Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain

Sounds interesting, except I'm skeptical what qualifies as a melody to that algorithm, as that is a bit of a nebulous term to musicians anyhow.

It's an analogy to the "give a million monkeys a typewriter and one of them might eventually type the Hamlet play by accident", I'm guessing. Lots of nonsense, but the occasional Mozart melody. The interesting thing is the copyright aspect. If musicians didn't have it hard enough already, it might get even worse. You can't copyright something which has already been generated and released somewhere.

Perhaps it's explained in that ted talk. Haven't seen that yet, so I might have to eat my words

Wasn't there a babel library thing too? Every single combination of letters that could ever written....

  On 2/26/2020 at 9:11 AM, goDel said:

It's an analogy to the "give a million monkeys a typewriter and one of them might eventually type the Hamlet play by accident", I'm guessing. Lots of nonsense, but the occasional Mozart melody. The interesting thing is the copyright aspect. If musicians didn't have it hard enough already, it might get even worse. You can't copyright something which has already been generated and released somewhere.

Perhaps it's explained in that ted talk. Haven't seen that yet, so I might have to eat my words

Well, according to the article it's to prevent costly copyright lawsuits (like the aforementioned Petty/Smith one) since all the melodies will have been public domain and therefore non-copyrightable.

Melody copyright is a joke anyway. It's all just math.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique

  On 2/26/2020 at 9:11 AM, goDel said:

It's an analogy to the "give a million monkeys a typewriter and one of them might eventually type the Hamlet play by accident", I'm guessing. Lots of nonsense, but the occasional Mozart melody. The interesting thing is the copyright aspect. If musicians didn't have it hard enough already, it might get even worse. You can't copyright something which has already been generated and released somewhere.

Perhaps it's explained in that ted talk. Haven't seen that yet, so I might have to eat my words

My understanding is that it was largely done for the copyright aspect, because they feared a world in which lawsuits against musicians who have only barely copied another musician's work (e.g. Two musicians basing their melodies on walking up the same scale a few notes) would have a devastating effect on creativity in music. 

I agree. I would rather a world where 90% of copyright thieves get away with blatant plagiarism than a world where you can't use the note C or the word "the" without being sued. 

Mind you, I didn't watch the Ted talk I watched this video about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw

Interesting Adam Neely vid on this:

  On 2/26/2020 at 8:47 PM, Goiter Sanchez said:

Interesting Adam Neely vid on this:

 

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That's what I posted but couldn't figure out how to imbed videos cos I'm a moron. 

Love Adam Neely btw, I've been learning a lot from his channel. 

  On 2/26/2020 at 10:48 PM, springymajig said:

That's what I posted but couldn't figure out how to imbed videos cos I'm a moron. 

Love Adam Neely btw, I've been learning a lot from his channel. 

Just copy and paste the YouTube URL (not the shortened version; not sure if that works or not)

It's a little strange that copyright issues generally only apply to pop or rock genres. I haven't heard about any acid house disputes, and it's pretty much accepted that punk songs will always be really similar so you don't sue people over them.

I wonder who will be the first person to get sued by remaking "Sandstorm."

But can it make a melody sound as godlike as Ilkae’s The Green Spectrum? Probably not.

  On 2/28/2020 at 2:22 PM, President Squidward said:

But can it make a melody sound as godlike as Ilkae’s The Green Spectrum? Probably not.

Well, it technically should be part of that set of generated melodies...

But thanks for mentioning it - this is great stuff!

But can it make a melody sound as godlike as Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet? Probably not.

why would you bother using more than one note in a song anyway

  On 2/29/2020 at 11:03 PM, Lada Laika said:

why would you bother using more than one note in a song anyway

or even more than one sound tbh. pinnacle of modern music right here

One of the key elements of what makes a melody a memorable melody is its rhythm, and this thing obviously hasn't got that covered.  A lot of melodies would barely even make sense without the right rhythm.  Plus so many hooks are just one note in a specific rhythm that makes it catchy.  There was that Marvin Gaye bullshit suing over a groove FFS.  /AI defeated.

(meant to post this last month, just remembered...)

Yeah i also thought about that, i mean, it surely can generate every possible sequence of 12 notes from a chromatic scale but what about rhythm? There's almost an infinite number of rhythm paterns alone, imagine that combined with the number of notes... What about combining all of this with chords? I call it bullshit... 

  On 2/26/2020 at 8:47 PM, Goiter Sanchez said:

Interesting Adam Neely vid on this:

 

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Oh ok everything i just said is adressed in this video... 

  On 2/29/2020 at 11:03 PM, Lada Laika said:

why would you bother using more than one note in a song anyway

Right?