In this episode, get ready to explore the amazing world of Citizen DJ with its brilliant creator, Brian Foo! This isn't your usual sound archive -it's a wild, fun playground where historic audio comes alive, thanks to the Library of Congress. Hear how kids and hip hop artists alike are diving into thousands of public domain recordings - from early motion pictures and jazz to folk and opera - and transforming history into new beats and soundscapes. Whether you're a history buff or just love fresh music, Citizen DJ lets you remix the past in ways you never imagined - making sound preservation fun, funky, and unexpected!
Explore Citizen DJ yourself at www.citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov and dive deeper into the vast Library of Congress audio collection at www.loc.gov/audio/.
Sound Files is presented by the National Recording Preservation Foundation (NRPF), an independent nonprofit dedicated to preserving recorded sound history with generous support from the University of Michigan School of Information and other NRPF supporters. Learn more or make a donation at www.recordingpreservation.org.
Jesse Johnston, creator of Sound Files and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, hosts the podcast. Teresa Carey is the senior producer, editor, and creative lead for Morse Alpha Studios, which produced this podcast. Writing is by Jacob Pinter, field production by Steve Lack, and sound engineering by Ben Carey. Original music by Evan Haywood.
Rashard Dobbins: There's a saying. You know If you're familiar with the Wu-Tang Clan, that Wu-Tang is for the children. We really believe that.
Jesse Johnston: This is Rashard Dobbins. Rashard has worn many hats in his career. He’s a performer and an educator. He also used to be a talent agent. These days, he leads a non-profit in Detroit, Michigan called Class Act.
Rashard Dobbins: Class Act is many things. I think the easiest way is to say, you know, become a movement.
Jesse Johnston: A big part of that movement is running arts programs for kids. All of the programs at Class Act–all the ways that kids learn how to express themselves–are rooted in hip hop. Rashard rattles off the pillars of hip hop culture. There’s Dance, beatboxing… Graffiti and design.
Rashard Dobbins: which would be rapping, poetry, you know, public speaking, podcasting, and of course, music. You know, DJing.
Jesse Johnston: Those are disciplines that can take a lifetime to master. Which is why Class Act wants kids to start early. Plus, they build on the curiosity and exploration that kids have naturally.
Rashard Dobbins: Because we know that if you give a four-year-old a marker, they're going to go to the wall and start doing a mural, right? That's graffiti. If they find a spoon somehow they'll get a pan and start making it into the drum, right? And that's beat making. That goes into the the element of DJing.
Jesse Johnston: Give our producer Teresa Carey’s 6-year-old a beat—they love to beatbox—and you’ll be amazed what kids come up with just by playing around. But if kids want to keep making music… eventually, they’ll outgrow pots and pans. They’ll need instruments. And lessons. And maybe software to record and re-mix music. All of that can get really expensive, really fast. Not everybody has access. In fact, Rashard says that from the very start… hip hop has been about making the most of what you do have.
The storied birthplace of hip hop is a party that happened in 1973. The Bronx in the 1970s was a neighborhood in crisis. Jobs were disappearing, schools were underfunded, and landlords were abandoning buildings. It was a tough environment, but out of that struggle came creativity. In that apartment building in the Bronx… a 16-year-old who called himself DJ Cool Herc spun records for his sister’s back-to-school party.
Kool Herc via Fresh Air: I didn’t have the luxury of headphones. I had to queue the record over the music because that’s the way my setup was set up.
Jesse Johnston: This is Kool Herc… looking back on that party years later, in an interview with the radio show Fresh Air.
Kool Herc via Fresh Air: You know, the record, you can tell where the breaks are. It’s a dark groove. And people used to wait sometimes for those particular parts of the record to come on. And I would just play stuff, you know. And I would tell them I had new records. I want them to check it out at the same time I’m checking it out. And if it’s something I personally like, I’d tell them, I’m feeling this one. And I hope you like the rest I play. Because they came to my house. They’re my guests.
Jesse Johnston: Kool Herc’s mixes were a hit. And before long… other DJs were taking his ideas and running with them.
