Someone tried copyrighting all the possible pop music melodies. "Most pop melodies run fewer than 12 notes. If you generated every possible melody with just the eight notes of the C scale, that’d be 8^12 melodies, which is 68,719,476,736." So they generated all of them, as MIDI sequences, and stored them on a hard drive.[1][2] Arguably, all those are now public domain.
That was back in 2016. If you applied machine learning to pop music, you could probably establish a classifier for melodies that don't sound awful, and get that number down into the millions. Spotify has about 100,000 uploaded tracks. The space of listenable pop music may become fully populated. It would be amusing to have something that classifies songs as "Standard melody #67426564".
Note that "standard melody #3473" was literally exactly how European medieval church music was (and still is) categorized. There are 7 notes in the scale and certain rules that eliminate some possible sequences, but the space of possible canti firmi was finite and studied as a closed space by medieval music theorists.
There were monks whose job was to chant various psalms at specific tempos through the night so they would know when it was 4am to wake up the cook so he could start breakfast. I don't know if I could ever hate music, but that would get me close.
This sent me down a rabbit hole; I would love to see your source I can't find any. The idea that someone might carefully pace their recital in order to keep accurate track of time across several hours is threshold-hard to believe. It seems _possible_ but unlikely, and the kind of story which is likely to grow with retelling.
The closest mention I can find is this [1]:
> Early monastic rules say little about how time was determined, though the Rule of the Master notes that pairs of monks took turns, in weekly shifts, trying to stay awake while the others slept in order to awaken the abbot on time. Several possibilities for deter- mining that time are likely, however, including the use of calibrated candles or lamps of oil, [...] the recitation of a certain number of psalms, [etc]
However, here is it only mentioned as a possibility, not an actuality, and no sources are provided.
There appear to have been several orders who practiced 24-hour prayer by taking shifts, see for example the Acoemetae [2]. Here we do have Monks staying up all night reciting psalms but I can't find any indication that the prayers themselves were used to keep track of time.
The only reference to prayer-as-timekeeping that I can find seems to be in Medieval recipe books [3], which apparently would say things like boil this fish for as long as it takes to recite the lords prayer three times. Dead-reckoning works well on such short time-scales!
Even as early as the 500s there appear to have been timekeeping methods accurate enough to tell that dawn was approaching. When the skies are clear you can read this from the stars and accurate-enough water clocks have been in Europe since ~ the 500s. So there doesn't seem to be a need to perfect the act of spending hours reciting psalms at the right tempo.
Oy... medieval music theory is such a huge subject that I couldn't begin to do it justice in a HN comment. The short version is that some time in the 9th century monks developed neumes, an early form of musical notation, to write down the chants they chanted at different times of the day. Medieval music theorists classified those chants according to the last note (what we now call the "tonic") and the most common note (what we now call the "dominant"). There were 262144 theoretically possible melodies (8 notes long, 6 possible notes, but some were rejected for music-theoretic reasons so the actual space was rather smaller) which could be indexed by their sequence in a collated list of melodies ("on the Sunday after Pentacost sing the 7th chant in the Lydian mode" or whatever).
If I had to pick a "best-of" reading list, I'd say the 9th-century "Musica Enchiriadis", Berno's "Prologus in Tonarum", and Boethius's "De Institutione Musica". These all assume a familiarity with Platonic music theory, so at least skim through Plato's "Timaeus" first. There will also be more references to astronomy than will make sense to somebody in the modern age, because music and astronomy were believed to be essentially the same thing. Also more recent research has found that actual musicians of the time seem to have completely ignored the theorists. Some things never change.
In the 18th Century Presbyterian Church, they only sang Biblical psalms set to simple (but distinct) tunes and without any musical accompaniment. This was known as exclusive psalmody.
The psalms weren't the prose-style you'll find in any print Bible though, they were their own translation called the Metrical Psalms. Its 1650 edition proved very long lasting.
Many of these psalms were set to common metre, meaning that if you found such a psalter and tried singing it to some well-known tune it will very likely 'fit' the lyrics. You could try Psalm 23 set to the tune of The British Grenadiers, or Amazing Grace, or even The Star-Spangled Banner: https://thewestminsterstandard.org/psalm-23/
This was actually how the psalms were practised by congregations in my home country. The psalm lyrics were considered too sacred for practice, so they set the same tunes to other (sometimes comical) lyrics and practised those during the week. Then on Sunday the minister would say something like 'we will now sing Psalm xx to the tune of lilies', and the congregation would know the tune even if they hadn't memorised the psalm lyrics.
