[HN Gopher] I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
        
       Author : redcodenl
       Score  : 268 points
       Date   : 2022-03-24 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.royvanrijn.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.royvanrijn.com)
        
       | lhorie wrote:
       | Something that doesn't seem to have been discussed from the legal
       | angle is this: if one can make any copyright claim about these
       | datasets qualifying as "prior art", doesn't that then open itself
       | up for trolls to claim that the datasets infringe on existing
       | prior art? It's not like I can draw a pikachu, release it to
       | public domain and make a slam dunk legal claim that all other
       | pikachus are henceforth kosher.
       | 
       | I think Adam Neely makes a more relevant point in his videos
       | about Dark Horse and Levitating: it doesn't really matter what
       | any actual infringement claim is because you can typically find
       | relevant prior art from legitimate works of music if you dig deep
       | enough, even without going through the exercise of autogenerating
       | note sequences.
       | 
       | As I understand, the legal arguments focus on whether there is a
       | clear and traceable connection between the creative process for a
       | song and the alleged infringed work, and whether there is clear
       | intent to omit credit where it is due. I.e. the argument already
       | starts from the assumption that similarities and inspirations
       | from existing works of art can and do exist.
        
         | andybak wrote:
         | Is there still a value in this as a Reductio ad absurdum? A
         | short cut that makes it less neccessary to slog through a prior
         | art battle in each and every case?
        
       | imwillofficial wrote:
       | This guy is nowhere near the "World's most prolific DJ"
       | 
       | I've never heard of Him, and I run in those circles.
       | 
       | Interesting reading though.
        
         | badcc wrote:
         | I think you missed the joke!
        
           | hilarious1212 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | jer0me wrote:
             | 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 a throwaway to insult someone's
             | article?
        
               | wartijn_ wrote:
               | I think it's just a troll comment, given that it's a new
               | account with the text "hilarious" in it.
        
               | horsawlarway wrote:
               | 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!).
        
               | tecleandor wrote:
               | I mean... That's very productive!
               | 
               | "Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or
               | services expressed by some measure."
               | 
               | An whole album with millions of melodies in just one
               | morning is quite efficient :). Meaningful or deep, maybe
               | not. But productive... yes!
        
               | hilarious1212 wrote:
        
               | zer0-c00l wrote:
               | bro you have no place to talk to tell people to "go back
               | to Reddit" after posting that comment. "like typing the N
               | word in all caps" what on earth are you even talking
               | about?
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | hilarious1212 wrote:
        
             | Cthulhu_ wrote:
        
         | OzzyB wrote:
         | I think prolific in this case is more the "Super Whizkid DJ
         | Creates 100,000 Tracks in a Week" sense -- not in the sense
         | that you may or may not have heard of them...
        
           | imwillofficial wrote:
           | Yeah, I would not call 100,000 tracks of garbage noise
           | produced and never played for people a prolific DJ. A DJ is a
           | performer by definition.
           | 
           | No knock on his accomplishments
        
         | vmception wrote:
         | yeah, he's not, by any definition, the first line of the
         | article says that is an alternate clickbait as a joke which
         | maybe allows it to comply with HN posting guidelines, but given
         | that the poster's username has the NL acronym in it which
         | probably means Netherlands, and the Dutch-like name of the
         | author of the article, (and actual prolific DJ scene in that
         | country), its probably the same person, so its unknown if that
         | actually makes it fit HN posting guidelines to me
         | 
         | Its amusing, it got me to click though and I was pleased by
         | what I read
        
         | jjulius wrote:
         | I, too, "run in those circles" and I got the joke. :)
        
       | dmitriid wrote:
       | Spider Robinson explored this in his 1983 story, _Melancholy
       | Elephants_ :
       | 
       | http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
       | 
       | --- start quote ---
       | 
       | There are eighty-eight notes. One hundred and seventy-six, if
       | your ear is good enough to pick out quarter tones. Add in rests
       | and so forth, different time signatures. Pick a figure for
       | maximum number of notes a melody can contain. I do not know the
       | figure for the maximum possible number of melodies--too many
       | variables--but I am sure it is quite high.
       | 
       | " _I am certain that is not infinity._
       | 
       | "For one thing, a great many of those possible arrays of eighty-
       | eight notes will not be perceived as music, as melody, by the
       | human ear. Perhaps more than half. They will not be hummable,
       | whistleable, listenable--some will be actively unpleasant to
       | hear. Another large fraction will be so similar to each other as
       | to be effectively identical: if you change three notes of the
       | Moonlight Sonata, you have not created something new.
       | 
       | I do not know the figure for the maximum number of discretely
       | appreciable melodies, and again I'm certain it is quite high, and
       | again I am certain that it is not infinity
       | 
       | --- end quote ---
       | 
       | Do read it It's scary and prescient.
        