Rashard Dobbins: You know although those scholars in that community had their dance classes and poetry classes and music classes taken away, their housing was being taken away and expressways were being run through them. Gang and arson was was heavy at that time in those neighborhoods as well. They made something so beautiful like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
Jesse Johnston: Now, Rashard… and anyone else who wants to create hip hop music… have a tool to make their own phoenix. It’s called Citizen DJ. A free website with an almost unending supply of sounds to sample… and tools to quickly, easily turn them into real music.
Rashard Dobbins: And that's why we utilize Citizen DJ, you know, because we see it as opportunity to allow folks to be themselves, to express themselves and to, you know, fall more in love with themselves, with their tribe, with their community, with art, you know, with things from the past that they normally wouldn't get a chance to do.
Jesse Johnston: I’m Jesse Johnston, and you’re listening to Sound Files… a podcast about the preservation of recorded sounds supported by the National Recording Preservation Foundation. We’re hoping the podcast offers our listeners a chance to hear some of the amazing stories preserved in audio, as well as meet some of the folks involved in helping to give us new ways to preserve and access these sounds!
In this episode… grab your headphones and get ready to drop the beat. We’re exploring Citizen DJ. We’ll learn how its creator found inspiration from sound archives at the Library of Congress… including spoken-word collectio ns that might not seem musical. Plus, we’ll get a live demo… and hear how it can turn anyone into a DJ. Even you. The creator of Citizen DJ is an artist and computer scientist named Brian Foo.
Brian is constantly looking for new ways to mix art and technology. For instance, he worked on data visualization for the first-ever permanent exhibit on climate change at the American Museum of Natural History. A few years ago, he became an “innovator in residence” at the Library of Congress. And while there, he reached into one of his personal interests: hip hop.
Brian Foo: I was really kind of taken by, uh, this idea of a DJ, uh, who would be digging through the crates of, you know, old record shop basements and thrift stores and trying to find the most kind of obscure sounds that they could add to their collections. And later kind of remix it into something new.
Jesse Johnston: Now, there’s another thing you should know about Brian. He loves libraries. Because today, most libraries do a lot more than check out books. Years ago, Brian got a taste of this… when he worked for the New York Public Library.
Brian Foo: And I was part of this project, which is a community oral history project. The goal was to collect neighborhood oral histories from the various neighborhoods in New York City.
Jesse Johnston: Then, Brian also had to transcribe those oral histories. And he came across an interesting problem. Transcripts capture what someone said. But not how they said it. Inflections… pauses… the tone of someone’s voice. Those nuances, the “grain” of the voice and the speakers tone and cadence, are part of the meaning of what was said. And you can’t see them in a transcript. So Brian got creative.
Brian Foo: One of my early personal projects I did was transcribe, oral histories, not only into words, but into sheet music. So, trying to transcribe kind of the pitch, and kind of the, the melodies and the pauses and everything. And, the words that they're saying are essentially the lyrics.
Jesse Johnston: This was the “aha moment”... that would eventually lead to Citizen DJ. Brian could make music, even with audio that wasn’t originally musical.
Brian Foo: And when you put it into music, it also makes those words or phrases or sentences more memorable because it gets stuck in your head, right? It's very easy to have a melody stuck in your head, uh, compared to, I don't know, a quote in an article or something, right? So, like, if you hear it, over and over again in a loop, it turns into this melody that could be stuck in your head for days.
Jesse Johnston: With all of that in mind… Brian started his term at the Library of Congress in 2019. And they had exactly what he needed. The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. Most people know that it has books–more than 26 million of them! But Brian was interested in something else. The library also has a treasure trove of audio recordings.
Brian Foo: Everything from oral histories to government film to field recordings to radio broadcasts to recorded music.
Jesse Johnston: There are more than 3 million audio recordings in all. And more than 60,000 of them are available online, in more than 100 languages.
Brian Foo: I was really kind of thinking about, how can we. Quote unquote, open up kind of our collective crate of sounds?
Jesse Johnston: So… how could Brian share those recordings with the rest of the world? He thought about hip hop icons from the 1980s and ‘90s… a time known as hip hop’s “golden age”. Hip hop DJs peppered their own songs with samples–little snippets of existing songs. This was part of what made hip hop, hip hop. Brian remembered some of his favorite groups–like Public Enemy and De La Soul. In the course of just one song, the DJ might take horns from an R&B song… a guitar riff from a rock song… maybe a drum break or vocals from somewhere else… and mash them together in a kind of collage. Let's take a look at De La Soul's 1989 song "The Magic Number." It’s a great example of sampling techniques. The main hook, "Three is the magic number," is sampled from an educational cartoon called "Schoolhouse Rock!" And the song also features elements from Johnny Cash. ("Five Feet High and Rising)".
Brian Foo: I think one of my favorite things was like listening to a hip hop track, but then going to the liner notes and looking at the music that they sampled, which was a gateway for me to learn about new, usually older, you know, music that was from a different genre, and then listen to that album. And then listen to the new track again and hear it differently.
Jesse Johnston: In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the music industry started to crack down on sampling. DJs didn’t always ask permission from the original creators of their samples. And some of those creators thought they deserved a cut of the money DJs were making. The group De La Soul lost a big copyright lawsuit in 1989. They had to pay 100,000 dollars for sampling a song by the rock band The Turtles. And in another major lawsuit against the rapper Biz Markie, a federal judge wrote in 1991 that sampling without permission was no different than stealing. After that… sampling got a lot more expensive. DJs had to pay for licensing… or risk getting sued. It’s also why us podcasters can only talk about these songs, when we wish we could just play them for you.
But the draw of sampling never went away. Rashard Dobbins from Class Act in Detroit says samples are little gems… like a toy you might find at the bottom of a cereal box.
Rashard Dobbins: You know the beauty of hip hop is the fact that you are able to say, you know I know we don't have access to saxophones in our school district or you know these horns, but ah there's this dude named Miles Davis and he's dynamic and I love this section of what he did and I want to express that.
Jesse Johnston: Plus, Rashard says digging up deep cuts from old music is more than just a cool technique. Sampling and remixing can be a form of preserving and sharing culture. In that way, hip hop sampling is like a way that creators can dip into recorded sounds to reuse them in ne w expressions that reference and revive those audio archives.
Rashard Dobbins: Yeah I think there's just something so beautiful in it because it's paying homage. Especially for communities affiliated with the diaspora. right you know You have 400 plus years of systems trying to wash away your culture and who you are and who others are. And sampling is a way to say, no, this is dope. I really like or dig these dance moves, these clothes, this aesthetic, these sounds, and to appreciate them in order to preserve them.
Jesse Johnston: Brian Foo saw a way to contribute to all of this… using audio the Library of Congress already had. Even better? It could offer sounds to DJs for free, with no expensive licensing fees. There was too much material for Brian alone. So he asked for help taking stock.
Brian Foo: We not only wanted to have, older sounds because, you know, there's a lot of older sounds that are available for free, but we wanted like a good diversity of different types of sounds. And we mean diversity in a lot of ways. So, music from different eras, different genres, different formats. Audio that might be well known and audio that might be kind of like hidden gems.
Jesse Johnston: These recordings can be decades old. Some were even created in the 1800s. And a lot of them… were just really old recordings of people talking. But Brian thought he could turn them into something.
Brian Foo: What are things that are culturally significant, culturally and historically significant, but also what are things that are underutilized? And what are, what are some things that would sound cool in new music?
Jesse Johnston: When we interviewed Brian, he pulled up his computer and showed us how Citizen DJ works. If you want to try it on your own… and you definitely should… we’ll share the link at the end of this episode. Once you land on the website… it only takes one or two clicks before you make it to a page full of dozens of color-coded audio snippets.
Brian Foo: So you can really just find a particular sound that resonates with you, and then you can very quickly remix it and add a beat to it and, um, you know, kind of make it your own.
Jesse Johnston: To show us how it works… Brian dipped into one of the sound collections. This collection is called “Inventing Entertainment”. It comes from sounds that originally belonged to the inventor Thomas Edison and his companies. The oldest recording in this collection is from 1890. To show us how something so old can be remixed into hip hop… Brian pulled up a sound from the 1920s.
Brian Foo: This particular sound (sound plays) is a tiny sample from this item called “Old Pal Why don't you answer me?” And you can listen to it in context. (music plays).
Jesse Johnston: Once you pick your sound… it takes just one more click to reach a dashboard. You can see your sample. You can add drums underneath. And there are lots of options to make it your own.
Brian started DJing in real-time.
Brian Foo: I'm just going to play it on a loop just to kind of give you a sense of what it sounds like with just the samples. I'm going to speed it up a little bit. (music plays) I'm going to add, some drums to it. Change the sounds. I can make it more like a EDM. I could change the item, change up the drums. So I'm just remixing this live in the browser.
Jesse Johnston: To make it even more fine-tuned… music producers can download their masterpiece from Citizen DJ. Then they can import it into audio editing software. Thanks to a collection called “The National Jukebox”... Citizen DJ has music in all kinds of genres. You can work with opera… folk music… jazz. And some collections are all spoken word.
Lionel Richie via Citizen DJ: Because I’m not a studied musician. I was a doodler in the music business. And to discover this God-given talent is just probably the best thing that could ever happen to me.
Jesse Johnston: That’s the voice of singer Lionel Richie. Y’know, lead singer of the Commodores. “Easy like Sunday morning”. Richie is also an all-around musician, having written eight songs that topped the Billboard Hot 100! He received the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2022. So you can imagine there’s quite a lot of material related to his music, as well as interviews and performances, documented in sound recordings. One of these is an interview with music executive Joe Smith, who interviewed Richie in the 1980s. And that collection is available on the Library of Congress website. Citizen DJ homed in on a couple of small moments from that interview.
Lionel Richie via Citizen DJ: Oh yes, yes, yes, yes.
Brian Foo: I created this algorithm that tries to identify the most musical parts of a particular audio recording. So that algorithm, I guess I identified Lionel Richie, kind of doing this, um, kind of like rhythmic response, like, yes, yes, yes. So, I'm gonna just, quickly show you how you could remix that, that little, bit of audio into, music. So again I’m going to start with just the audio–the sample. And then I’ll add the drums.
Jesse Johnston: Brian adjusts the tempo. He customizes the drums. And before long… he’s building an original song that has the voice of a musical legend. Besides gathering all of the audio… Brian had to spend some quality time working with lawyers. He made sure users of Citizen DJ can have access to all of these sounds for free.The library also thought carefully about the ethics of using some of the sounds in its collections. After all, someone who was recorded 50 or 100 years ago couldn’t have given consent for their voice to end up on Citizen DJ. The website has an ethics guide to help users navigate those concerns.
The first prototype of Citizen DJ went live in April 2020. Rashard Dobbins says… in the end, it recreates the feeling of digging through crates at the record store, searching for the perfect sample.
Rashard Dobbins: And when I think about back in the iPod days, or cassette days, or even burning someone, the CD is something so intimate. you know And I think Citizen DJ is providing all of that.
Jesse Johnston: Of course, Rashard didn’t keep Citizen DJ all to himself. He shared it with the students at Class Act.
Rashard Dobbins: The platform is really intuitive. you know It was simple. The majority of our kids that used it were elementary school. Our program goes elementary and up, you know from kinder and up, literally. And we saw like one of the the greatest uses with our elementary school scholars.
Jesse Johnston: A couple of students from Class Act actually ended up on a panel at the Library of Congress. They shared some of the music they’ve made with Citizen DJ. One especially memorable piece of music came from a student named Layla. The first word Rashard used to describe it… was “zany”.