Still happening in the Free Church of Scotland. They have psalters with pages split horizontally, so you have the words at the top and the tune at the bottom.
People fish in the ocean and think that the fish is theirs. Huge companies do that and they act and profit as the fish is theirs. But isn’t the (now depleted) fish something that belongs to humanity. For popular music is so much you can pull out of the pond, in my opinion it can hardly be somewhere own property. Maybe a too advanced thought? When the white man landed in America they said this is ours, the aborigines reply. Yes, meaning this belongs to everyone and it is yours too. Can we transcend this ownership thing?
We are just pathetic as a wild animal, and don’t come with the “our brain is our weapon” because 80% (yes i made that number) of the humans cannot even start a fire on the wild let alone build a shelter, pick food that won’t poison them, fabricate tools and weapons out of the environment.
And yet, you will go sleep tonight pretty sure that the only other animal that could possibly get into your home and kill you is another human. Most humans live their whole lives without having felt like being the prey not even once in their lives.
As individuals, most of us are not that impressive, or as you say, we are downright pathetic. But our power is in our societal organization, and our inherited culture.
Well that's complicated by the fact that bears are often eating other animals, so I think their general philosophy is, if you're powerful enough to take it and keep it, it belongs to you.
There is a reason the pen is considered mightier than the sword.
A blade kills an enemy while it's wielder is alive, fit, and wielding it in anger.
The pen shapes the very thinking of entire generations. Anyone who says the space of violence is disjunct from the space of words is a downright fool. Hell, politics is just violence in it's Sunday/Friday/Saturday best.
The exact same logic applies to many things that by rights ought to be commons, but are not. Most notably: land.
The idea that, for example, any person claiming sole ownership/usufruct of a piece of land owes to the public a rent for the value of the undeveloped land is called Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism).
Maybe the fish should be the property of society and the location of the fish is the catchers right, with safe handling and responsible returns being their responsibility?
Step one and two describe how Society currently works in civilized countries. The fishing territorial Waters belong to the nation, and fisherman are licensed to use it.
I don't know what you mean by responsibility here. In the current system fisherman are incentivized to catch fish by the profit* from selling them, which they pay taxes on. You need incentives because picking people and forcing them to be responsible for fishing would be slavery
Even if the claim that most pop melodies consist of 12 notes is true (which is dubious), the 8^12 number excludes variation in rhythm or the timing between the notes which can make a significant impact on the overall feeling of the melody. If you hum/whistle some pop song you know in your head, it is easy to see that the notes aren’t all equally spaced apart in time.
A copyright claim doesn't mean you've copied anything. I can submit a DMCA takedown for any video on youtube by filling out a form [0] and it's fairly likely the video will be pulled.
Seems pretty easy to identify the song it's based on to me (and the original composer even threatened to sue). The rhythm's also pretty similar though.
It's an interesting case though because they are clearly different songs. I listened to that song for many years and never once made the connection to the other one until I heard the live version played with the special ending.
take a popular song, change the rhythm and timing and maybe change the middle bridge part and change all the lyrics to be something you wrote yourself and wait if you get a copyright claim.
"The copyright system is abused" is a very different claim than "the use of rhythm, rests, and timing greatly increases the original melody space". It's odd to refute one with the other.
no but look at how this very simple difference will lead to you being sued is very similar to look at how this very simple difference but slightly less simple than the other one and more of a real world scenario really will keep you from being sued.
It's very odd to not see the similarity between the two claims and how one exists as a critique of the other.
Agree, but a jury just needs to decide a song sounds similar for it to be a copyright infringement. So a jury may hear the same melody and exclude the variation in their comparison.
And that is clearly defined by writing down the notes. The length and the space between. That is the reason why we have the 1/1, 1/2, 1/4, … notes. On how those notes are connected and so on.
Well, he could mean that some notes are connected (where I think we all mean the 8 notes are of equal measure). So between every two consecutive notes you can add a line, multiplying the space by 2^7
with a 4/4 (which is most of music is these days) there's only so much slicing you can do to have relative times between notes differ.
