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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

#91

Post by TeMPOraL »

albertzeyer wrote: post #83
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.

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

#92

Post by DiabloD3 »

onion2k wrote: post #19

The idea might be to prevent lawsuits, but presumably the authors have opened themselves up to being sued by anyone who already owns a melody. If melody owners can't sue the authors then their work can't protect anyone either.

The artist suing, however, would have to worry about legitimizing this work. If the artist suing were to win, it would be setting precedent that everything else is the archive is also copyrightable, including all the melodies that are novel.

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

#93

Post by TeMPOraL »

code6fun wrote: post #68
collyw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't it a bit of wasted space to store the generated data on archive.org Could the algorithm be considered a form of compression?

Does the algorithm represent the Kolmogorov Complexity of the dataset?

Of the "all possible melodies" dataset? Yes. Of the "all possible melodies humans would conceivably consider music, and nothing else" dataset? Not at all.

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

#94

Post by arghwhat »

albertzeyer wrote: post #83
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.

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…

More correctly, it can produce every possible monophonic sequence of tones given infinite time, which in the article was further limited to monophonic 12-tone sequences across a single octave (any other limitations I missed?).

A melody contains more than a sequence of tones. The most heartless definition would at the very least include rhythm. For every sequence of tones they output, they only produce one out of hundreds of possible melodies for that sequence.

It is of course an interesting thought to consider the definition of decompression, but on the other hand, we should also limit the contributed idiocy to the bare minimum required to break the relevant idiotic rules.

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

#95

Post by C1sc0cat »

playpause wrote: post #71
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…

It is to avoid FUD. It ensures no one can derail the conversation into a debate about what constitutes being ‘affixed to a physical medium’. “But are the tunes really affixed to the medium?” “Yes, this hard drive in my hand literally contains a bunch of MP3 files” is a lot stronger than: “Yes, in a way, because this tune-generating script technically constitutes a self-extracting archive, your honour.”

Presumably musicians/composers using purely electronic tools such as abletron live have no problem asserting copyright already.

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

#96

Post by wnkrshm »

teekert wrote: post #10
admiral33 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2035 everybody must speak in grammatically incorrect sentences to avoid being sued by the algorithm.

Haha, nice line of thought. Almost, just almost (and scary because of it) imaginable as a real future.

That is why I hope that experiments such as the one that the artists in the article do aren't successful and their copyright does not hold up in court.

If it did, an actor with more resources could feasibly blanket own any cultural good of value and automatically, quantifiably argue how close any arbitrary third party creation is to their copyrighted material.

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

#97

Post by dmurray »

Anderkent wrote: post #85
dmurray wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't contain the floating point representation of that number, which would be infinitely long, but it does contain the UTF8-encoded constructive proof that uniquely identifies that number.

Surely not? If there are more numbers that can be represented in any amount of bytes (as shown by the diagonal argument), then you cannot represent a constructive proof for each of them in any amount of bytes.

Kind of. A constructive proof by definition means something like you can explain exactly what the number is in a finite number of bytes.

The standard diagonalization argument is a constructive proof, identifying a specific number. Normally a constructive proof is preferable. But with a bit of hand waving you can make it into a non-constructive proof that there are "unknowable" numbers that cannot be described in any finite amount of bytes.

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

#98

Post by goto11 »

Intermernet wrote: post #74
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.

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.…

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.

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

#99

Post by im3w1l »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77
im3w1l wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line between enumeration and a very prolific artist is blurry. What if someone instead of just enumerating them created actual songs featuring them as themata? And what if those songs were tool-assisted? But still catchy? I see it as likely that someone will eventually try it not just as a legal strategy but because of a genuine curiosity in music and AI. According to wikipedia > There is a long tradition in clas…

That's what courts are for! Their job is to figure out the shade of colour a thing has.

Your color paradigm can trivially solve the current case - it's an enumeration and not a creative production.

But the future case I'm speaking of will be a very real dilemma and either decision will have drawbacks. It's not just about seeing through a hack.

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

#100

Post by willvarfar »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #95
playpause wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is to avoid FUD. It ensures no one can derail the conversation into a debate about what constitutes being ‘affixed to a physical medium’. “But are the tunes really affixed to the medium?” “Yes, this hard drive in my hand literally contains a bunch of MP3 files” is a lot stronger than: “Yes, in a way, because this tune-generating script technically constitutes a self-extracting archive, your honour.”

Presumably musicians/composers using purely electronic tools such as abletron live have no problem asserting copyright already.

The musican has to cut a CD or something phyiscal.

https://www.tunecore.com/guides/copyrights-101 the first paragraph is:

> For a work to be “copyrightable,” it must be original and fixed in tangible form, such as a sound recording recorded (affixed to) on a CD or a literary work printed (affixed to) on paper.

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