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What Counts as Music and Why?
Posted by
michael
on Fri Oct 03, 2003 06:40 PM
from the perl-jam dept.
from the perl-jam dept.
The Importance of writes "There has been much discussion about compulsory licensing schemes. Most of the debate has been about music. But what happens when any file can easily be converted into a sound file and back again? Can shareware authors convert their software to digital music and get paid for sharing it? Can pornographers get paid for turning images into sound? Scott Matthews has written a program (Ka-Blamo) that does the conversion. LawMeme looks at some of the issues. This raises the question, what should count as music and why?"
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Transacting the undefined (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Transacting the undefined (Score:4, Insightful)
Prose, news, music, poety, pictures, movies -- it is really just o's and 1's.
If pictures were receiving the same laws, we could easily change pictures to music as well. We can change text to music without any difficulty.
Everything goes down to binary... changing it from format to format is trivial.
Davak
Parent
Re:Transacting the undefined (Score:3, Interesting)
While I agree with your final point, I disagree with your reasoning. Take your example spam. While spam has yet to be defined clearly, it is not indefinable. One could, for example, say spam is any unsolicited email meant to profit the sender. This may not be the best possible definition, but once it is adopted by the law, precedence will alter the meaning into one that will hopefully make it more useful. But
Re:Transacting the undefined (Score:3, Interesting)
Music is 1/f noise. This means that if you plot the frequency distribution of a data stream the intensity of the f frequency appears to be 1/f. (This can be carried out by Fourier analysis or such.)
However many other interesting phenomenon produces this 1/f signature. These are the ones I remember:
* variations in the healthy heart b
A Challenge (Score:5, Funny)
Music is Music (Score:5, Interesting)
Making a software program and converting it into an audio file is idiotic. If the purpose of the file is not to listen to, don't even try to argue its consideration in any kind of licensing scheme...
Re:Music is Music (Score:2)
Yes, it is laughable. These are the problems a society creates when it tries to create laws to control the flow of data.
Davak
Re:Music is Music (Score:2)
Music is protected by laws that software is not.
Please explain what law protects music which doesn't protect software. I thought software had more protection.
OK, there's public performance/display, but I don't see how that matters, since you can't publically perform software, and publically displaying software doesn't make much sense.
Re:Music is Music (Score:3, Informative)
Actually copyright law does specificly recognize public performance and display of software. Running a program and displaying the results is a "performance". It is most easy to recognize it in the form of video games, often almost identical to watching a movie.
If you were to buy several copies of a game an set up public terminals
Re:Music is Music (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Music is Music (Score:5, Insightful)
If I take a photograph of a tree and encode it into bits, those bits will always represent the content of an image, even if some stupid Baudio-like program presents those bits as though they were some other sort of media. Even if I'm the one pretending it's a
This is crucially different from some of the examples he gives, which don't really apply to his "codec" at all.
In steganography, two different works are combined into a single encoding. This does -not- make the resulting file a single work, nor does it make the included image a song, or the included song an image.
The DeCSS song is a little more complicated, depending on whether you believe it is intended to (and can be) enjoyed as pure music, or whether it is merely intended as a vector for code. In any case, there is real audio content that's been provided.
4'33" was meant to be enjoyed as audio content, so it is, even though the 'art' is actually in the lack of audio content. It's not like the silence (or in Baudio's case, noise) is really meant to be pornography.
Hmm... I think a key differentiator might be what -analog- formats the content exists as. We live in an analog world and digital encoding can really only exist as a means of temporarily storing something inherently analog. Content is analog.
This whole argument just seems... stupid.
Stupid enough to make me actually post...
Parent
Re:Music is Music (Score:2, Insightful)
Running an audio file converted to an image through a JPEG or GIF compressor will result in irreversibly useless garbage. This has a lot to do with the vast differences in different media types' notions of space over time. Audio frames are much smaller than video frames.
Considering there are entire musical genres consi
Re:Music is Music (Score:2)
Of course we all know what music is.
The real point of the question being asked here is how in the world is a dumb computer supposed to interpret this "intent"?
So if a computer can't actually interpret the intent of a file (except perhaps by filename suffix or header information, both of which are all too easy to forge if one was trying to be deliberately deceptive), the answer to the question being posed in this articl
Re:Music is Music (Score:5, Insightful)
It refers to sound recordings (that's how Shatner "got away with it").
The story's question is phrased somewhat improperly improperly.
