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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

#301

Post by irrational »

kian wrote: post #294
irrational wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what any of those words mean (octave, melody, tempo, harmony, diatonic?) Do you have a book that you would recommend to learn about these terms?

Octave - a doubling in the frequency. Generally speaking, in twelve tone equally tempered classical music, melodies and harmonies are drawn from a scale, a subset of these twelve notes. The most notable of those scales, the diatonic scale has 7 unique notes, and the eighth note wraps back around to the beginning of the scale. Thus, moving from a note to a note double the frequency took 8 notes - hence, the octave. Di…

Unfortunately that is just pushing it out. frequency? Is this the same as a radio frequency? tone? twelve tone? equally tempered? scale?

I honestly know nothing about music so this is all gibberish to me. But I'd be interested to learn if anyone has a book recommendation.

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

#302

Post by thaumasiotes »

paulddraper wrote: post #154
Intermernet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely satire, but it's satire in the face of comical law. That's the point. If copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale, and in a limited number of bars, then this is a completely valid argument against such a weak argument. The reality is that many number one songs can be tonally compared to many classical pieces, or even pieces from the last 40 years.…

> copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale Interestingly, there are writers who want to argue originality based on the arrangement of letters in 26-letter alphabet! The world is indeed a strange place for the dogmatically logical programmer.

>> If copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale, and in a limited number of bars

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

#303

Post by Retric »

shadowgovt wrote: post #285
Retric wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Representative governments are well known for supporting powerful groups over the collective benefit of society. Just look at any of those countries tax codes and you will find a multitude of special exceptions. Patents are of limited duration because the tradeoffs of unlimited patents are so horrific. If we accept a billion dollar drug must enter the public domain, clearly copyright should also be limited just as it…

"A tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference" seems like a utilitarian argument that the system is working as intended; there is net positive benefit.

If it costs 350 million people 1 cent to hand me 1 million dollars they don’t notice, yet that’s a net loss. Critically, even when you include those who benefit it’s still a loss.

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

#304

Post by db48x »

cormacrelf wrote: post #273
db48x wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The method of generation prevents that. They didn't listen to song A and write down the melodies from it, then listen to song B and write down those melodies. They generated them all in order using a computer program. Presumably it prevents lawsuits because I can write a song starting with a melody from this archive knowing that it's in the public domain. (Or because it makes obvious the absurdity of having a copyrig…

It doesn’t prevent lawsuits, or do anything at all. Other comments here are close; this material is not an original work, so copyright does not subsist in it. No copyright, no ability to place in public domain or issue licenses at all. This is the equivalent of pouring a glass of water in the ocean and then declaring you own all international waters.

It certainly contains many melodies which are not original. But what about the rest? It either contains some melodies which are original or it contains no original melodies. In the former case then they can be copyrighted, and in the later case they cannot (well, that hinges on access rather than mere equality, but I'll ignore that). However, in the latter case nobody else can get copyright on any new melodies either.

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

#305

Post by nybble41 »

jerf wrote: post #232
goto11 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I can write a program which can generate your name and your sexual preference (among a lot of garbage data). Does that mean this can no longer be considered private information subject to privacy laws? You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.

This actually reveals an important truth about the nature of information: Information is often better understood as exclusionary , rather than somehow "creative". If I have a "thing", you don't know what color it is. If I know tell you it is "red", you still don't know the exact shade, but I have excluded a lot of possibilities. How informative my statement is depends on how much is excluded. If I name an exact Panto…

> ... as a legal criticism of the system it would fail completely.

The legal criticism would be that there just aren't that many unique melodies—as demonstrated by the fact that they were able to enumerate them all—so the mere fact that two songs use the same melody is not sufficient to show that one is a copy of the other. The set of melodies that are compatible with human ascetics is even smaller. They don't actually need these auto-generated melodies to qualify for copyright for the project to succeed. It works equally well if similarity in melody is not considered sufficient evidence of copyright infringement.

