
Musicians algorithmically generate melodies, release them to public domain - dylan604
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain
======
ChrisArchitect
lots of discussion over here on this topic from two weeks ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22301091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22301091)

~~~
dr_dshiv
And discussed in 1692, by Bernoulli, Mersenne and Kircher

[http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1979HisSc..17..258K...](http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1979HisSc..17..258K/0000258.000.html)

------
calny
I'd like this to work, and kudos to the creators for having an interesting
idea in a problem area. I've been surprised that copyright plaintiffs have
been winning these cases, e.g. Marvin Gaye vs Robin Thicke, the Katy Perry
case. Maybe this "all-melodies-ever" idea has an off chance to defeat
copyright claims based solely upon melody, although I'm doubtful (that said, I
haven't thought deeply about it and copyright law is filled with nuance).

But practically, most of these claims are not based solely on melody. For
instance, a plaintiff beat Katy Perry based on expert testimony that the songs
were similar "with regard to their pitch, rhythm, texture, pattern of
repetition, melodic shape, and timbre."[1] The way these cases are being
decided, plaintiffs could avoid dismissal by claiming copyright in some
nebulous combination of protectable elements, even if melody is a key part of
similarity.

One ray of hope: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which decides most of
these cases, since it encompasses LA) is reconsidering these issues in the
case where Led Zeppelin was accused of ripping off the Stairway to Heaven
riff. The lawyers made their arguments last year, and we are waiting for a
decision. A good decision could clean up the law governing these claims.

[1] [http://www.fordhamiplj.org/2019/09/27/katy-perry-lost-her-
da...](http://www.fordhamiplj.org/2019/09/27/katy-perry-lost-her-dark-horse-
copyright-lawsuit-but-the-real-loser-is-the-music-industry/)

~~~
dublinben
This is a great video about that Katy Perry case by composer Adam Neely.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ytoUuO-
qvg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ytoUuO-qvg)

~~~
qqn
That was amazing, thanks so much!

------
calibas
If their legal argument is legit, it also means they just infringed upon the
copyrights of most modern songs by attempting to release their melodies into
public domain.

Someone who owns the copyrights to a song should sue them for a paltry sum,
just to see how things play out in court.

~~~
wpasc
What if a good actor who owned an infringed melody sued them with the
intention of losing to set a good precedent?

~~~
bluGill
See vidarh's very good post which I won't repeat.

A court trail is not much a precedent. The judge can decide to not allow you
to mention it. Even if a sympathetic judge (meaning faking neutral but really
biased) does allow it, it will be with instructions that allow the next jury
to ignore it.

To get a precedent you need to go to court. Then you need to appeal, and a
court needs to agree to hear/rule on the appeal. Here you have a problem
though: even if you conspire to lose, someone else can file an "Amicus brief"
[https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Amicus+brief](https://legal-
dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Amicus+brief) and make a compelling argument
that you overlooked. A first round appeal may not get this, but by the time it
get to the supreme court (probably not even you - it generally takes dozens of
different cases before it gets that far) there will be a lot of interest and
your attempt to lose can still win because those who want to win can pour
enough into their briefs.

------
wrs
> And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.

>"Under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts
either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all," ...

I’m surprised they went there, because that makes no sense. Nowadays books,
movies, TV shows, podcasts, and pretty much every other form of media consist
of a stream of numbers, so by that argument _nothing_ would have copyright.

