Damien Riehl (lawyer, programmer and musician) and Noah Rubin have just found a trick to stop future copyright infringement lawsuits related to plagiarized music and offer a method to release the melodies.
The musicians propose generating all possible combinations of melodies from eight notes and twelve rhythms using an algorithm, recording each one in MIDI format. The two musicians are working to release these generated productions under the free Creative Commons Zero license. The idea is to prevent users of copyrighted works from inadvertently becoming victims of legal proceedings.
The algorithm in question, whose source code has not yet been published by the two musicians, was able to generate 300,000 melodies per second and the final result consists of a repertoire of 68,7 billion melodies stored in MIDI format.
Therefore, they were published in two large files, each weighing just over 600 GB, on the archive.org website.
The notes of a melody can be converted into a series of numbers, making it easier for developers to write the algorithm. In fact, it's enough for the algorithm to use the same approach hackers use to try all possible combinations of character strings to find a password.
For example, the notes taken into account are limited to those that are diatonic in the major scale, that is, without taking into account the high (or the flat): in this case, the notes used integrate the twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
Furthermore, the Riehl-Rubin algorithm is limited to a single octave , while a song's melody can often span two or even three octaves. There are also reasons to consider not only the timing of each note but also the time spent in silence. Musicians and artists admit, in fact, that these few elements can significantly and substantially alter the character of a melody.
However, many internet users who have commented on the issue are quite skeptical, especially regarding the potential lack of consideration judges might give to works produced through artificial intelligence. Furthermore, it is highly likely that some of the melodies generated by this process are already copyrighted by other authors who originally created them.
However, it must be said that this project carried out by Riehl and Rubin is an initiative that likely paves the way for other avenues of research and exploration. This probably involves rewriting the algorithm.
In fact, many comments praise this initiative, which could succeed in gathering very strong contributions from the developer and musician communities.
There are, for example, those who have already proposed codes to generate the title of each of the millions of melodies produced, with Diceware, a method to create random sentences. The two musicians hope that other contributors will broaden the field covered by this project to other fields besides pop music.
The two initiators of this project recall, in an interview, that problems related to the plagiarism of musical work are frequent, which can unfairly affect musicians and artists.
The resulting lawsuits are often very costly to the music world, which would generally risk spending between $ 380,000 and $ 2 million, just for attorneys' fees.
Furthermore, the fines to be paid if the judge recognizes plagiarism are sometimes very high.
And in this case for example, the lawsuit, in the summer of 2019, about the hit song "Dark Horses" by Katy Perry, now forced to pay $ 2.78 million, because the melody in question would resemble that of a Christian song by rap written by Marcus Gray called "Joyful Noise".
Source: https://www.vice.com