I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

https://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2022/03/all-the-music-megamix/

by redcodenl • 4 years ago

376 91 4 years ago

eweise• 4 years ago

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.

ovi256• 4 years ago

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.

QuercusMax• 4 years ago

I think you meant to say that African traditions focus on rhythm, not harmony?

gnulinux• 4 years ago

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.

munk-a2• 4 years ago

This is especially relevant when it comes to timbre a musical quality that's extremely difficult to even record in staff and bar notation.

whiddershins• 4 years ago

It does, this description of what can be copyrighted is confused.

thebricksta2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

jerf2• 4 years ago

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.

wincy2• 4 years ago

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.

kube-system2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

What about the silence between notes? Copyrighted or no? Their Jingle Bells sounds horrible with no silent spaces.

matja• 4 years ago

To fully appreciate the silence between notes, you must experience the full orchestra version of John Cage's 4'33"

imwillofficial2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

I think you missed the joke!

hilarious1212• 4 years ago

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.

OzzyB• 4 years ago

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...

imwillofficial2• 4 years ago

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

jjulius• 4 years ago

I, too, "run in those circles" and I got the joke. :)

vmception• 4 years ago

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

mellosouls• 4 years ago

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

29athrowaway• 4 years ago

Clickbait.

benabus• 4 years ago

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?

lbotos• 4 years ago

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.

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

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?

horsawlarway4• 4 years ago

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?

roywiggins• 4 years ago

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_....

nwsm2• 4 years ago

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.

kube-system2• 4 years ago

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.

erikschoster• 4 years ago

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.

wpietri• 4 years ago

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...

PaulDavisThe1st• 4 years ago

All possible scales with 12TET and octave equivalence.

GLGirty• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

This. How about an algorithm to predict aesthetic appeal?

redcodenl• 4 years ago

Sure there is a lot of bad music in there, but the next top 40 song that tops the charts will likely also be in there, hidden away.

almet• 4 years ago

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 ?

svantana• 4 years ago

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.

viccuad2• 4 years ago

I found that the TED talk linked on the article explains the issue colourfully, in case you haven't watched it.

marssaxman• 4 years ago

The point is that applying copyright law to music leads to absurd outcomes. It is a bad idea, and ought to be abolished.

Kye3• 4 years ago

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.

throwaway675309• 4 years ago

Does the same apply to other mediums? What if I generate all possible 64x64 images? (Extend that to every resolution in theory)

snek_case• 4 years ago

A lot of people seem to miss the distinction between DJ (someone who mixes/remixes music) and composer/producer.

nwsm2• 4 years ago

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.

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

Thank you for your summary Damien

helsinki• 4 years ago

Cool - now scrape the web for new songs that match one of yours and sue them ;)

lhorie2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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?

lhorie2• 4 years ago

IMHO, the similarity angle is nearly a red herring. "Girl from Rio" by Anitta is unequivocally a copy of "Girl from Ipanema" but it has proper attribution so there's no problem. What really matters is this chain of attribution: For Levitating, did Dua Lipa collaborate w/ Artikal Sound System or otherwise appropriate artistic output from them in a more significant capacity than any other permutation of song pairs from the other dozen similar songs? And if so, was Artikal Sound System cheated out of income? I'd argue that no, and that they probably are getting more publicity from the whole stunt than they otherwise would have.

There's a bazillion examples of flat out copying being considered perfectly fine: the lyrics for Anne Marie's "2002" clearly uses iconic lyrics from Britney Spears pretty much verbatim, and in a way that is obviously intended to refer to Britney, but the thing is that many many other artists before her have done similar homages (e.g. Calvin Harris' "My Way" references Sinatra's, etc) so there's a fairly strong reason to believe that a lawsuit based solely on similarity grounds would go nowhere.

bmitc• 4 years ago

That is indeed discussed directly in the linked video.

GrazeMor2• 4 years ago

This only works for western music

kleer001• 4 years ago

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.

GrazeMor2• 4 years ago

He was clearly relying on being able to distill a melody to x beats per bar which is very western.

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

Wasn’t there an article on the front page last week about how computer generated art wasn’t copyrightable?

cycomanic• 4 years ago

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...

dmitriid• 4 years ago

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.

cwkoss3• 4 years ago

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.

pfarrell2• 4 years ago

It's an interesting thought. I'll counter with this point: Just because a song makes $10M, doesn't mean the authors see any of it. I am reminded to the story of "Mbube" aka "Wimoweh" aka "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" where Solomon Linda, the musician who created the famous melody died penniless while it is estimated he and his estate should have earned over $15M in royalties.

https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/in-the-jungle-inside-th...

cwkoss3• 4 years ago

How does that counter my point? If anything, I'd say that supports the cap, as the cap is unlikely to hurt artists - it would mostly hurt industry predators. And less money in predators pockets reduces the funds they have available for legal strong-arming.

davedx• 4 years ago

Kinda interesting project but very clickbait title. What does this have to do with DJing?

lookalike74• 4 years ago

Great question, DJ's mix songs and this person mixed 'every possible 12 note melody combination' they could generate with code.

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

Ah, dude's not a dj then (as far as this is concerned)

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

is it just me or does this not feel like a "lot" anymore? this is $20 in storage and a 1s query now

They generated all songs of length n=12 with k=8 notes, this amounts to a staggering n^k = 8^12 = 68,719,476,736 unique songs.
All these songs are 12 notes long and have their own MIDI file which adds even more overhead. The size of this dataset is huge, 1.2TB compressed using GZIP.

irjustin• 4 years ago

This is a similar concept of Library of Babel[0].

With code you really can do "a thousand monkeys at typewriters", but is it meaningful?

[0] https://libraryofbabel.info/

tehlike• 4 years ago

it would make more sense if keyboard was printing words - which would be more or less equivalent of the notes on the music case.

KyleJune• 4 years ago

Couldn't authors who published melodies before him make copyright claims against him. Seems like he may be opening himself up to many copyright claims.

I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

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