Even just having the database around so that one can say that they copied the melody from here rather than from some other source might be enough. After all, unlike patents, independently producing something similar to a copyrighted work is not infringement; you have to have actually copied from the other work. If you're a musician perhaps you should listen to a few randomly-selected melodies from this program each day. Maybe it will spark something, but even if it doesn't it will at least make it harder to argue that whatever melody you come up with could only have been "subconsciously copied" from some other composer's song you may have heard decades ago.

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

#306

Post by amichal »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #290
olooney wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beholding the Big Bang, 2009, by Arthur Ganson A series of 12 pairs of reduction gears, each at a 50:1 ratio. On the left, a motor spins at a high rpm; on the right, the drive shaft is embedded into a concrete block. It will be 13.7 billion years before the final gear completes a single rotation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCA2whpMCno

I wonder what the system as a whole is rated to. I suspect the motor will give out within another decade. I doubt that the system used a super long life motor, but I could be very wrong.

This is at the MIT museum. I first saw it as a child decades ago and many times sense. The motor has been visibly replaced/refurbed and I'm sure they turn it off at night. All that said, when you see the first gear or two zipping around and stand there and stare at the Nth gear trying to see any movement at all it really drives home how these things scale. As a kid I once watched it for over an hour to see if could see ANY movement in the first gear that looked still.

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

#307

Post by dependenttypes »

shadowgovt wrote: post #284
JackFr wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird -- legal arguments aren't protected under any sort of intellectual property regime. In fact in common law jurisdictions, it's encouraged for you base your work off that of previous practitioners. I always wonder how different our intellectual property regime would be if lawyers demanded to be paid royalties for others citing cases which they had won.

Copyright as an institution is grounded on arguments of net societal benefit, and it doesn't take much argument to demonstrate that there is net societal harm to intentionally diminishing people's ability to comply with the law.

Sadly the Norwegian courts do not seem to agree. See this series of blog posts by the creator of CSS. https://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/06-11-blog

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

#308

Post by kian »

irrational wrote: post #301
kian wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Octave - a doubling in the frequency. Generally speaking, in twelve tone equally tempered classical music, melodies and harmonies are drawn from a scale, a subset of these twelve notes. The most notable of those scales, the diatonic scale has 7 unique notes, and the eighth note wraps back around to the beginning of the scale. Thus, moving from a note to a note double the frequency took 8 notes - hence, the octave. Di…

Unfortunately that is just pushing it out. frequency? Is this the same as a radio frequency? tone? twelve tone? equally tempered? scale? I honestly know nothing about music so this is all gibberish to me. But I'd be interested to learn if anyone has a book recommendation.

If you're looking for a book, Music: A Mathematical Offering https://www.amazon.com/Music-Mathematical-Offering-Dave-Bens... is pretty good. But you're nearly a the end of your recursion, though. Wikipedia ought to take you the rest of the way to answering those basic questions. More complex questions like why certain combinations sound good whe next to one another, on the other hand...

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

#310

Post by rdlw »

paulgb wrote: post #140
tunesmith wrote: post #42

It's about fourteen kinds of ridiculous, as summarized in other threads. No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony, the headline is literally false, etc. Some of the copyright lawsuits are dumb and this is effective satire or performance art but that's all it is.

> No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes I am not a musician, but which of these are copied in the Tom Petty / Sam Smith case that motivated this exercise? To my untrained ear, I do hear some similarities in the relative lengths of the notes (meter?). I found a side-by-side comparison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YflFw9T77FQ

I don't have a great ear, but I think it's a similar melody, albeit at a different tempo and key (?). If you can't hear it, try changing the video speed to 1.5x during the Sam Smith part.

If these two songs are similar enough, then I think it could be argued that a MIDI sequence has been copied, since in both cases it requires a significant change of tempo and key. A lot of commenters seem to be missing this point: yes, the generated sequences sound different from real songs, but so do the songs involved in the ridiculous court cases. Radiohead and Ed Sheeran were sued for chord progressions, Katy Perry for a melody. The songs involved were altered about as much as the MIDI sequences would need to be to show the similarities.

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