Back in the day I worked for Atari, writing game cartridges for their line of home computers. I had a decent relationship with marketing and had developed a reputation as one of the more helpful geeks. One fine day a marketing guy knocked on my door and asked: "What would it take to print out every possible eight-by-eight bitmap? We want to copyright them so our competition can't use them." Seriously. So I told him t…
I tried calculating this number for 16-bit images in Python (8^8^16), and the interpreter just froze. Go was pretty quick though: 3.940200619639448e+115
Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
311–320 of 340 posts
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
The code actually can produce every possible melody in MIDI. They simply have not stored every possible melody explicitly (uncompressed) on a hard drive (which is impossible, as the size is infinity). However, if you interpret the program itself as a self-extracting compressed archive, they actually have stored every possible melody (in a compressed way). So the question reduces to how much the type of compression ma…
> So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here It doesn't matter at all. As 'patio11 correctly points elsewhere in the thread[0], this question boils down to the colour of the bits. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441118
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#313Earlier 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.
"Learn music theory in half an hour" is obviously an exaggeration, but it really comes astoundingly close to fulfilling that promise. It contains a lot of information and each part builds on the previous parts, so it requires focus and maybe a few repetitions to 'get it', but I think the approach is fantastic for showing how many ideas of music theory are deeply connected.
Not a book as you requested, but hopefully you'll find the other reply useful. As for some of your specific questions:
Frequency is the same concept as radio frequency, but in this case refers to something we can directly sense. Radios transmit electromagnetic waves, which are photons moving at a certain rate, measured in Hertz, or cycles per second. Sound frequency refers to movement of air waves, so a more accurate analogy than radio waves is waves in a pond when a rock is thrown in. Human ears are sensitive to frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, so any sound you hear is a combination of frequencies. Natural language is helpful here, since higher frequencies sound 'higher' and lower frequencies sound 'lower'.
A tone is a sound at a specific frequency, also known as a note. For example, 440 Hz is designated as the note A4 by the Geneva conventions, and this is what most instrument tunings are based off.
Twelve tone equal temperament is the tuning system nearly all modern Western music uses. Certain ratios of frequencies sound pleasant, especially ratios with small numbers, such as 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4. So if we know 440 Hz is a note in the system, it would be nice to also have 587 Hz, 660 Hz, and 880 Hz. However, these frequencies will only really sound good when played with that original 440 Hz, not necessarily with each other. So instead of using them exactly, we approximate them in a useful way. The 1:2 ratio, the octave, is generally considered to be the most important, so that ratio is kept, but otherwise the notes are equally spaced (human hearing is logarithmic), or equally tempered. The most popular tuning system has twelve tones. There's no note at 660 Hz, but there's one at 659 Hz, which is pretty close, and there happens to be one at 587 Hz. Other ratios are also represented reasonably well.
A key is a collection of notes that sound good together, based on the ratios of their frequencies. The alternative would be chromatic composition, where all 12 notes are used and none is obviously 'more important'. Most music is in a specific key, but uses some chromatic notes to make the melody more interesting.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
You haven't diminished the ability for 350 million people to do things, practically, by shaving 1 cent off of them. But adding the ability a million dollars provides one individual to do something cool with 1 million they couldn't do before has increased the overall capabilities of everyone.
In essence, you've just described Kickstarter's business model.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#315Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#316Back in the day I worked for Atari, writing game cartridges for their line of home computers. I had a decent relationship with marketing and had developed a reputation as one of the more helpful geeks. One fine day a marketing guy knocked on my door and asked: "What would it take to print out every possible eight-by-eight bitmap? We want to copyright them so our competition can't use them." Seriously. So I told him t…
Your average printer can print at 600 dots per inch^2. A4 paper is 11.69in by 8.27in, with an area of 96.6763in^2. You can fit 58005.78 dots on an A4 paper assuming you can print on the edges, double that for both sides at 116011.56 dots.
Ignoring actually fitting the bitmaps on the paper, you can store 1812 bitmaps per sheet of paper. You can roughly fit all possible combinations of bitmaps on 10,176,500,000,000,000 sheets of paper.
Typical office paper weighs 5 grams. Ignoring the weight of ink, your total mass of paper would be 50,882,500,000,000 kilograms of paper. Pluto weighs vastly more at 13,090,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.
You definitely don't need a planet's mass worth of paper, but maybe a couple of planets worth of production however. We'd be more likely to see planet scale enslavement in a Douglas Adams galaxy wide copyright mockery scheme, which galactic court would likely throw out since they don't appreciate mockeries of law, leaving everyone a bit disappointed and with entirely too much visibly grey paper.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Only if you consider money completely fungible and use money as your utility function for determining loss here. You haven't diminished the ability for 350 million people to do things, practically, by shaving 1 cent off of them. But adding the ability a million dollars provides one individual to do something cool with 1 million they couldn't do before has increased the overall capabilities of everyone. In essence, yo…
Basically, even if individual bacteria are unnoticed enough of them can kill you.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I found this video to be an extremely helpful and concise explanation of music theory basics: https://youtu.be/rgaTLrZGlk0 "Learn music theory in half an hour" is obviously an exaggeration, but it really comes astoundingly close to fulfilling that promise. It contains a lot of information and each part builds on the previous parts, so it requires focus and maybe a few repetitions to 'get it', but I think the approach…
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Copyright law protects expression, and the labour required to produce that expression. Just like people who copy others’ work to gain from it, the “authors” have attempted to gain from doing no work and letting a computer give them all the world’s music. Imagine if they didn’t release their library into the public domain, and instead started to immediately sue over every new song that came out? It is fortunate that they cannot do either.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found this video to be an extremely helpful and concise explanation of music theory basics: https://youtu.be/rgaTLrZGlk0 "Learn music theory in half an hour" is obviously an exaggeration, but it really comes astoundingly close to fulfilling that promise. It contains a lot of information and each part builds on the previous parts, so it requires focus and maybe a few repetitions to 'get it', but I think the approach…
Thank you for the very detailed response. I'll take a look at that video. Does it cover what a key is?
I actually had to look up what the difference between a key and a scale is, as I thought the terms were pretty much interchangeable. I've edited the last part of my other comment to reflect this:
A scale is actually an ordered set of notes belonging to a key. A key is just an unordered collection of notes. I got this wrong earlier.
So playing all the notes belonging to C major in ascending order is playing a scale, and playing the notes in any order is playing in the key of C.