       | GLGirty wrote:
       | Author has discovered a new method of torture. I tried to listen
       | to the 2 minute sample, and rage quit after 30 seconds.
        
         | dr_dshiv wrote:
         | This. How about an algorithm to predict aesthetic appeal?
        
       | snek_case wrote:
       | A lot of people seem to miss the distinction between DJ (someone
       | who mixes/remixes music) and composer/producer.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | cwkoss wrote:
       | We should pass a law to cap the maximum earnings from a single
       | work of art to destroy the incentive for lawyers to strangle
       | culture with predatory lawsuits.
       | 
       | Ex. Once a work of song makes $10M it should just go into the
       | public domain. Want to make more? Keep writing more songs.
        
       | eweise wrote:
       | I'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.
        
         | whiddershins wrote:
         | It does, this description of what can be copyrighted is
         | confused.
        
         | jerf wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | wincy wrote:
           | I mean, the game No Man's Sky procedurally generates 18
           | quintillion planets but they hold a copyright on all of those
           | planets, don't they? They certainly haven't explored all of
           | the planets.
        
             | jerf wrote:
             | Imagine you load the No Man's Sky source code, and you
             | break it all down, and you load the assets in. You
             | certainly have a copyright on all the assets.
             | 
             | You don't generally end up with a copyright on all possible
             | combinations. You may still _de facto_ "own" the copyright
             | if all possible combinations encompass parts of your own
             | creation. For instance, I've been playing XCom 2 lately. It
             | has a character creator. Firaxis can't claim to own all the
             | possible combinations of characters it can create, but they
             | own a substantial portion of the parts. I don't think they
             | could claim they own eyes of a particular color or
             | particular shades of skin, but all the clothing,
             | accessories, tattoos, guns, etc. all _individually_ have
             | copyright, so it 's still not like I personally can just
             | crank up the character creator and claim a copyright on
             | some particular one and start using it for whatever
             | commercial purposes I desire.
             | 
             | No Man's Sky, from the looks of it, is in the same boat.
             | They don't necessarily get "a copyright" on everything
             | their algorithms can possibly generate, but at the same
             | time, if someone produces an exact match of any of the 18
             | quintillion planets they must be using plenty of
             | copyrighted assets along the way. So in practice there may
             | not be a big difference.
             | 
             | Where the difference comes in is when the pieces get to be
             | so fine that they are not themselves copyrightable. To put
             | it in a visual context, the original favicon format was
             | 16x16. Even at full 24-bit color, that's only 2^32 possibly
             | favicons. It's trivial to enumerate them. But you can't
             | copyright a single pixel, and you can't simply claim a
             | copyright on all combinations. The former is a bare fact,
             | and the latter had no creativity ("enumerate all
             | possibilities" is not creative, it's a homework assignment
             | in Comp Sci 201). You can't copyright a single note, it's a
             | bare fact. You can't copyright all enumerated combinations
             | of them. You can copyright the program used to generate
             | them, but that doesn't give you rights to the output.
             | 
             | So, they do and they don't. And the sense in which they do
             | doesn't match the sense in which trying to copyright all
             | possible melodies does.
             | 
             | In the event that you have something like
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fZBUsn5RYg , kkrieger, a
             | super-procedurally-generated game that doesn't have any
             | clear textures or geometry in its code, I think you could
             | claim a copyright on what _gets manifested_ , but not on
             | _every conceivable thing the algorithm could generate_.
             | What gets manifested will be a much more reasonable amount
             | of protection relative to the effort, merely polynomial at
             | most, rather than exponential. Exponential is, you know,
             | _really big_.
        
             | balls187 wrote:
             | I'm assuming you mean the US, right?
             | 
             | I was doing legal research on this, and funny enough there
             | is an article that discusses this very issue:
             | http://mttlr.org/2016/11/no-mans-skynet-copyright-in-
             | procedu...
        
             | munk-a wrote:
             | IANAL but I'm pretty sure generating something, even
             | something creative, isn't enough for protection if it isn't
             | novel and distinct. I'd assume none of their planets would
             | be protected since there are 18 quintillion of them and
             | most of them have never actually been rendered - but the
             | process to generate planets of that style might be
             | protectable.
        
