Published 15:30 IST, March 2nd 2020
Musician create every melody possible to end music copyright lawsuit claims
Musicians Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin created algorithm to merge every 8-note 12-beat melody combination and produced MIDI files of over 68 billion melodies.
A musician and a lawyer have reportedly created all the melodies using an algorithm to avoid accidental music infringement. The idea was to copyright every single musical combination and give it to the artists and musicians so that they no longer have to worry about the copyright lawsuits, as per media reports. According to the reports, Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin first created a computer algorithm to merge every single 8-note 12-beat melody combination and produced MIDI files of over 68 billion output melodies in the hard drive. Riehl, who is also a lawyer, worked on the copyright. The duo had to switch programming languages from Python to Rust to generate all possible melodies on the piano and save them on Rubin’s modest computer music framework.
Rubin and Riehl faced considerable complications to produce such a large unthinkable number of melodies, they, however, found the pop melodies convenient as it ran fewer than 12 notes, confirmed Riehl in his TED talks episode that was posted on YouTube. Riehl told the audience that the algorithm made 300,000 melodies per second. He said that for these melodies to be copyrighted, they had to be produced as work.
No rights reserved music
Explaining about the process in detail, Riehl said in his talk show, “under copyright law, numbers are fact, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all”. He further added saying, “So maybe if these numbers have existed since the beginning of time and we're just plucking them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copyrightable." The two musicians made the algorithm of the generated melodies available for the audience on Github and on the Internet Archive. They released the MIDI files under Creative Commons Zero license which means that the musicians and artists do not have to worry about copyright of their own work as all the melodies were a part of no rights reserved music.
Updated 15:30 IST, March 2nd 2020