Nor is the issue new. It's just more pressing now than before. Without using a computer at all I can convert light (and therefore photoimages) into sound and vice versa. I can turn mathmatics into music and music into mathmatics (Mozart was fond of doing this and developed a method using dice to develop themes). I can turn text into images, sound ( no, that's not a degenerate statement. I can turn text into arbitrarty sound. It's called "reading music" and any text can be used for such).
What is needlepoint other than a set of Cartesian Coordinates with a color code translated into an image?
How about this piece of paper I have here with some symbols on it? Is it my copywritable intellectual property, or is it a chess game? And if I can copywrite it what rights do the players have to it? It was their game, and thus their creation, after all.
Computers just make the process faster, easier and more ubiquitous, but artists, scientists and home experimenters. .
And then there was Dr. Leary. Think about it.
KFG
Parent
Okay, I'll Bite On This... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but just remember, it's not the size of the song that counts. Even a short song like this could deeply penetrate P2P networks.
RNA as music for an example (Score:5, Interesting)
From http://whozoo.org/mac/Music/Sources.htm
They go on to say:
Ok, this makes sense to me but we also do the same thing with words... and words can be made into speach. Why not say the same thing of patents... Our minds take existing ideas and change them... thoughts get put into actions, actions into motion, motion in physical parts, physical parts into machines, machines into processes, processes into... well, you get the idea.
All of our existence as humans (including our own being) is parts being put together into something greater than the whole, and this happens to include music... music has bizarre rules, and most everything else can be made into music. Does this mean the rules of music apply to the other items?
Reminds me of the DeCss as free speach argument.
So be it.
Program Renamed (Score:3, Insightful)
Steganogrphic obfuscation of copyrighted works..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Concealing Code (Score:2, Interesting)
Technically, you're not distributing this code, are you?
Compulsory licensing is a bad idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Compulsory licensing is a bad idea. (Score:3, Insightful)
Who said this is what compulsory licensing will do?
As I understand it, compulsory licensing means just that: publishers are compelled to offer licenses at a predetermined rate. That means I can download any song from anywhere, and as long as I send the predetermined license cost to the owner of the copyright, that copy is legal.
What doe
A whole new world for obfuscated code ... (Score:5, Funny)
Cheers,
IT
Music analysis and DRM (Score:2)
M$ Music (Score:3, Funny)
Compulsory licenses? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can shareware authors convert their software to digital music and get paid for sharing it?
Why would they want to do that? It's better for a copyright holdere not to be forced to offer a compulsory license.
Um... (Score:2)
wahoo! (Score:5, Funny)
Defining the terms (Score:2)
Damn I wish I could remember who said that, it was brilliant.
I know, I know. (Score:3, Insightful)
this is the best argument i have heard yet (Score:3, Funny)
The OpenBSD 3.4 Song: Theo Sings Back-up [slashdot.org]
A picture is worth a thousand words (Score:2)
A thousand sounds is worth a picture.
On a side note. (Score:3, Interesting)
Art and life eh?
Hey, Guess What? You Have To Use Judgement (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, guess what? You have to use judgement. In fact, they actually have people in court called judges. You know. Those guys and gals in the funny black dresses and/or wigs depending on where you hail from. Last I heard the judges--get this--actually have to judge things. They haven't been replaced by referees who simply follow the rules as written. We know that because they aren't wearing black and white striped shirts, and they don't blow whistles (or whatever it is refs do in other games and countries besides USA football).
Of course there are guidelines. Personally I'd say anything that can be played live and sound enough like the recording for a jury to identify the tune as unique from other tunes, and to name that tune, is music.
Thus, bit barf dumped to a .wav file is not music because nobody can play it on an instrument, and most bit barf would sound very similar to the jury.
But of course you'd have to use judgement. Some wrapper stopping and starting bit barf while bragging about his sexual conquests might fall into the grey area, but if enough people testify that they find it entertaining and prefer Cornrow Groovy bit-barf fine ladies to other works of the same genre, then guess what: It's music.
But the bottom line is that somebody will have to make up their minds, it may be subjective, and the loser will have to live with the answer.
Yeah, that's tough. Nothing's perfect.
How to define music (Score:3, Insightful)
In 1787, Mozart invented A Musical Dice Game for Composing a Minuet [univie.ac.at]. Given the results of the game, I assume that one can derive the dice numbers that created it. (If not, it shouldn't be hard to modify the game to possess that property.) Now, play the game using a fixed string of bits instead of a random number generator. The result is very definitely music, and it isn't steganography.