~~~
segmondy
What if I can encode a movie by n^m then it becomes a crime to share that
number. copyright makes numbers illegal, it's hard for most to understand
since these are very large numbers. what if I can express the information as 2
numbers. (n) and (m) n^m. .... then n and m individually are not illegal, but
someone telling you that you can apply ^ to it becomes illegal. or maybe that
is not illegal, but if you consume it as the appropriate media it becomes
illegal. ... the challenge today is that sharing these numbers or possession
of these numbers are a crime. sure, you can call it a file, but it's just a
number. if i take a foo.mpeg file and rename it foo.dat or encode it as a zip,
gz, string of 1 & 0s, uuencoded data, the law makes all of that illegal. For
now these numbers are illegal, but should numbers be illegal?

~~~
Jwarder
I read an article (>10 years ago so sadly I don't recall the title) about how
computer science people see data differently from law people. Computers know
nothing about the intent of data, it is only bits. The law (nominally) tries
to figure out intent behind the data. It is possible to encode any data so it
looks like a random stream of numbers; the law doesn't care what you did to
the data, just if you intend to use that data to do something illegal. The
user's intent colors the data.

~~~
Tyr42
[https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)
Colour of your bits.

------
tunesmith
"12 beats" makes no sense, they're talking about melodic phrases of 12 _notes_
or less. You can also have a same sequence of notes, but different rhythms or
starting on different beats and it'll sound totally different. And then
there's the non-diatonic, or borrowed chords - doesn't even take into account
Lydian or Mixolydian mode. I dunno, first pop melody that comes to mind that
is an example, Michael Buble's "la la la" line in "Everything" is not in this
collection.

Also, for actual complete melodies, I'm not even sure Happy Birthday would fit
their restrictions. It's diatonic and within an octave, but the range is from
V to V rather than I to I. So if they're assuming I to I, it wouldn't fit
unless they supported mixolydian mode.

~~~
dawnerd
If you watch their Ted talk, he discusses them expanding to those combinations
as well.

~~~
christefano
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Hackers have this idea that they can hack the law. However, judges are not
computer programs blindly following the written instructions of the law. They
are expected to apply "judgement" when resolving these cases, and they are
likely to not be impressed by this effort. I suspect this will have the same
effect as if a bunch of people got together and released a massive public
domain dictionary and then claimed that authors could not bring copyright
claims anymore because all the words they used were in the public domain
dictionary.

~~~
type0
> I suspect this will have the same effect as if a bunch of people got
> together and released a massive public domain dictionary and then claimed
> that authors could not bring copyright claims anymore because ...

They could claim that as much as I can claim that this sentence I just cited ^
above belongs to me, it wouldn't change the reality of things that you
supposedly wrote it.

We are talking about the combined work of a dictionary and not the individual
words right? Because let's say Wiktionary was in public domain and not CC BY-
SA, then if Elsevier went ahead and said that they had copyrighted this
material (because it belongs to no-one in particular) and sued Wikimedia
Foundation for publishing Wiktionary pages. Would that lead to plausible
"judgement" and whoever got more money for lawyers would win? I'm speculation
off course, hence the questions and I'm not actually familiar with the
American copyright system.

~~~
salawat
Copyright for written works protects the particular production thereof.

I.e. You can summarize, you can quote, and you can paraphrase, but if you copy
the thing in it's entirety, bind it, and sell it as a production of that work,
you've violated copyright. If you copy the entire literary content, but leave
out all the other trademarks, illustrations, etc, you'd still be likely to be
held in violation of copyright as long as the amount of word for word
reproduction of these original text in an unaltered form approached unity.

However, as far as I'm aware, you could technically get away with reproducing
another book in it's entirety if you quoted every piece it of it, but there
were other substantial chunks of content around said quotes. This hasn't
typically been done for practical reasons, (as you'd arguably have two books
worth of content in one), but would still technically just slide in as fair
use as far as I am aware. Though I'm fairly certain anyone would just
encourage someone seriously attempting to do that to just get permission, or
publish a standalone work with references to a particular edition of the work
in question.

The absurdity with music related copyright infringement is that the copyright
holders assert they own a copyright to the underlying melody. The foundation
of the composition if you will. It should encompass the work as a whole.
Either that or the particular scoring. The example I gave above of a book that
reproduces another book as part of it's composition would roughly parallel
another song composed with the same underlying melody. A book containing a
repro of a book in the sense of set theory is still a different composition
than the original work. So too should be music.