There are also a number of things that change the expression but not the melody. eg Hallelujah vs Zombie:
- have different melodies but use the same chords
- can be sliced and diced both with various rests and palm mutes and arpeggios and strumming yet still have them individually identifiable (and sometimes very close, possibly even overlapping in some sections, but that's perfectly normal and how one does a good mashup)
Even the time signature doesn't mean much, one could play Zombie on a blues shuffle and it would still be distinctively Zombie-esque.
Throw in music theory and keys and I IV V and chords and whatnot which I still don't master but I get the idea, it severely reduces what one ought to do to compose something enjoyable.
With that you can mathematically reduce you problem space to some extent.
In any case it's all completely moot because fundamentally the creation process is a) ingest ideas, b) digest, c) excrete ideas, which ultimately come from a mixture of a). Everything new looks like something else to some extent, and there's a fundamental reason why artists are told (or themselves tell) they're "influenced by" this or that other artist.
If we were to truly strictly enforce copyright nothing would ever get created anymore. So I don't know if copyright itself is right or wrong, but I feel copyright enforcement is truly fucked up these days (and not just in music)
As a beginner composing in my living room I'm truly scared (on top of fear of inadequacy) to push something out there I put my heart and soul into and get sued to oblivion (or at the very least have it destroyed and claimed by some entity that is not even involved in creation)
That ignores rhythm and chords which are important and distinct. Also given current court rulings stating such non-creative computer generated things are not copyrightable, it's irrelevant to copyrighted music.
Not generally. Prior art works like that for patents. For copyright the courts generally allow copyrights on things created independently of an existing item. So it's likely the whole exercise is worthless at affecting any future copyrights.
100,000 tracks seems like an awfully low estimate, how did you arrive at that number? Just as a spot check, I've liked ~6500 individual tracks, and it would be very surprising if that represented 6% of their total catalog - I'd expect that actual percentage to be orders of magnitude lower.
Emphasis is regarded as an interpretation of the notes. Interpretation doesn't invalidate the claims of the original author according how copyright is currently applied.
It's like interpreting Shakespeare. You can emphasis this sentence over that one, and this word over that one. It is still Shakespeare.
I think this ignores what actually makes a pop song popular and a hit. It isn't the chord progression or melody, at least primarily. It is the marketing.
Plus, I assume that major studios have already been using stastical-based software for decades to help craft songs to fit the current vogue. There's a reason why many songwriters and producers write songs for Kpop and state those songs could never be released in the U.S.
I worked in the business for 15+ years and was involved in a lot of campaigns for artists and music you’ve heard a lot.
Everyone says this but once you get in the actual music business you end up seeing the vast amount of stuff that gets the exact same amount of marketing, checks all the boxes, has all the right people and money behind it, and goes absolutely fucking nowhere.
You realize very quickly it’s not really about the marketing. People get to decide what music they like, and do.
That doesn’t mean bad music doesn’t get popular. It does. You just don’t like the taste of the massive number of people that enjoy it.
I get it I can’t fucking explain Pitbull either. I want it to be a conspiracy.
Standard rules of business normally apply to anything sold.
1. Product gotta be good enough to compete with other similar products
2. Price low-price, middle or premium, but it needs to fit the category
3. Place make it easy to find and purchase
4. Promotion tell the people who need this thing, all about it
If any of these are wrong you don't get market success.
But there are a lot of non-linearities.
Old Marketing joke:
"I know half of my budget is not working, I just don't know which half"
> You realize very quickly it’s not really about the marketing. People get to decide what music they like, and do.
I am not convinced. And it isn't about a conspiracy. These are sort of emergent phenomena and statistics. It doesn't mean every single pop song marketed in the same way will be a success. But I guarantee that there is correlation between major studios and their marketing and the average success of their songs. There's also other aspects such as paid advertising occurring in a song's lyrics and music videos, and this happens in movies as well. See: https://www.mic.com/articles/118974/pop-music-is-more-about-.... And that was several years ago. I imagine that's even worse these days. It certainly is for movies, but I don't listen to enough popular music to know.