         | thebricksta wrote:
         | It's a fun concept, and maybe will be useful in some weird edge
         | case of a lawsuit, but no. Most recent music infringement
         | lawsuits seem to argue that some combination of the sound
         | design, groove, rhythms, chord progressions, melody or reduced
         | melody, structure, and lyrics wind up giving a song the same
         | "feel" as a prior song, and that's the basis of the copyright
         | infringement. Then pseudoscientific experts come in and pick
         | and choose common musical elements that both the songs share to
         | attempt to justify the claim, oftentimes wrongfully taking
         | credit for inventing genre-wide defining musical elements. Adam
         | Neely did a good job touching on this in his recent analysis of
         | the Dua Lipa Levitating lawsuit [1].
         | 
         | An AI generated song machine would have to nail a lot more
         | elements than just the melody notes to properly stop music
         | copyright cases. In my view, a more interesting project that
         | might be more effective in defusing lawsuits would be to try to
         | catalog all of the musical tropes that define genres, then
         | attempting to detect how common they are in that genre. In an
         | ideal world, maybe this would be able to drive a metric of how
         | similar specific two songs are vs. picking any two songs in
         | that genre at random.
         | 
         | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnA1QmZvSNs
        
           | woolion wrote:
           | >Adam Neely did a good job touching on this in his recent
           | analysis of the Dua Lipa Levitating lawsuit [1]
           | 
           | He most certainly did not. Of all the different takes out
           | there, his is very weak.
           | 
           | >Most recent music infringement lawsuits seem to argue that
           | some combination of...
           | 
           | There is a very good reason: as he mentions, the chords
           | diversity use in pop songwriting is typically so poor that
           | based only on that, the amount of things considered
           | plagiarism would thus be ridiculous. If the similarities
           | affect almost all dimensions (style, arrangement, rhythm,
           | melody, ...) to the point of being "essentially the same",
           | then it's exactly what people would want the law to exist
           | for.
        
             | thebricksta wrote:
             | > He most certainly did not. Of all the different takes out
             | there, his is very weak.
             | 
             | I think Adam Neely did a good job explaining what
             | infringement lawsuits mean in the context of popular music
             | production. Whether or not you agree with the strength of
             | his case on this particular lawsuit, well that's not quite
             | the point I was trying to make here. Still, what do you
             | consider to be a strong take on this case?
        
         | ovi256 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | gnulinux wrote:
           | 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 not only European musical
           | traditions will have equivalent rhythmic complexity but also
           | other musical traditions will have equivalent harmonic
           | complexity. Just because we don't have a great model of other
           | musical traditions' harmony, does not mean they lack harmony.
           | And vice versa. E.g. during Baroque era although temporal
           | information was rarely denoted on paper (any more than 3
           | time, 4 time, tempo etc) musicians performing these pieces
           | had to express a certain understanding of rhythm. Pieces were
           | never played like MIDI, they always had rhythmic nuances.
        
             | dotancohen wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | QuercusMax wrote:
           | I think you meant to say that African traditions focus on
           | rhythm, not harmony?
        
           | munk-a wrote:
           | This is especially relevant when it comes to timbre a musical
           | quality that's extremely difficult to even record in staff
           | and bar notation.
        
         | kube-system wrote:
         | Copyright _does_ take into account the entire work.
         | 
         | However, people will sometimes claim that a portion of their
         | work is stolen.
         | 
         | The idea here is to give someone a citation of it existing
         | elsewhere as a defense to the above. Although this is a very
         | experimental endeavor and some suspect it won't be taken very
         | seriously in an actual court, because the context in which it
         | was created may undermine some of the creative requirements for
         | qualification under copyright law.
        
         | swamp40 wrote:
         | What about the silence between notes? Copyrighted or no? Their
         | Jingle Bells sounds horrible with no silent spaces.
        
       | wodenokoto wrote:
       | Wasn't there an article on the front page last week about how
       | computer generated art wasn't copyrightable?
        
       | nwsm wrote:
       | The TED talk was great, though he could have used more compelling
       | examples than George Harrison and Sam Smith. Also great was
       | Damien's Twitter response to the author on using the de Brujin
       | approach-
       | 
       | > We had initially considered a "de Bruijn" sequence. But if we
       | were to use a single file, that would have down sides:
       | 
       | > If someone infringes our work, it would only be a tiny
       | percentage (0.0000000001%?) of the "work" -- so someone would
       | argue "fair use"
       | 
       | > Same idea with others incorporating ATM works in theirs ("tiny
       | percentage")
       | 
       | > So our technical/legal design is "One MIDI file per melody" --
       | which I think is a legal feature, not a bug.
        