The use of a Mozart encoder and decoder would be even more powerful than Ka-Blamo.
PHP (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, Here's Another Idea (Score:3)
How about requiring "musicians" to perform before they can copyright music?
A "musician" is a person or group of people, not a machine.
To "performance" is when the musician(s) perform physical actions on the instruments that produce a work that the audience recognizes as being disctinct from other copyrighted works.
An "instrument" is a device that is designed to produce sound when acted upon by a musician. A song must have a minimum number of "notes" to be copyrighted. There must be at least one physical action on the part of the musician to create each note. Thus, a computer is not an instrument because it has purposes other than producing sound. It's perfectly OK for the musician to enhance his music with a computer, but there must still be an instrument hooked to the computer. The musician cannot simply hit one key on his MIDI keyboard and use it to trigger bit-barf on his computer. That would be a one-note song and thus not copyrightable.
Furthermore, a "musician" must have had several paid performances of the work, indoors at an establishment that serves food and/or a concert hall, and there must be no kickbacks from artist to venue. Works that fail to meet these criteria would still be protected by copyright; they just wouldn't get compulsory license fees.
A piece of "music" must be distinguishable from other pieces of "music" by a jury.
There might still be some loopholes in this, but I think that covers it pretty well. You can't license bit-barf under these rules. Nobody will come to hear it.
Ahead of my time! (Score:3, Funny)
My friend and I walked the rest of the way to school with 6502 machine code playing from our impromptu boombox.
Little did I know.....
--
Frank Zappa (Score:3, Interesting)
I tend to agree. If Justin Timberlake can call what he does music (as opposed to the prepackaged sound-based diversionary tactic it REALLY is) and the Beatles can call somebody repeating "Number Nine" over and over music, then, really, music just becomes another arbitrary term that is defined mostly by someone's personal taste rather than an actual discernable entity.
This is easy... (Score:3, Funny)
Music must have lyrics.
Music must consist of a drummer, a bassist, a guitarist, and a vocalist.
Music must last no less than 3, and no more than 5 minutes.
Music must be: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus.
Music must be accompanied by a video.
Music must be about love.
Music must have a 30 second instrumental intro for the DJ to talk over.
Music must rhyme.
Music must be able to be danced to.
Simple (Score:4, Funny)
--jeff++
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Funny)
Nowadays that's an outlawd technique. Decrypting satanic messages by playing tracks backwards is prohibited by the DMCA (Demonic Message Comprehension Act).
Parent
Re:Well, IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)
If all you pay is at the concert, you are contributing to skyrocketing ticket costs for concerts. Composing, recording and producing an album takes time, talent and money. Artists and technicians involved in that process deserve to be paid for their work just as you are paid for yours.
I do believe the system contains massive amounts of unnecessary overheat. The meat isn't very lean, so to speak. Record executives rake in huge salaries, while most artists, which pay those execs, are lucky to make gas money. This needs to change. It will be a long, slow and painful process, but I think we are in the beginning stages of that now. Just remember, the execs won't give up their fat salaries without a fight.
I remember when concert tickets for a major act were $20 at a major venue. Going to a concert was affordable then. And I went to a fair number of concerts. Today, the major acts are pulling in $75 for those same seats. Sure, you can go to some shows for $35, but those are generally acts from the 80s or emerging bands. Even so, it's nearly double what it was less than 20 years ago.
If concerts were affordable, I'd go far more often. Paying your fair share at every step of the process (not just for concerts, but for the CDs, too) will help.
Piracy only makes the problems worse and it's a lame excuse to break the law.
Parent
Re:Well, IMHO (Score:3, Interesting)
Piracy is urging the industry to change its ways. I've explained this before: The movement of information is fluid; you have to work with the tools available. Now, the tools are interconnected powerful computers.
IF digital information can be copied perfectly, infinitely then no amount of legislation is going to put the genie back in the bottle. The "public stockade" approach of the RIAA right now will only swell Freenet and it's descendants, continuing a cat and mouse that started long ago.
Re:suck it! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:suck it! (Score:2)
Re:What counts? (Score:2)
There is always one idiot who will abuse something...
Re:What counts? (Score:2, Funny)
That's much more fun.
Re:What about the other way? (Score:2)
Re:reminds me of... (Score:3, Informative)
That "dance artist" (I dislike that description, he's more than a generic techno musician) is in fact Aphex Twin. You can see the image through a spectrograph. Old Slashdot article here [slashdot.org].
Re:Ka-Blamo is also a good demonstration of how... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent