Making music, for Gregory Young, is like “playing with Legos, but with more expensive equipment.”

He and his partner, Mathew Young, who are not related, make up the duo Headphone People, formerly Wild Style. They are on the cutting edge of a music revolution made possible by computer technology known as sampling. They compose their own pieces using snippets of sound recorded by other artists. They may start with a bass line from an old vinyl record album, add one of Bobby Hutchinson’s drumbeats, layer in some brush strokes by Dave Brubeck, then add a few bars of a horn from a cut of Sarah Vaughn’s “My Funny Valentine.”

It is a long, slow, tedious process that will serve as background for live performances and the CD they plan to complete this spring. In performance, Greg will alternate playing keyboards, electric guitar and bass cello along with the recorded “samples.” Mat will operate two turntables which he manipulates manually, cuing up records, but playing only a few seconds of each cut before pushing the obsolete disc backward with his fingers to create the scratchy noises that are the signature sound of the art form.

The idea of sampling goes way back, according to Greg. “Bach stole pieces he heard by other composers all the time. That’s how it was done then, when a composer wasn’t as mired in music as a business [as artists are today].”

Sampling, as it is used by Headphone People, grew out of the New York City ghettos in the mid-1970s when beats, break dancers, graffiti and rhymes exploded across the country. Then, a disc jockey manipulated two turntables and a mixer to create a continuous flow of the best cuts or breaks on records, similar to Mat’s duties in live performances. Techno, hip-hop, rap and similar genres can trace their roots to early street DJs.

Computer technology made this new approach to composition possible. The tools of the art form are not musical instruments, but computers, keyboards, drum machines and, most importantly, samplers. This machine, which is about half the size of a laptop computer, weighs less than the average best seller, and allows a single sound to be recorded. That sound then can be run through a keyboard or computer, where its pitch, tone and key can be altered.

“Basically, the sampler takes any audio sound and digitizes it, so we can manipulate it,” explained Mat, as he and his partner assembled a song at Greg’s Bangor apartment. “We can loop it, play and record it end-to-end, then record the chorus or melody of a song, add a drum piece, maybe a snare or a kick.”

“The sequencer puts those sounds in a row,” added Greg. “It’s kind of like an old player piano. Sometimes, if it doesn’t seem to be fitting together quite right, we can time stretch it so the tempo fits in. We may lay in 12 or 16, as many as 24 tracks before we’re through, and work eight hours on one composition.”

Greg, 29, and Mat, 20, grew up nearly a continent apart and, at first glance, the two University of Maine students appear to be too different in age, style and temperament to make their collaboration successful. Physically, they are opposites. Greg is tall, thin, fair and a smoker. His wire-rimmed glasses give him a scholarly air, his long, delicate fingers seem made for baroque concertos. His speech is slow, deliberate, often a monotone. During live performances, he wears an oversized shirt with a button-down collar and a faded, beat-up porkpie hat. He looks a bit like “The Thin Man” author Dashiell Hammett, minus the pencil-thin mustache.

Mat is shorter, darker, with the solidity of a soccer player. He moves and speaks in a staccato style as full of breaks and beats as his music. Mat began sampling in high school, using his parents’ record collection, an old turntable, a karaoke machine and one of the first samplers on the market. In nearly every piece of music he hears, Mat mines a new sample. In addition to working with Greg, he DJs at Orono’s Bear Brew Pub, usually in jeans, a T-shirt, a baseball cap and headphones.

Greg grew up in Colorado and dropped out of high school to play music. Trained as a classical pianist, he is so well-versed in music theory that he can pick up and play almost any instrument. Greg, who is working on his doctorate in developmental psychology, sees music as an avocation.

Mat, who lives in Hampden, sees it as a career. A graduate of John Bapst Memorial High School, he is majoring in digital music. He wants to use music computer technology to score Web pages or videos while continuing to compose his own music. He works in the sound division of the multimedia center at the university, adding sound to films and videos, and doing voice-overs.

The two met about a year ago, through a university speech instructor. Mat gave a speech on DJing and the instructor introduced Mat to Greg. The two said they have few, if any, artistic disagreements and the differences in their styles, backgrounds and musical training are a good fit.

“When we first got together I was a little worried because he wasn’t a musician,” said Greg. “But, I found out that he has a musical sensibility, so that lack of classical training doesn’t matter.”

“However,” interrupted Mat, “Greg really helps me out compositionwise. He can figure out why something doesn’t work. He can do the math and the meter. I can’t. Greg also can explain all the musical terminology to me. We collaborate well because everything is up for discussion.”

“I’ve played in a lot of bands,” said Greg, “and musicians are notorious for having big egos. It’s nice that that is not an issue for us.”

When the Headphone People perform, Mat runs the sampler and two turntables. The cuts or breaks he uses from each record album are written in a small notebook, he refers to often. Greg plays the keyboards, bass cello or his classic 1956 Gibson Les Paul electric guitar, along with recorded pieces as Mat scratches the records forward a few revolutions, then backward.

The result is a fusion of layered notes and sounds that sometimes rub and crash against each other with an energetic dissonance. Other compositions are full of melodic harmonies that blend in a seamless wave of sound that gently laps across the audience. In every piece, there are snatches of nearly recognizable, some almost identifiable, cuts.

However, what Mat and Greg create is a totally new song, a composition built and crafted the way some sculptors create art from discarded objects — a one-of-a-kind castle created from Legos.

However, this way of making music is controversial, and, some critics claim, illegal. Nearly all of the samples used by artists like Greg and Mat are copyrighted. That means that they should not be used without written permission from the holder of the copyright. Today, most artists retain the rights to the material they create. However, most of the jazz recordings Mat and Greg sample were recorded in the 1950s, when record companies retained copyrights to artists’ work. The majority of the those labels no longer exist, so the duo are not worried about being sued.

“There is some stuff available for sampling that are license-free,” explained Greg, “but that’s like cheating — like using a rhyming dictionary to write poetry. There are definitely legal and moral questions surrounding sampling. But this is not plagiarism. I am not taking something and passing it off as mine. It’s OK to use a quote to emphasize a point, as long as you cite it.”

Composers like the Youngs insist on using records, not CDs, even though the smaller discs have a “nice, clear sound and records are bulky and wear out,” according to Greg. “But the goal is not necessarily a pristine sound. That grittiness we get with records is part of the genre, and records are easier to cue up and scratch.”

“The whole thing about using records,” added Mat, “is trying to maintain that lineage from what we are doing back to the birth of hip-hop, which traces its roots to jazz. Who decided that good music has to be really clear?”

Ryan Genz, 23, of Orono attended the Headphone People’s performance at the New Moon Cafe in Bangor earlier this month. He described their sound as a combination of jazz, hip-hop and fusion.

“But that doesn’t do it justice,” he declared. “This music is really coming into its own and creating a new paradigm that is giving voice to styles and emotions that have not been given voice to before. It’s more optimistic than some other styles and the beat brings people together to dance and talk about things.”

Headphone People will perform at 8 p.m. the first Monday of each month at the New Moon Cafe on Main Street in Bangor. Greg’s solo CD, “G.S.,” which was released last year, is available at Dr. Records in Orono. Headphone People can be reached by e-mail at gregory-young@umit.maine.edu.