       | GrazeMor wrote:
       | This only works for western music
        
         | kleer001 wrote:
         | It should work for declaring melodies in any system of music
         | that has notation.
         | 
         | Now, you're correct if you're saying that not all music has
         | melodies. Or that things like Indian ragas would be difficult
         | to run through exhaustive permutation. But, as far as I know
         | all music in the world has native notation or can be notated
         | and reproduced.
        
           | GrazeMor wrote:
           | He was clearly relying on being able to distill a melody to x
           | beats per bar which is very western.
        
       | almet wrote:
       | This 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 ?
        
         | marssaxman wrote:
         | The point is that applying copyright law to music leads to
         | absurd outcomes. It is a bad idea, and ought to be abolished.
        
           | throwaway675309 wrote:
           | Does the same apply to other mediums? What if I generate all
           | possible 64x64 images? (Extend that to every resolution in
           | theory)
        
           | Kye wrote:
           | What do you imagine would change if musicians couldn't
           | protect their work?
           | 
           | As a musician, I think what would happen is the companies
           | that abuse copyright now would keep abusing musicians, except
           | now they can just take any song they like without
           | compensating the person who made it.
        
             | ARandumGuy wrote:
             | Broadly speaking, there are 3 main copyrights that apply to
             | a given piece of music: the recording, the overall
             | composition, and the melody. The first two are pretty
             | uncontroversial [1]. You can't distribute my recording
             | without my permission, and you can't make money off of a
             | cover version without compensating me.
             | 
             | The melody copyright is where things get really hazy. It's
             | hard to determine when a melody infringes on another
             | melody. What if the notes are the same, but the timing is
             | different? What if the notes aren't exactly the same, but
             | are pretty similar? What if the main melodic ideas are
             | really common in a given genre or style? How do you
             | determine if there was actual copying, or if two musicians
             | just came up with the same idea independently? What if the
             | melody just isn't an important part of the style of a given
             | work? What if the melody is almost the same, but used in a
             | completely different musical context?
             | 
             | There isn't an objective set of criteria that can determine
             | if a melody infringes on another melody, without being too
             | narrow or too broad. And since there's no good criteria,
             | the only way to litigate this is to have better lawyers
             | then the other guy, which rarely works out well for
             | independent artists.
             | 
             | [1] At least, uncontroversial at a high level. The details
             | get messy really quickly.
        
               | Kye wrote:
               | There is definitely a sizable and vocal contingent of
               | people who want all copyright on music abolished and only
               | consider performance a valid way to make a living as a
               | musician. When they don't specify, like above, that's
               | generally the meaning. I've been chastised for selling
               | albums enough to know it's not isolated enough to ignore.
        
               | msla wrote:
               | Can chord progressions be copyrighted?
               | 
               | https://www.buzzfeed.com/reggieugwu/what-the-law-says-
               | about-...
               | 
               | > Copyrighted elements of a musical composition can
               | include melody, chord progression, rhythm, and lyrics --
               | anything that reflects a "minimal spark" of creativity
               | and originality.
               | 
               | https://ask.audio/articles/5-common-beliefs-about-song-
               | copyr...
               | 
               | > Song Titles and Chord Progressions are not copyright
               | protected
               | 
               | > This is true.
               | 
               | [snip]
               | 
               | > Ditto for chord progressions. There must be hundreds of
               | songs that were hits in the '50s and early '60s that
               | followed the familiar "ice cream changes" progression of
               | I-vi-IV-V7. Thin "In The Still Of The Night" (another
               | song that shares its title with others), "Donna",
               | "Silhouettes", "This Boy" just for starters. Also the
               | chords from the "Pachelbel Canon in D" have been used
               | numerous times. Think "A Whiter Shade Of Pale."
               | 
               | Does lack of enforcement make something legal?
               | 
               | https://moviecultists.com/can-chord-progressions-be-
               | copyrigh...
               | 
               | > "If a single chord progression were elaborate enough
               | and unconventional enough, it could be protected."
               | 
               | How many possible chord progressions are there?
        
         | svantana wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | viccuad wrote:
         | I found that the TED talk linked on the article explains the
         | issue colourfully, in case you haven't watched it.
        
       | helsinki wrote:
       | Cool - now scrape the web for new songs that match one of yours
       | and sue them ;)
        
       | newguy999 wrote:
        
       | davedx wrote:
       | Kinda interesting project but very clickbait title. What does
       | this have to do with DJing?
        
       | temptemptemp111 wrote:
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | mellosouls wrote:
       | Previous discussions on the underlying project fwiw:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22301091
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22440944
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22413526
        
       | fatlat wrote:
        
       | benabus wrote:
       | But 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?
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | Good luck proving that these songs were not created via
         | automation in court - or that the claimant did not create the
         | melody via automation for that matter. Wouldn't most electronic
         | music fall under that definition?
        
         | kube-system wrote:
         | You're missing the point of what the court is saying.
         | 
         | The court is saying "the [typewriter] didn't write the book,
         | you wrote the book using a [typewriter]"
         | 
         | Replace [typewriter] with any technology.
        
         | horsawlarway wrote:
         | 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
         | die?
        
           | nwsm wrote:
           | I certainly agree that the author of an automation deserves
           | credit/copyright for its output.
           | 
           | But imagine I build something that spits out as many binary
           | sequences as possible. Do I then have a copyright to all the
           | "works" that can be interpreted from it in various data
           | formats I may have accidentally met?
           | 
           | This question is about intention, not authorship.
        
           | roywiggins wrote:
           | 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_.
           | ...
        
             | viccuad wrote:
             | The linked TED talk on the article explains it nicely. A
             | phone book is created with a finite set (numbers,letters,
             | words in English), but that finite set can be used to
             | produce an infinite set. You can always produce a new
             | result by appending to previous result.
             | 
             | In contrast, a musical melody is created by a finite set,
             | and is bracketed by a duration. You can't keep adding more
             | notes to a composition without extending its duration.
             | Doing so makes it non melodic. If you do it enough, it
             | becomes noise (white noise, pink noise..)
        
             | horsawlarway wrote:
             | No real disagreement from me - I'm just saying that there's
             | absolutely nothing preventing you from using automation to
             | create copywrite-able works.
             | 
             | People keep throwing that article around, and there seems
             | to be a profound misunderstanding about what was determined
             | there - automation is _fine_. Listing a machine as the
             | author is not.
        
         | lbotos wrote:
         | You are missing the crux of that argument:
         | 
         | "Thaler listed Creativity Machine as the author of the work"
         | 
         | You cannot claim that the AI was the creator.
        
       | cycomanic wrote:
       | I suspect the "appealing" melodies amongst this are likely a
       | small subset of the the total set.
       | 
       | The whole story reminded me of this axis of awesome (OZ comedy
       | group) song (well worth watching):
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I&list=RD5pidokakU...
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | Clickbait.
        
       | erikschoster wrote:
       | Other 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 consequences of this object or
       | objects. The important feature is that any finite series is
       | fixed, so greater sized disks, blue ray, whatever, is not
       | significant to the idea, that is in a finite universe there are a
       | finite number of finite objects. The size of the bit strings set
       | real limits on the number of possible objects; web pages
       | typically use 24 bits to encode colors, 8 bits for red, 8 for
       | blue, and 8 for green that gives 256 x 256 x 256 or 16,777,216
       | possible colors, and no more.
       | 
       | > In Deleuzean terms, you could call this, all possible CDs, the
       | "virtual plane", thought experiment, in the case of 2 to the
       | power 6265728000 of all possible audio on CD, a virtual set of
       | possibilities or a virtual plane, and the actual physical CDs in
       | the world are actualizations of these virtualalities. Actual
       | objects, physical CDs, being intensities on this virtual plane.
       | Actual CDs are not mere copies of there virtual counterparts,
       | they are not re presentations of the virtual, for they have many
       | more properties, many physical properties, color, size, shape
       | etc., just as in the Deleuzean Virtual and Real planes, the real
       | is not a copy of the virtual, but an intensity.
       | 
       | > Using this as a model we can "experience" actualities that are
       | physically unlikely for humans if not in practice impossible, for
       | 2 to the power 6265728000, is approximately 10 to the power
       | 2000000000. There are only 10 to the power 118 particles in the
       | universe so a full and total actualization of the virtuality of
       | CDs seems impossible.
        
         | PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
         | Related: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/
         | 
         | All possible scales with 12TET and octave equivalence.
        
         | wpietri wrote:
         | Oh, neat! The Chord Catalogue is even available on streaming
         | services. Here it is on Pandora:
         | https://www.pandora.com/artist/tom-johnson/the-chord-catalog...
        
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