critic Nate Patrin identifies Stone as one of the most sample-friendly artists of the 1970s – not because of his commercial hits, but because of how much sonic space he left in his tracks: the open-ended grooves, unusual textures and slippery emotional tone. You can hear his sounds in famous tracks such as 2Pac’s “If My Homie Calls,” which samples “Sing a Simple Song”; A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Jam,” which draws from “Family Affair”; and De La Soul’s “Plug Tunin’,” which flips “You Can Make It If You Try.”

The studio as instrument

While Sly’s approach was groundbreaking, he wasn’t entirely alone. Around the same time, artists such as Brian Wilson and The Rolling Stones were experimenting with home and nontraditional recording environments – Wilson famously retreating to his home studio during “Pet Sounds,” and the Stones tracking “Exile on Main St.” in a French villa. Yet in the world of Black music, production remained largely centralized in institutionally controlled studio systems such as Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, where sound was tightly managed by in-house producers and engineers. In that context, Stone’s decision to isolate, self-produce and dismantle the standard workflow was more than a technical choice: It was a radical act of autonomy. The rise of home recording didn’t just change who could make music. It changed what music felt like. It made music more internal, iterative and intimate. Sly Stone helped invent that feeling. It’s easy to hear “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” as murky or uneven. The mix is dense with tape hiss, drum machines drift in and out of sync, and vocals often feel buried or half-whispered. But it’s also, in a way, prophetic. It anticipated the aesthetics of bedroom pop, the cut-and-paste style of modern music software, the shuffle of playlists and the recycling of sounds that defines sample culture. It showed that a groove didn’t need to be spontaneous to be soulful, and that solitude could be a powerful creative tool, not a limitation. In my own practice, I often record alone, passing files back and forth, building from templates and mapping rhythm to grid – as do millions of musical artists who compose tracks from their bedrooms, closets and garages. Half a century ago, a funk pioneer led the way. I think it’s safe to say that Sly Stone quietly changed the process of making music forever – and in the funkiest way possible. Jose Valentino Ruiz, Associate Professsor of Music Business and Entrepreneurship, University of Florida This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Xianda Huang, University of California, Los Angeles Several years ago, an employee at Universal Music came across a cassette tape in a Tokyo warehouse while sorting through archival materials. On it was a recording by the late Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng that had never been released; the pop ballad, likely recorded in the mid-1980s while Teng was living and performing in Japan, was a collaboration between composer Takashi Miki and lyricist Toyohisa Araki. Now, to the delight of her millions of fans, the track titled “Love Songs Are Best in the Foggy Night” will appear on an album set to be released on June 25, 2025. Teng died 30 years ago. Most Americans know little about her life and her body of work. Yet the ballads of Teng, who could sing in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Indonesian, continue to echo through karaoke rooms, on Spotify playlists, at tribute concerts and at family gatherings across Asia and beyond. I study how pop music has served as a tool of soft power, and I’ve spent the past several years researching Teng’s music and its legacy. I’ve found that Teng’s influence endures not just because of her voice, but also because her music transcends Asia’s political fault lines.

From local star to Asian icon

Born in 1953 in Yunlin, Taiwan, Teresa Teng grew up in one of the many villages that were built to house soldiers and their families who had fled mainland China in 1949 after the communists claimed victory in the Chinese civil war. Her early exposure to traditional Chinese music and opera laid the foundation for her singing career. By age 6, she was taking voice lessons. She soon began winning local singing competitions. “It wasn’t adults who wanted me to sing,” Teng wrote in her memoir. “I wanted to sing. As long as I could sing, I was happy.” At 14, Teng dropped out of high school to focus entirely on music, signing with the local label Yeu Jow Records. Soon thereafter, she released her first album, “Fengyang Flower Drum.” In the 1970s, she toured and recorded across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Southeast Asia, becoming one of Asia’s first truly transnational pop stars. Teng’s career flourished in the late 1970s and 1980s. She released some of her most iconic tracks, such as her covers of Chinese singer Zhou Xuan’s 1937 hit “When Will You Return?” and Taiwanese singer Chen Fen-lan’s “The Moon Represents My Heart,” and toured widely across Asia, sparking what came to be known as “Teresa Teng Fever.” In the early 1990s, Teng was forced to stop performing for health reasons. She died suddenly of an asthma attack on May 8, 1995, while on vacation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the age of 42.