Unless I'm flawed or unaware of some extra nuance about these things.

~~~
bluGill
Quoting generally limits you to 10-20% of the entire work quoted, and you must
add a lot of detail to justify those quotes. You could maybe get around it by
writing 100 books each that quote 1%.

Even then you might get into trouble if it can be shown your quotes are in
order and thus you didn't apply any creative effort in choosing it. (out of
order with page references so it can be assembled might be fine).

All of the above with a ton of maybe. It all depends on factors that are not
entirely settled and subject to change.

~~~
salawat
>All of the above with a ton of maybe. It all depends on factors that are not
entirely settled and subject to change.

That's the part I object to frankly.

For a second I had a hope that there were actually guidelines that helped
clarify it, but even with the 10%-20% rule, yet if one managed to write and
publish an entire set of pages enumerating every semantically correct page,
we'd again be in the same problem.

As the process of creation becomes more available to the everyman, I can see
that copyright is going to be a thornier and thornier issue. Especially if
smaller and smaller chunks are going to be deemed as an acceptable basis for
infringement without taking into account that the commonality of those smaller
chunks being allegedly infringed upon must have the quality of being arranged
in reference to every other part of the composition as a whole as well to
count as an infringement of you're even attempting to achieve a reasonable
outcome of copyright. Which means that you couldn't claim infringement merely
for the presence of a work in another, which I'm fairly certain copyright
holders would find unsatisfying because it would sharply curtail the value
proposition represented by going after people for purportedly "infringing" in
hopes of garnering a settlement, which is what it seems has become the norm
rather than the exception in IP circles nowadays.

------
jkingsbery
> "if the artist being sued for infringement could have possibly had access to
> the music they're accused of copying—even if it was something they listened
> to once—they can be accused of "subconsciously" infringing on the original
> content."

Now, they just need to release an album called "Every Song Ever" and start
having that played on the radio so that they can argue that every musician can
claim in court that the version they were subconsciously inspired by the Every
Song Ever version.

~~~
usrusr
Not before that radio show is over which might take a while.

On a more serious note, if that project was ever taken at face value, that is
as a collection of music and not as a piece of mathematical performance art
exploring the theoretical boundaries of copyright, they'd get into quite some
trouble: somewhere on that drive there's a copy of Strawberry Fields, perhaps
even the Happy Birthday song, and we all know what that means.

~~~
smhenderson
_perhaps even the Happy Birthday song_

Not to be pedantic but at least this one was finally put to rest in 2018, in
the US that is. And it's EU copyright expired in 2017 [0].

Copyright law is crazy but every once in a while a legal case comes along and
injects just a tiny bit of sanity back into an otherwise insane system...

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Copyrigh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Copyright_status)

------
mxfh
Reminds me of this work: "On 12 Sept 08, German Avantgarde musician Johannes
Kreidler registered – as a live performance event – a short musical work that
contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA [german copyright collecting society]
using 70,200 forms."

[http://kreidler-net.de/productplacements-e.html](http://kreidler-
net.de/productplacements-e.html)

------
BookPage
This resonates with feelings I have any time I want to work on a music based
software project. It feels like a minefield even contemplating ideas in this
field; like anything successful that analyzes music will get you sued.

------
wbhart
I don't think this is going to put a dent in cases of existing copyright
holders making claims against people coming up with similar sounding works.

Firstly, there's an enormous corpus of music out there that precedes this
effort, and those copyright holders can still make claims.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, how would someone prove that a
musician copied the work from this algorithmically generated collection? These
haven't been number one hits or in widely available collections. Someone could
not conceivably argue that a musician derived their work from this due to
familiarity with the melody.

I wish the copyright problem would go away. But I really don't see this as a
solution.

A large number of musicians and software designers need to collaborate on a
project that is much more permissive with regard to sampling, covers,
arrangements, adaptions, etc, all the while preserving the rights of
songwriters who just happen to write a number one hit song to get paid for
their work.

