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Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

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Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#22

I should do this for words.

I've often thought how strikingly easy it seems to be to produce sentences that have probably never been written before.

For example:

I am typing these words on a mobile phone whilst sat on a train to an airport, wearing a green jacket, brown shoes and a maroon hat with a black bag containing gifts for my children. That seems a fairly prosaic sentence at first glance but I doubt has been written before.

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#25
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't use a CNN for this because there's no spatial correlation to take advantage of. Maybe an RNN somehow but the basic problem is scoring (ie how melodic a song is) not classification so honestly I don't know you'd do this using neural networks.

On the contrary, with a more generous reading of the previous comment, it holds some merit. 1. CNN's are used fairly commonly for sequence tasks nowadays. Convolutions can be 1D after all. 2. It's also possible the previous comment was referring to using 2D convolutions on the spectrogram of the audio, which is a common approach. 3. Neural networks are capable of more than classification. Scoring is a regression task…

a 1D CNN is an extremely simple RNN...

do people really run 2d convolutions on spectrograms? that seems rather backwards to me - why convolve in frequency space when you can just multiply in the time domain.

re regression tasks: sure I guess that's just an embedding basically right?

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#26
post #14

It's interesting to think about this from a more general perspective: what if we're not limited to midi, and we're talking about a more general kind of _design_ problem, where the design problem is to select a good solution to a problem within some (large) but finite and theoretically enumerable search space. We can think of selecting a good melody to fit into a song as one example of a design problem -- searching th…

If intellectual property of this kind is a finite resource, then maybe there should be a lifetime intellectual property "takings" limit.

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#28

Wouldn't they get into legal issues as they are colliding with every song already in existence?

Since they're not trying to profit from them, they'd probably just get cease and desist letters and take the offending ones down. Since one of the founders is a lawyer, it's probably feasible to handle most minor conflicts that come up while still protecting the vast major of the melodies.

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#29
post #22

I should do this for words.

I've often thought how strikingly easy it seems to be to produce sentences that have probably never been written before. For example: I am typing these words on a mobile phone whilst sat on a train to an airport, wearing a green jacket, brown shoes and a maroon hat with a black bag containing gifts for my children. That seems a fairly prosaic sentence at first glance but I doubt has been written before.

Try searching for it in the Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/

(edit: ninja'd)

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#30
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tl;dr would be nice it you post such a long article that doesn't directly seem to have anything to do with the current topic.

It's actually very relevant, the TL;DR (from memory) is that lawyers (and judges) aren't programmers, and the source of data (referred to as the "colour of the bits") is as important as the actual bits of the data. Thus "I have this bit pattern as part of a bit enumeration" is different, to the legal system, than "I have this bit pattern because I specifically created it".

What's the legal principle that distinguishes methods of generation? Even if enumeration is definitely on one side, there is an infinite gradation from there to human generation.
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