I don't see why this isn't just another example of a broken system - copyright is wrong, always. It was invented by the Inquisition, after all.
Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
41–50 of 149 posts
Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
#42I think this is just the nature of music. It requires a rather rigid system which does not offer enough diversity to be completely unique. All musical genres need to at least share the same root elements for association. https://youtu.be/Co9mW_9hH2g
This is not true. It may be true for modern pop, but I can give lots of examples where originality abounds: Classical music, Jazz and its derivatives, prog rock. I never understood why people listen to radio music and don't even know what is out there, it's like seeing the same dull basic painting over and over again.
Almost uniquely in art, free jazz retains the power to shock even sophisticated audiences. There is a brutality to the work of artists like Albert Ayler or Milford Graves that transcends the intellectual.
Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Music is about expression first and foremost. That may be, but the music industry is much more about industry than music. Artists like Radiohead only want to "protect their art" when there's a chance of getting a worthwhile check in to the bargain.
How do you know that a worthwhile check has anything to do with Radiohead's motives? What other artists are you implying belong to this group?
They are seeking 100% of the profits for that song. They could ask her to remove the song from the album if they felt like she was biting their music and had no monetary motives.
Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
#44As a hobby music producer I just can't wrap my head around the logic behind copyright infringement. It's so arbitrary. It's illegal to steal a melody but sophisticated chord progressions are fine. It's illegal to copy the text of even the simplest verse but reverse engineering some complex synthesizer sounds is fine. Although I personally strive for it, I don't think originality is a point worth discussing. Music is…
What we see right now is the beginning of the "intellectual property" lawsuit wave. Music producers, artists, and record labels have always known that pop music doesn't come out of thin air and is highly repetitive. For some popular chord progressions and main melodies you can literally find thousands of practically identical songs. Until recently, copyright holders have avoided lawsuits except in cases of blatant co…
> Mainstream music will become even less melodic and weirder than it already is, as these songs (e.g. in contemporary "R&B") are developed to avoid lawsuits while still kind of "sounding like a hit". It's a tricky business.
I think this is a great example for what you're describing:
Anne-Marie - Ciao Adios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqob4D3BoZc
Sounds actually quite fresh!
Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
#45I think this is just the nature of music. It requires a rather rigid system which does not offer enough diversity to be completely unique. All musical genres need to at least share the same root elements for association. https://youtu.be/Co9mW_9hH2g
Western tonality has some rules. Composers can operate outside of that if they want. With computers, a single composer could make up a new set of rules for every piece. You can turn a drum beat into a note by accelerating the wave form, invent your own scales. It is interesting that even electronic artists tend to operate within the constraints of the western tradition. It is probably a struggle to find an audience o…
Western tonality is a consequence of the biology of human hearing combined with the physics of common Western instruments. The ear converts sound to the frequency domain. If peaks in that spectrum are close together, they're perceived as a single beating sound. If they're far apart, they're perceived as separate sounds. But if they are of intermediate distance, they are perceived as a dissonant noise. Plomp and Levelt investigated this with pairs of sine tones[0], and Sethares generalized it to arbitrary sounds[1].
If you sum the dissonances on the Plomp-Levelt curve of every pair of harmonics from multiple sounds played at once, weighted by the amplitude of those harmonics, you get a good approximation of perceived dissonance. String and wind instruments make sounds with harmonics at (approximately) integer multiples of the fundamental. If you graph the calculated dissonance of frequency intervals of such sounds, the minima will match the intervals of the traditional Western scale.
Other instruments, such as tuned percussion, can have prominent harmonics at non-integer multiples of the fundamental. This requires different tuning for maximum consonance. Indonesian classical music, with its extensive use of tuned percussion, is well known for this.
You can of course ignore this, but most people like their music to be mostly consonant, and if you arbitrarily change tuning you're very likely to end up with something that's mostly dissonant.
[0] http://www.mpi.nl/world/materials/publications/levelt/Plomp_... [1] http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf (less formal summary: http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html )
Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
#46Nowadays it wouldn't be hard to build a program that generates a 500+ hour long instrumental piece which contains 80%+ of all song progression sequences. Then release it under "free for commercial use" and nobody can every sue anyone else in the future. Thank you very much
Won't it get you sued out of existence by every existing label/artist?
Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
#47For anyone who doesn't play the guitar, 'Creep' and the Hollies track is is derived from come feature a rather obvious chord progression. Physically it is the result of sliding an open E chord down the neck to produce higher notes then, la piece de resistance, taking a finger off. Radiohead added a killer feature of turning the gain up on the amplifier for the chorus, genius. It's the kind of thing teenagers everywhe…
> Physically it is the result of sliding an open E chord down the neck to produce higher notes then, la piece de resistance, taking a finger off. Radiohead added a killer feature of turning the gain up on the amplifier for the chorus, genius. It's the kind of thing teenagers everywhere find in their second month of guitar mastery.
E major, G# major, A major, A minor
The song is in E major, yet G# major and A minor are not chords in that scale.
> Why should you get paid for the guitar equivalent of pressing all of the white notes on a piano?
Firstly, no. All the white keys are consistently in one key, e.g. C major
Secondly, although Lana's infringement may have honestly been accidental, the progression and melody are extremely similar to Creep.
Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds reasonable but how do you define “any form of creativity/expression” legally? That’s the problem. If you know anything about writing music you should know why chord progressions can’t be copyrighted. There’s only 12 notes, there’s not that many unique chord progressions to be found in the Standard I/IV/V pop music format. Melodies and lyrics, on the other hand, there’s a nearly infinite supply. The proble…
I'd say “any form of creativity/expression” means you take something and don't copy it 1:1. Copying 100% of a (lyric|composition|: not okay, taking a subset of it: fine. Admittedly, it has to be a bit more sophisticated than that. For instance, getting away with just omitting the very last word would be ridiculous. > If you know anything about writing music you should know why chord progressions can’t be copyrighted.…
The problem I see with your analysis is that you're taking a fundamentally creative and subjective process, reducing it to its output, and then making comparisons based solely on the mathematics of the output. That strikes me as akin to comparing two paintings by counting pairs of brush strokes. The reality is much more complex than that.
We have really powerful computers and we know a lot of math, so it's understandably seductive to reduce a problem like this to one that yields to mathematical analysis, but there is something important lost in the reduction. It's a song we're discussing, and not just a progression of chords.
Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
#49If any one or two of the song characteristics were similar most would chalk it up to inspiration - but in this case every progression, melody, vocal slide, beat, and crescendo is appropriated. Not to mention the tone of the piece and lyrics.
Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
#50Nowadays it wouldn't be hard to build a program that generates a 500+ hour long instrumental piece which contains 80%+ of all song progression sequences. Then release it under "free for commercial use" and nobody can every sue anyone else in the future. Thank you very much
Won't it get you sued out of existence by every existing label/artist?
i didn't think of it, we need the "satoshi nakamoto" of music