The whole thing needs to be lucrative enough that composers, performers and
the tech companies involved can afford to flip the middle finger to anyone
exhibiting corporate greed.

~~~
wongarsu
>how to distinguish a solution like this from a traditional record label.

It could be a traditional record label, just with a rule in its charter that
all works are released into the public domain ten years after recording
(instead of the regular 70+ years). This should still be profitable to run
since you have a decade to profit from any song.

Maybe even immediately releasing into the public domain and just operating
from the profits of live performances could be a viable business model for a
record label.

~~~
wbhart
Release after a certain number of years is one possible way forward. The
problem I see with that though is you want as much excitement as possible
about your number one hit in the first few years. Covers, adaptions,
arrangements, performances all add to the excitement around the thing you are
trying to sell. You should want those.

My personal (not very practical) opinion on it is that any derived work that
is musically distinct should be considered a separate work. If it isn't the
same tune, it isn't the same tune, even if it is similar. If it isn't the same
performance, it isn't the same performance.

In fact, the only thing that should be copyrightable by a composer is a
specific arrangement of a melody, not the underlying melody itself. (The
problem of course is that this is subjective, and not something the law or
technology is well-equipped to decide.)

As for record companies, all they should care about is people ripping off
their exact CD's and putting them on YouTube for free and not paying them. In
my opinion, it's greed to want a cut of a performance/arrangement/cover of a
melody that someone else put all the work into.

------
dehrmann
Give enough monkeys enough pianos and time and they'll eventually write
Mozart's Piano Sonata No 16.

Interestingly, it wouldn't be eligible for copyright[1], but somehow the
algorithmically generated work would be?

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute)

~~~
mdemare
> Give enough monkeys enough pianos and time and they'll eventually write
> Mozart's Piano Sonata No 16.

Sure, No 16... No 19 is right out though.

------
TheOtherHobbes
An "8-note 12-beat combo" is nowhere close to being a complete catalog of
every possible melody. Not even in pop.

~~~
diffeomorphism
Maybe, can you give an example that does not fit into this?

~~~
dragontamer
Though you asked for an example... but maybe its best to show a counter-
example instead? Here's the Imperial Death March played in a Major-scale,
instead of a minor scale.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9MShtCg4fk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9MShtCg4fk)

If everything was in an 8-note (no accidental, transpositions only) measure,
they'd sound like "Vader's redemption".

To sound sad, you MUST shift to a minor key. A minor key has sharps and flats
to create tension. Any "sad sounding" song cannot be properly played in a
major key.

~~~
mjw
> A minor key has sharps and flats to create tension.

The natural minor or Aeolian mode doesn't use any notes outside the diatonic
scale (probably what you meant by "sharps and flats"). It's very possible to
write sad music in the natural minor. REM's "Losing my religion" for example.

> To sound sad, you MUST shift to a minor key

With sufficient skill you can write sad music in any key or scale, there's no
hard and fast rules here. Tonality is only one of the elements you can use to
shape the emotion that's conveyed, and it's all quite culturally relative too.

------
0xff00ffee
The scary part of this (and Adam Neely does a great segment on it) is that the
person simply has to have a copy of the work to claim the copyright. It
reminds me of genetics companies patenting "random" sequences in a hope that
some might contain some value in the future.

------
dylan604
What happens if the algorithm creates a melody that is already protected by
copyright? Are they prepared to defend themselves in court? Are they willing
to take the "offending" piece out of the library?

~~~
dreamcompiler
The algorithm has almost certainly has done so many times. But it just writes
numbers (in the form of MIDI sequences) to a file. Numbers aren't
copyrightable. I don't think there's any issue of them defending themselves.
The bigger question is whether these numbers can be used as a defense when
another musician gets sued.

------
dankerr
I only see an 8-tone scale being used so nope, not every possible melody.

~~~
diffeomorphism
Are there actually any popular melodies that span more than one octave?

Also, suppose I take a popular melody spanning two octaves and compress it to
one (just c' to c). Will these melodies actually sound different enough to be
considered independently copyrightable? My guess would be no.

~~~
dragontamer
> Are there actually any popular melodies that span more than one octave?

Star Spangled Banner's melody spans 3 octaves IIRC.

But more importantly, any melody with an accidental would require the 13-notes
that include the 5 "sharps" or "flats" per octave.

Every country song is pretty much played in the 5th, meaning the 4th note is
USUALLY played sharp. So your standard country tunes are pretty much
guaranteed not to be in this set.

Jazz and Blues music has a LOT of accidentals, and they also are syncopated up
the wazzoo. Even IF Jazz and Blues music were all in C-Major, I doubt they
tried out their strange rhythms.

At best, 8-note, single-octave, 12-note rhythms, cover a very, very small
subset of simplified classical music (Simplified Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,
and not the original Mozart version either:
[https://youtu.be/KKCsujeeu8o?t=50](https://youtu.be/KKCsujeeu8o?t=50)) and
maybe some simple folk songs like "Mary had a little lamb". But for goodness
sake, even "Happy Birthday to you" spans more than one octave...

\----------

I just counted it. "Simplified Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" is 14-notes. Even
this beginner song is too long to be covered by the 12-notes auto-generated by
this algorithm.

So we're talking "Hot Cross Buns" level rhythms... I guess? But "Hot Cross
Buns" is 17 notes long.

"Row Row Row your boat" is syncopated. I doubt its rhythm is covered. Its also
26 notes long.

Here's a better question: what song is actually covered by 8-note, single
octave, 12-notes combinatorics? I'm having difficulty figuring one out. I'm
picking the simplest songs I know of and they still don't seem to be covered.

~~~
bluGill
Many songs have A and B parts. If we allow combining many different "melodies"
to create the larger whole that covers some music in that now you only need to
find 8 note, single octave combinations. I don't see why we should allow that,
but if you allow it.

8 notes in a single octave pretty much limits you to melodies of someone who
has been studying music only a few months. Even my penny whistles are capable
of more than that after a couple months of study. (a few days if you already
know music or are interested in one specific song)

------
ramshorns
This is cool. It's kind of like the project to algorithmically create prior
art of every possible idea in order to weaken patent trolls [1].

Too bad they went with CC0 instead of CC-BY-SA – we could have ended
restrictive copyright on music and made all music free!

[1] [http://allpriorart.com/](http://allpriorart.com/)

------
dvaun
There is far more work involved with creating music than simply creating an
unique melody. And yet, maybe, pop music can and should be kept simple — like
these generated melodies — to have a broad appeal. It's a shame that artists
can be sued for likeness if their work feels original and introduces a new
tone and feeling when heard.

------
whiddershins
The role of the artist is to make choices. Every possible thing is the exact
opposite of making a choice, and of a creative act, therefore it makes zero
sense that anything could be said to be copyrightable about this.

------
lostgame
This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Songs are copyrighted two ways, performance
- the arrangement, composition and lyrical content of the song, and the master
- the actual mastered resulting waveform.

Samples are copyright infringement on the master and using for instance the
same chorus as someone else in your song falls under performance.

I don’t get how this helps either.

~~~
organsnyder
You're completely omitting written music, which is extremely important in
copyright law. Music can be copyrighted without ever being performed—writing
it down is enough.

------
chisaipete
Cool! Who's going to make a browser to listen to all these first?

------
hashkb
Just ridiculous. Choice of instrument/rig and articulation alone are enough.
If I annihilate "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on guitar like Hendrix did to
the Star Spangled Banner, I did that and I deserve to be paid if you enjoyed
my playing.

------
iainmerrick
You don’t have to do a lot to get a TedX talk, I guess.

