Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

musictech.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 340 posts

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

#51

Post by Iv »

Robin_Message wrote: post #40

I am not a lawyer, but as I understand copyright law there seem to be to be two problems with this: - a copyrightable work must include some human creativity. It seems to me that an enumeration of possibilities might be creative, but there is no way an individual element of that enumeration can be considered creative. - Copyright depends on copying . If you release a song with a catchy melody stolen from another song…

To be fair, this program is a stupid response to a stupid problem. Even if that muddied the waters for a year or two, that would just be a patch, not a fix.

The fix is political. Call for copyright reforms.

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

#52

Post by rajansaini »

nicklo wrote: post #15
throwqwerty wrote: post #12

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…

I have some questions (mainly to improve my own understanding):

2. Since data is MIDI-encoded, would a convolution hold any merit here? I suppose you could render to an mp3 and analyze the audio itself but that seems very computationally expensive and prone to overfitting. 3) If we're training a scoring classifier, we would need labeled data, but getting those labels seems very challenging, not least because of how subjective our impressions of melodies can be (for instance, the opinions of a fan of atonality would be drastically different from a fan of pop). Do you have any ideas on how to mitigate this?

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

#53

Post by kaoD »

throwqwerty wrote: post #33
drno123 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I meant to run 2D CNN over generated spectrograms. We do something similar to classify some specific emissions in RF with good success. As for scoring/classification, you can start by having an output of CNN say whether the song is catchy or not.

why run a CNN over a spectrogram? besides what I said (convolutions in frequency domain are multiplications in time domain) an FT is linear. if classifying using those features were effective then your CNN would've learned the DFT matrix weights from the original signal.

A spectrogram isn't a FT. It's a FT sampled over time.

(Not sure if that matters, I don't know much about NNs, but seemed like an important distinction.)

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

#54

Post by iainmerrick »

jmkd wrote: post #22
jay_kyburz wrote: post #3

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.

I’m sure I’ve read (in the context of Google searches) that it’s very easy to write a sentence that’s never been written. Most sentences on HN are probably completely unique.

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

#55

Post by arketyp »

hobofan wrote: post #49
albertzeyer wrote: post #36

The code is written in Rust. The core algorithm can be found here: https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli/blob/master/src/ut... (Specifically the function gen_sequences. It basically uses multi_cartesian_product to iterate over all permutations.) Isn't it a bit of wasted space to store the generated data on archive.org ( https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets )? I mean, as we see, it's trivial to cre…

I'm not sure if it would hold up legally anyway, but with it already being generated I can see it working out a bit better. If you only provide the code as a means of generating any melody, you could just as well replace it with any music instrument and claim you can generate any melody with it.

Ad absurdum (or maybe not so much?), any universal Turing machine can be programmed to list every possible program, specifically the one generating every melody. So the copyright claim could then just as well point to Conway's game of life or rule 110.

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

#56

Post by albertzeyer »

willvarfar wrote: post #50
albertzeyer wrote: post #36

The code is written in Rust. The core algorithm can be found here: https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli/blob/master/src/ut... (Specifically the function gen_sequences. It basically uses multi_cartesian_product to iterate over all permutations.) Isn't it a bit of wasted space to store the generated data on archive.org ( https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets )? I mean, as we see, it's trivial to cre…

At the very beginning of this excellent interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw that I found in the comments here, they explain this. Apparently, for this to work, they have to "affix them to a physical medium". Strongly recommend watching that video! Excellent info.

Hm, they don't really explain this, or do they? They just say "by saving those melodies to a hard drive they have affixed them to a physical medium which is all that is necessary to copyright them".

So, by the same argument, they could copy the self-extracting archive to a hard drive, and then have the same thing, or not?

They even say that they already store it in a compressed form on the hard drive.

What if some future compressor (future ZIP format) is clever enough to see that you are going to save all possible permutations of something, and then saves this is a much better compressed way. Then suddenly when compressors do this, it means when you use such a compressor, you do not have copyright on the data anymore?

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

#57

Post by lcrz »

itronitron wrote: post #44
Leszek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

A counterpoint to that is that genetically modified organisms can be patented and those are effectively random perturbations of current 'state of the art' which are then selected for fitness.

That's not a counterpoint. That's a case in point. The selection by the human (or by any other method) is the 'creativity'. The fact that the change itself occurred randomly is not important. The fact that the permutation was chosen is actually what gives it a certain color in the sense of the article.

There's also a difference between copyright and patent law.

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

#58

Post by willvarfar »

albertzeyer wrote: post #56
willvarfar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very beginning of this excellent interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw that I found in the comments here, they explain this. Apparently, for this to work, they have to "affix them to a physical medium". Strongly recommend watching that video! Excellent info.

Hm, they don't really explain this, or do they? They just say "by saving those melodies to a hard drive they have affixed them to a physical medium which is all that is necessary to copyright them". So, by the same argument, they could copy the self-extracting archive to a hard drive, and then have the same thing, or not? They even say that they already store it in a compressed form on the hard drive. What if some fu…

Very true.

I think the focus has to be on the spirit not the technology. Saying to a lawyer/judge/jurist "hey, this script can generate every possible melody!" _feels_ quite different from saying "every single melody is already written down, on this hard-drive I am waving at you! Look!"

Tangent: reminds me of the Hutter Prize for compression (hey, they prize pot recently increased to €500K and I submitted it to HN but it didn't get any votes http://prize.hutter1.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize).

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

#59

Post by Lewton »

Robin_Message wrote: post #40

I am not a lawyer, but as I understand copyright law there seem to be to be two problems with this: - a copyrightable work must include some human creativity. It seems to me that an enumeration of possibilities might be creative, but there is no way an individual element of that enumeration can be considered creative. - Copyright depends on copying . If you release a song with a catchy melody stolen from another song…

> Copyright depends on copying

Copyright claims have been won by arguing the song was so widely available that it’s unreasonable to assume the defendant did not have access to it, which is why they’re trying to spread access to this as far as possible

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

#60

Post by reacweb »

willvarfar wrote: post #58
albertzeyer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, they don't really explain this, or do they? They just say "by saving those melodies to a hard drive they have affixed them to a physical medium which is all that is necessary to copyright them". So, by the same argument, they could copy the self-extracting archive to a hard drive, and then have the same thing, or not? They even say that they already store it in a compressed form on the hard drive. What if some fu…

Very true. I think the focus has to be on the spirit not the technology. Saying to a lawyer/judge/jurist "hey, this script can generate every possible melody!" _feels_ quite different from saying "every single melody is already written down, on this hard-drive I am waving at you! Look!" Tangent: reminds me of the Hutter Prize for compression (hey, they prize pot recently increased to €500K and I submitted it to HN bu…

Takes any algorithm that can generates the digits of pi. It is proven that all the sequences of digits are present somewhere in these digits. Can you claim copyright on all the books of the universe because you can show the algorithm that can generate every possible books ?
Post reply on HN