China catches Teng Fever

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Teng’s story is that Teng Fever peaked in China. Teng was ethnically Chinese, with ancestral roots in China’s Shandong province. But the political divide between China and Taiwan following the Chinese civil war had led to decades of hostility, with each side refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the other.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, however, China began to relax its political control under Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up policy. This sweeping initiative shifted China toward a market-oriented economy, encouraged foreign trade and investment, and cautiously reintroduced global cultural influences after decades of isolation. Pop music from other parts of the world began trickling in, including Teng’s tender ballads. Her songs could be heard in coastal provinces such as Guangdong and Shanghai, inland cities such as Beijing and Tianjin, and even remote regions such as Tibet. Shanghai’s propaganda department wrote an internal memo in 1980 noting that her music had spread to the city’s public parks, restaurants, nursing homes and wedding halls. Teng’s immense popularity in China was no accident; it reflected a time in the country’s history when its people were particularly eager for emotionally resonant art after decades of cultural propaganda and censorship. For a society that had been awash in rote, revolutionary songs like “The East is Red” and “Union is Strength,” Teng’s music offered something entirely different. It was personal, tender and deeply human. Her gentle, approachable style – often described as “angelic” or like that of “a girl next door” – provided solace and a sense of intimacy that had long been absent from public life.

Teng’s music was also admired for her ability to bridge eras. Her 1983 album “Light Exquisite Feeling” fused classical Chinese poetry with contemporary Western pop melodies, showcasing her gift for blending the traditional and the modern. It cemented her reputation not just as a pop star but as a cultural innovator. It’s no secret why audiences across China and Asia were so deeply drawn to her and her music. She was fluent in multiple languages; she was elegant but humble, polite and relatable; she was involved in various charities; and she spoke out in support of democratic values.

A sound of home in distant lands

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the Chinese immigrant population in the United States grew to over 1.1 million. Teng’s music has also deeply embedded itself within Chinese diasporic communities across the country. In cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, Chinese immigrants played her music at family gatherings, during holidays and at community events. Walk through any Chinatown during Lunar New Year and you’re bound to hear her voice wafting through the streets.

For younger Chinese Americans and even non-Chinese audiences, Teng’s music has become a window into Chinese culture. When I was studying in the U.S., I often met Asian American students who belted out her songs at karaoke nights or during cultural festivals. Many had grown up hearing her music through their parents’ playlists or local community celebrations. The release of her recently discovered song is a reminder that some voices do not fade – they evolve, migrate and live on in the hearts of people scattered across the world.

In an age when global politics drive different cultures apart, Teng’s enduring appeal reminds us of something quieter yet more lasting: the power of voice to transmit emotion across time and space, the way a melody can build a bridge between continents and generations. I recently rewatched the YouTube video for Teng’s iconic 1977 ballad “The Moon Represents My Heart.” As I read the comments section, one perfectly encapsulated what I had discovered about Teresa Teng in my own research: “Teng’s music opened a window to a culture I never knew I needed.” Xianda Huang, PhD student in Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jared Bahir Browsh, University of Colorado Boulder “Da, duh.” Two simple notes – E and F – have become synonymous with tension, fear and sharks, representing the primal dread of being stalked by a predator. And they largely have “Jaws” to thank. Fifty years ago, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film – along with its spooky score composed by John Williams – convinced generations of swimmers to think twice before going in the water. As a scholar of media history and popular culture, I decided to take a deeper dive into the staying power of these two notes and learned about how they’re influenced by 19th-century classical music, Mickey Mouse and Alfred Hitchcock.

The first summer blockbuster

In 1964, fisherman Frank Mundus killed a 4,500-pound great white shark off Long Island. After hearing the story, freelance journalist Peter Benchley began pitching a novel based on three men’s attempt to capture a man-eating shark, basing the character of Quint off of Mundus. Doubleday commissioned Benchley to write the novel, and in 1973, Universal Studios producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown purchased the film rights to the novel before it was published. The 26-year-old Spielberg was signed on to be the director. Tapping into both mythical and real fears regarding great white sharks – including an infamous set of shark attacks along the Jersey Shore in 1916 – Benchley’s 1974 novel became a bestseller. The book was a key part of Universal’s marketing campaign, which began several months before the film’s release. Starting in the fall of 1974, Zanuck, Brown and Benchley appeared on a number of radio and television programs to simultaneously promote the release of the paperback edition of the novel and the upcoming film. The marketing also included a national television advertising campaign that featured emerging composer Williams’ two-note theme. The plan was for a summer release, which, at the time, was reserved for films with less than stellar reviews.