Rashard Dobbins: It still stands out to me because it was like a circus sample.Which Layla at the time was about fourth or fifth grade. So she still, you know, like that's what she was into. So when she was digging, she found something that resonated with her and built her own entire beat around that. You know, and it was something that I wouldn't have done, but I loved the masterpiece.
Jesse Johnston: Citizen DJ helps Class Act reach some of its major goals… like empowering young people, promoting equity, and building community. And besides that… it’s a powerful way to spark curiosity.
Rashard Dobbins: Where our scholars can now say, oh man, I want to go digging and find some cool samples. Or maybe you know they play piano or–as a number of our kids do. They might just want to lay it down themselves, but then use the sample to build around, right?
Jesse Johnston: When that first prototype of Citizen DJ rolled out in the spring of 2020… Rashard wasn’t the only person who saw it. It came out right at the beginning of the COVID-19 shutdown. A time when it felt like the whole world was stuck at home. Brian hoped Citizen DJ could be a bright spot for people who make music.
Brian Foo: We really kind of try to gift that to the American public, especially around the time that it was launched, where many musicians, could not make money because of concerts and things like that.
Jesse Johnston: Since it was a prototype, Brian wanted to know what people thought. There was a survey where users could leave feedback. And from the very beginning… he saw that Citizen DJ would make a much bigger splash than he expected.
Brian Foo: So we, we did this kind of pre launch where we wanted to get feedback. We were hoping to get maybe like a few hundred people to give feedback, which is pretty high for the Library of Congress. Um, in the first week, we got over a hundred thousand people who not only used the tool, but gave feedback. And that's like just like unheard of, in terms of, engagement, um, numbers with the Library of Congress products.
Jesse Johnston: The Library of Congress had managed to get some major news articles to feature Citizen DJ. But Brian noticed that it was also spreading organically. He saw big numbers of people coming to the website from niche forums and music subreddits. In the surveys, something like 80 percent of people identified themselves as creators–like independent or amateur music producers.
Brian Foo: and often people who specifically say that, like, I, you know, I had no idea this is something that the Library of Congress does, or even like, this is something that, um, I'm happy to have my taxpayer dollars go to, which is a very rare statement for anybody.
Jesse Johnston: Brian’s term as “innovator in residence” only lasted for about a year. But Citizen DJ did get a refresh in 2022. That’s when a federal law allowed a tranche of old music to enter the public domain… including thousands of music recordings in the Library of Congress collections. Also in 2022… Brian started a full-time job at the Library of Congress.
Brian Foo: I think the reason why I'm drawn to libraries in general is because, you know, they're not only about preservation and conservation. They're also about use and reuse. That's like a, that's like a, um, part of the definition of a library, right? It's not a, it's not a museum, you know, it's not something that's static
Jesse Johnston: By opening the door for anyone to make music with samples… Citizen DJ doesn’t just preserve what’s in the Library of Congress. It also gives anyone the chance to add to the living archive of hip hop. T Brian hopes Citizen DJ inspires new works of art. Especially art that, as he puts it, would “be otherwise impossible.”
Brian Foo: I'm very interested in the creation of new culture and new art and, um, I think to me that's, that's what's most, that's what's most important to me in terms of why archive, why, why preserve is because, um, Is because I think that's essential to, uh, to create new culture, to create new work, and also to contextualize the creation of new work in the history of, of, I guess, of, of America, but also, um, you know, the history of music, the history of, um, kind of, uh, uh, sonic culture
Jesse Johnston: The website for Citizen DJ is citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov
You can also explore the entire Library of Congress audio collection at https://www.loc.gov/audio/
The Sound Files podcast is presented by the National Recording Preservation Foundation, an independent nonprofit established by the Library of Congress, and generous support from the University of Michigan School of Information and other NRPF supporters. Learn more, or make a donation, at recordingpreservation dot org
The senior producer and editor is Teresa Carey, with writer Jacob Pinter, field producer Steve Lack, and sound engineer Ben Carey. With original music by Evan Haywood.
I'm Jesse Johnston, creator of sound files and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Remember: every sound tells a story— so let’s keep preserving them.