A lot of people seem to miss the distinction between DJ (someone who mixes/remixes music) and composer/producer.
I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
31–40 of 103 posts
Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saying something absurd isn’t automatically a joke that I am expected to get. This is humor on the same level as typing the N word in all caps or just lying. It’s not funny, it’s not clever.
lol what Edit: pro·lif·ic (adj) marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity It's just a fun title for his article about programmatically creating millions of remixes, thus becoming a very prolific DJ. That's the entire joke. It doesn't seem equivalent to "typing the N word in all caps." I'm sorry that your sense of humor is simply too refined to understand us uneducated peasants' jokes. Also you really just made…
Outside of the joke - I'd say your own definition of prolific undermines you pretty hard there.
While I respect the author for the goal here, I would say he was neither abundantly inventive nor productive.
His inventiveness boiled down to taking an existing concept, and saving some disk space using an already known algorithm. To boot - his method of saving that space rendered the original intent (preventing copywrite of melodies) useless, and was already considered by the original group.
His productivity was a single morning's work, creating a single album, which is just random noise and will never be meaningfully listened to even a single time.
I'm not going to begrudge him the usage in the title, and I think it's a fun weekend project, but I also think it's pretty clearly clickbait (which is fine!).
Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be a consequence of copyright law being developed in Europe. The European musical tradition is mostly concerned with harmony, and less with rhythm. A musical culture focusing on harmony would be most of the African traditions.
Just a nitpick but blanket statements like this are highly misleading. "European" musical traditions are not concerned with rhythm any less than "African" traditions. European musical theory historically focused on harmony more so than rhythm which has the side-effect of vernacular developing more a robust vocabulary for harmony. The reason this distinction matters is because I think its important to understand that…
And this seems to be completely lost today. Go listen to the Furtwrangler recordings, then listen to any modern arrangement. The modern arrangements are so precise, as if a computer is reading the scores. But the 1940s recordings are so full of life and vigor, it sounds like a different piece. And it is so much fun to listen to, even if the recording quality is atrocious by today's standards.
Karajan might have been the last of the conductors that I enjoy like listening to. His fifth changes pace but it feels so natural. The slow parts are drawn out were they need to be, but the fast parts just grab you and drag you along. There was no notation for that, it took interpretation. And he could get all the instruments to open the piece together. Even Berenbaum couldn't get his players to open the piece properly, at least not those that I could find on Youtube.
Thought there is one young guy on Youtube who does a terrific job conducting, I should go find that.
Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
#34No post body was provided.
Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
#35But if you can't copyright something that was created via automation ( https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2022/02/23/thaler-loses-ai-author... ), does this even matter?
You absolutely can copywrite works created via automation, you just still have to list a human as the author. Which makes a lot of sense to me - Someone had to set up the automation with the intent to create a copy writable work, and copywrite often has built in expirations based on a window of time after the death of the author. Hard to make that sane if you're listing a computer program as the author - when does it…
Even if you assign the copyright to a human and not a machine, you need a minimal amount of creativity to qualify for copyright, eg phone books can't be copyrighted. A "phone book" of every melody of a certain length is probably(?) not copyrightable either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications%2C_Inc.%2C_....
Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
#36I'm surprised to learn that copyright doesn't take into account the length of notes, which to me is part of what makes melodies unique.
It sounds like you're assuming that they actually have any copyright on this. They don't. It's not identical but see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702117 for some similar issue.
And in general, you must be "creative" to have a copyright. You might have a "copyright" on the resulting file, but no court would ever dream of extending that to a claim of copyright on every melody. There is no way that the author was "creative" in any sort of proportion to the amount of material being putatively claimed. Normally one would expect for this to then start a big HN chain arguing the precise definition of "creativity per unit output" that is the threshold, but in addition to the fact you have to get a court to agree to your definition, bear in mind that this is quite literally exponentially little creative effort per output. The author has put in so little effort per output that they haven't even listened to their own "work" once, I'm sure! This is not the normal definition of a "creative work". The usual arguments will be based around a polynomial at most, and frankly usually linear amount of output per "creative input". Especially in light of the fact that the lifespan of a given "creative human being" isn't even "linear" so much as "constant".
Given that this is only a very small amount of effort from being able to claim all combinations of notes ever, it's clear this is not a copyrightable work, excepting perhaps the literal output of the work but no more than that.
(It's also not that much more work to order these things in entropy order, by analyzing songs and deriving some probability for note lengths and intervals, making it so that one could just start generating melodies and actually hit almost every useful melody in an even "smaller" work. Also not copyrightable.)
So, basically, don't learn anything about copyright from this article.
Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
#37No post body was provided.
Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
#38A lot of people seem to miss the distinction between DJ (someone who mixes/remixes music) and composer/producer.
[deleted]
Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
#39This is a mathematical approach to music, and lacks (from my point of view) what is the mere essence of music : choice. I understand why they want to take back the copyright on music, but they do so in such a geeky way that it seems completely useless to me. Ultimately, musicians will pick good / cool melodies from this dataset, in the same way they do when in front of an instrument. I might be missing the point ?
Of course, any digitally representable artform can be enumerated this way. What's special is that melodies have low enough entropy that it's actually practical to create them all, which isn't the case with (say) movies or novels. And that low entropy is also why spurious similarities occur, as when huge pop stars are accused of plagiarising some band with 200 soundcloud followers.
Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
#40Other projects in a similar spirit: Tom Johnson's Chord Catalog which organizes the 8,178 chords possible in a single octave of the piano: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chord_Catalogue James Whitehead's All Possible CDs: http://www.jliat.com/APCDS/index.html > This “thought” experiment although based on real “physical” objects can be treated as a simple mathematical object and so allows us to explore some of the…
Related: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/
All possible scales with 12TET and octave equivalence.