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Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

musictech.net

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

#251

Post by salawat »

jerf wrote: post #225
logfromblammo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would note that 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence is copyrighted by John Cage as " 4'33" ", and a single chord sustained for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence, is copyrighted by Yves Klein as "The Monotone-Silence Symphony".

Cage's case is more complicated and less a violation than it may sound at first. It's not 4'33" of "mathematically true silence", that is, you don't violate it per se just by having the right number of zeros in your .wav file. It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in. Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance con…

>It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in.

That's an incorrect way to view it actually. 4'33" copyrightable essence is actually represented by the active production of its scoring. I.e. nothing. The background sound is not what makes it copyrightable. You can go ahead and sit at a piano for the length of the composition all you want, wherever you want, and you'll still be publically performing 4'33".

The rather humorous outcome, if one asks me, is that anyone who writes in 4 beats of silemce into a score should be violating copyright if we're going to be consistent.

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

#252

Post by olooney »

tripzilch wrote: post #241
syntheticnature wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once, a guy at a bar told me he wanted to do a similar thing: displaying a 100x100 image that changed once a second to run through all possible bitmaps. He didn't believe me when I told him that doing so would exceed the the lifespan of the planet (to say nothing of what state the universe would be in).

What I find useful when explaining people how long some very long count will take, is to tell them that 1 billion seconds lasts about 30 years, or that counting to a billion takes about 30 years[0]. Not sure if it would have helped with your guy, of course, but it generally provides some insight :) [0] I wonder about estimating that time, many numbers may take longer than a second to even pronounce.

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

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

#253

Post by eweise »

braindongle wrote: post #249

Love the spirit of this work, but nobody is an authority on what a melody is. How many different tuning systems were used? Why 8 notes? Why not 0..n notes? [0] Is a given melody, realized at 10ms per beat a melody? How about a 17-month pause before the first note? [1] Absurd? Sure. But who decides where the boundaries are? Lest one think that there is only an appeal to extremes here, check out Polansky's beautiful Lo…

8 notes is what popular music is based on. I don't see why it matter what the tempo is. Pretty sure no one would be in danger of copyright infringement of a 17 month pause.

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

#254

Post by white-flame »

shadowgovt wrote: post #203
ajuc wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole concept of IP is absurd, and there are many absurd consequences you can derive from it. But there are degrees of absurdity, it's one thing to do that when there's 26^100000 possible combinations, it's another when there's just 12^100 (and if you only care about melody it's overestimation, most songs will use much smaller subset of that).

It's not like this absurdity was unknown to the framers of copyright. Thomas Jefferson, writing regarding patents, wrote "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society..." And yet, they persist (and in the modern era, proliferate) because it's generally agreed society derives benefit from paying people for their purely-idea creative work. ... but that doesn't me…

They persist because they allow some people to create extreme monetization strategies, which feeds into lobbying congress for further expansion of copyright.

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

#255

Post by fsflover »

reacweb wrote: post #60
willvarfar wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

It has already been done (even though it is only a conjecture):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869691

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

#256

Post by db48x »

braindongle wrote: post #249

Love the spirit of this work, but nobody is an authority on what a melody is. How many different tuning systems were used? Why 8 notes? Why not 0..n notes? [0] Is a given melody, realized at 10ms per beat a melody? How about a 17-month pause before the first note? [1] Absurd? Sure. But who decides where the boundaries are? Lest one think that there is only an appeal to extremes here, check out Polansky's beautiful Lo…

99% of all music is pop music, and the tuning system for all pop music is 12-tone equal temperament. Would a jury even be able to tell the difference between 12TET and just intonation?

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

#257

Post by throwqwerty »

kd5bjo wrote: post #43
throwqwerty wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 has time on one axis and frequency on the other, so the ultimate result is a multiplication in one dimension and a convolution in the other. It can be used to show things like when a note starts and stops in a piece of music, which is difficult in either purely-time or purely-frequency space. Also, it’s computationally intractable to individually train 2^N weights. What a CNN does instead is train a con…

my mistake i didn't realize spectrogram and spectrum were distinct objects.

>Also, it’s computationally intractable to individually train 2^N weights.

that's a good point - i'd forgotten for a moment (because i'm so used to cooley-tukey fft) that in principle getting the spectrum involves a matmul against the entire vector. which brings up a potentially interested question: can you get a DNN to simulate the cooley-tukey fft (stride permutations and all).

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

#258

Post by wool_gather »

ajuc wrote: post #168
jameshart wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand if you offered it up as a fact with reckless disregard for its truthfulness... Again we see programmers trying to understand the law in terms of ‘how can a piece of data be illegal?’ while the law is quite happily focusing on making specific actions illegal. ‘You can’t arrest me, gold bars aren’t illegal!’ ‘Yes, but carrying them out of the federal reserve vault without permission is.’

"I invented this later but independently" isn't a valid defense, even if you can prove it. So it's not actions (like copying or plagiarism) that is prohibited, it's the result. That's the problem with IP law. In effect you give people monopoly on numbers. When the numbers are big nobody is bothered by this, because chance of arriving at the exact same one is effectively zero. But for songs the numbers are pretty smal…

That's not correct in the case of copyright. Independent invention can be used as a defense to a copyright infringement claim.

> Generally, a plaintiff proves copying through circumstantial evidence, showing that the defendant had access to the copyrighted work [...] > > [...] unlike in patent law, if a defendant independently creates the substantially similar work, he is not liable to the copyright holder.

https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/copying-copyright-s-wil...

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

#259

Post by salawat »

derefr wrote: post #242
jerf wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cage's case is more complicated and less a violation than it may sound at first. It's not 4'33" of "mathematically true silence", that is, you don't violate it per se just by having the right number of zeros in your .wav file. It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in. Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance con…

> Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance context may still be an interesting thought experiment Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample. There are plenty of these (though not usually that long) in sample libraries, recording e.g. traffic sounds, or diner conversation, or crickets in a marsh in summer, etc. And those are certainly copyrigh…

>Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample.

I would question any legal professional's authoritative standing to even advise on copyright of a work of music if they miscategorize a recording of ambient sound as a performance of a musical scoring consisting entirely of silence. The copyright doesn't apply to the ambient sound, but to the long quiessence of an artist at their instrument.

It demonstrates a complete blindness of the negative space of music, and a positivistic bias that has no place being enshrined in our legal system.

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

#260

Post by kevinventullo »

tripzilch wrote: post #241
syntheticnature wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once, a guy at a bar told me he wanted to do a similar thing: displaying a 100x100 image that changed once a second to run through all possible bitmaps. He didn't believe me when I told him that doing so would exceed the the lifespan of the planet (to say nothing of what state the universe would be in).

What I find useful when explaining people how long some very long count will take, is to tell them that 1 billion seconds lasts about 30 years, or that counting to a billion takes about 30 years[0]. Not sure if it would have helped with your guy, of course, but it generally provides some insight :) [0] I wonder about estimating that time, many numbers may take longer than a second to even pronounce.

I recently celebrated my billionth second :)
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