Films at the time typically were released market by market, preceded by local reviews. However, Universal’s decision to release the film in hundreds of theaters across the country on June 20, 1975, led to huge up-front profits, sparking a 14-week run as the No. 1 film in the U.S. Many consider “Jaws” the first true summer blockbuster. It catapulted Spielberg to fame and kicked off the director’s long collaboration with Williams, who would go on to earn the second-highest number of Academy Award nominations in history – 54 – behind only Walt Disney’s 59.

The film’s beating heart

Though it’s now considered one of the greatest scores in film history, when Williams proposed the two-note theme, Spielberg initially thought it was a joke. But Williams had been inspired by 19th and 20th century composers, including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and especially Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” In the “Jaws” theme, you can hear echoes of the end of Dvorak’s symphony, as well as the sounds of another character-driven musical piece, Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” “Peter and the Wolf” and the score from “Jaws” are both prime examples of leitmotifs, or a musical piece that represents a place or character. The varying pace of the ostinato – a musical motif that repeats itself – elicits intensifying degrees of emotion and fear. This became more integral as Spielberg and the technical team struggled with the malfunctioning pneumatic sharks that they’d nicknamed “Bruce,” after Spielberg’s lawyer. As a result, the shark does not appear until the 81-minute mark of the 124-minute film. But its presence is felt through Williams’ theme, which some music scholars have theorized evoke the shark’s heartbeat.

Sounds to manipulate emotions

Williams also has Disney to thank for revolutionizing character-driven music in film. The two don’t just share a brimming trophy case. They also understood how music can heighten emotion and magnify action for audiences. Although his career started in the silent film era, Disney became a titan of film, and later media, by leveraging sound to establish one of the greatest stars in media history, Mickey Mouse. When Disney saw “The Jazz Singer” in 1927, he knew that sound would be the future of film. On Nov. 18, 1928, “Steamboat Willie” premiered at Universal’s Colony Theater in New York City as Disney’s first animated film to incorporate synchronized sound. Unlike previous attempts to bring sound to film by having record players concurrently play or deploying live musicians to perform in the theater, Disney used technology that recorded sound directly on the film reel. It wasn’t the first animated film with synchronized sound, but it was a technical improvement to previous attempts at it, and “Steamboat Willie” became an international hit, launching Mickey’s – and Disney’s – career. The use of music or sound to match the rhythm of the characters on screen became known as “Mickey Mousing.” “King Kong” in 1933 would deftly deploy Mickey Mousing in a live action film, with music mimicking the giant gorilla’s movements. For example, in one scene, Kong carries away Ann Darrow, who’s played by actress Fay Wray. Composer Max Steiner uses lighter tones to convey Kong’s curiosity as he holds Ann, followed by ominous, faster, tones as Ann escapes and Kong chases after her. In doing so, Steiner encourages viewers to both fear and connect with the beast throughout the film, helping them suspend disbelief and enter a world of fantasy. Mickey Mousing declined in popularity after World War II. Many filmmakers saw it as juvenile and too simplistic for the evolving and advancing film industry.

When less is more

In spite of this criticism, the technique was still used to score some iconic scenes, like the playing of violins in the shower as Marion Crane is stabbed in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Spielberg idolized Hitchcock. A young Spielberg was even kicked off the Universal lot after sneaking on to watch the production of Hitchcock’s 1966 film “Torn Curtain.” Although Hitchcock and Spielberg never met, “Jaws” clearly exhibits the influence of Hitchcock, the “Master of Suspense.” And maybe that’s why Spielberg initially overcame his doubts about using something so simple to represent tension in the thriller.

The use of the two-note motif helped overcome the production issues Spielberg faced directing the first feature length movie to be filmed on the ocean. The malfunctioning animatronic shark forced Spielberg to leverage Williams’ minimalist theme to represent the shark’s ominous presence in spite of the limited appearances by the eponymous predatory star. As Williams continued his legendary career, he would deploy a similar sonic motif for certain “Star Wars” characters. Each time Darth Vader appeared, the “Imperial March” was played to set the tone for the leader of the dark side. As movie budgets creep closer to a half-billion dollars, the “Jaws” theme – and the way those two notes manipulate tension – is a reminder that in film, sometimes less can be more. Jared Bahir Browsh, Assistant Teaching Professor of Critical Sports Studies, University of Colorado Boulder This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.