A lot of this is about catching waves of sentiment and taste. The same thing happens in other industries, like fashion or furniture. For example, right now, you'll find a lot of furniture items coming in this sort of dusty rose pink. It feels like it came out of nowhere. So there's a snowball effect to how tastes change but then who can ride that and market towards where it's headed. I think that is as much as a part of a song's success than it's songwriting. Then there's a self-sustaining aspect of it, like that found in Max Martin's work. He's the goto guy, so artists go to him, so then people listen to his music, and then he remains the goto guy. His main talent, more so than his songwriting and production skills, is his ability to ride these waves of sentiment I mentioned. Couple that with the self-sustaining aspect, and you get his career.
I have watched several interviews of Kpop producers, many of which are western. They explicitly state that the songs they sell to the Kpop industry would not get bought and marketed in the U.S. by studios and artists. Yet, there are plenty of people who love Kpop music, and when people are introduced to it, they love it. So I believe those songs could be liked in the U.S. by western artists, but they aren't marketed.
It takes a lot of work to find good music that you like, and it almost never is on the figurative radio.
> “But Riehl and Rubin’s point, they say, is not actually to obtain legally sound copyrights, but to illustrate that there are a finite number of ways to combine notes to create pop melodies, and these combinations existed before any songwriter actually put them to paper. All of these melodies can be generated and represented mathematically, suggesting that writing the melody for a pop song is, in some ways, a lot like selecting and portraying a pre-existing—and non-copyrightable—mathematical fact.”
Some deep concepts right there. Would the same thing apply to any sequence of things? The AACS cryptographic key? The words in a book? Is there some breakpoint in number of permutations where human creativity and memorable history allow for copyright?
So they generated all of them, as MIDI sequences, and stored them on a hard drive.[1][2] Arguably, all those are now public domain
Not really though. If this were accepted as a creative work, then it also violates the copyright of every modern song. But, as exemplified the the story in the OP, where the author gets the idea from is really important. So, you could look a jury in the eye and say you were just browsing through a hard drive full of melodies and picked one that seemed good, but that likely isn't going to fly.
It's a neat idea, but copyright protects against copying, if someone copies your work, even if your work is derived from the public domain, then you have reasonable grounds on which to sue. You'd have to have added something creative to the public domain melody, however.
In short copying from the public domain does not make one's whole work public domain.
This maybe helps against specious claims?
It may be useful to consider how Pantone's copyright on shades of colour relates; they don't get to sue people for using those colours (in general).
Pantone doesn't get its money from copyrighted nuance names. They get it from putting together and selling all the processes and chemicals which deliver you the exact same color over all thinkable media. How would this translate in the musical world?
I think they meant to write 100,000,000. I was about to say that sounds insanely low, because I have 15k songs "Liked" on Spotify and there's no way I've liked 15% of practically all songs.
Even 100.000.000 isnt all songs. There is still loads of music missing, with changes hppening every now and then as labels pulls specific band lineups not covered by their agreements with Spotify.
There is nothing by eg The Blues Brothers outside the two movies and their debut album. Nothing by Spocks Beard prior to Neal Morse leaving the band. Other albums are stripped of specific songs because a guest artist wasnt part of the overall deal.
There are probably countless other examples as well, and as artists are moving away from physical media completely I fear that entire artist will disappear in the future because they happened to be pulled from streaming services.
On the other hand, there are countless recordings of the same songs by covers bands, different recordings of the same classical pieces, etc. https://forgotify.com/ should give a good idea of what the long tail on Spotify is.
The defence would be that you copied from the public domain to make a derivative work, the other aspects -- timing, lyrics, repitition, instruments used, etc. -- would be where your copyright lay. You couldn't successfully sue someone for using that sequence of notes on your melody (common ancestor) but could if the result shared your timing or other aspects; provided those choices passed the bar for making a creative work.
My only nitpick is I don't think you need AI or machine learning for automatic music generation. Instead, we've allowed tastes to be so dumbed down you could achieve success with MIDI, a RNG and a couple of if/then statements.
That was back in 2016. If you applied machine learning to pop music, you could probably establish a classifier for melodies that don't sound awful, and get that number down into the millions. Spotify has about 100,000 uploaded tracks. The space of listenable pop music may become fully populated. It would be amusing to have something that classifies songs as "Standard melody #67426564".
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/whats... [2] https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/lawandarts/a...