What Counts as Music and Why?

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?"

Transacting the undefined

IMHO, this is a fundamental problem with this kind of non-transactional pricing scheme. Our categories such as "music", "noise", "data", "spam" are fundamentally perceptual definitions. Once you try to divy up a share of profits among a variety of things that people are accessing with their bandwidth, there are no objective criteria by which to separate one from another. It becomes an issue of who is making the most noise and can muscle their way into greater (non)-market-share, which is why this issue is being discussed in relation to music in the first place. The determination of who gets what share becomes a contest of politics, rather than quality. It becomes rather like the attempts of socialist governments to control pricing; even with the best of intentions there is no way to make this fair. Either we vote with our dollars or let someone else vote with them, based on their perceptions.

Re:Transacting the undefined

Really instead of thinking of changing things into music... we are really just looking at different mechanism to change things into a common format.

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

A Challenge

If he can convert the new Metallica album into music, I'll be impressed.

Music is Music

Anything created with the purpose of being listened to should qualify as "music" - yes I know that this also would include radio broadcasts of news and whatnot that's just ppl talking, but as far as it goes audio is audio.

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

Indeed, media type is (and should be) defined by content, not by encoding. The type reflects the manner in which the author intends the content to be enjoyed, and the manner in which the consumer intends to enjoy it.

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 .wav file, I intended it to be an image, and you probably intend to view it as an image. If you honestly intend to listen to my image file (which I suspect don't even follow the appropriate standards of the file formats they purport), then maybe we can talk about it's merits as music/line noise.

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...

Re:Music is Music

In this light I might point out that copyright law does not refer to "music."

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 even some lawyers, have been dealing with all of this stuff for decades.

And then there was Dr. Leary. Think about it.

KFG

Okay, I'll Bite On This...

Can pornographers get paid for turning images into sound?

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

From http://whozoo.org/mac/Music/Sources.htm

Imagine the mRNA to be like a long piece of magnetic recording tape, and the ribosome to be like a tape recorder. As the tape passes through the playing head of the recorder, it is "read" and converted into music, or other sounds...When a "tape" of mRNA passes through the "playing head" of a ribosome, the "notes" produced are amino acids and the pieces of music they make up are proteins.

They go on to say:

Music is not a mere linear sequence of notes. Our minds perceive pieces of music on a level far higher than that. We chunk notes into phrases, phrases into melodies, melodies into movements, and movements into full pieces. similarly proteins only make sense when they act as chunked units. Although a primary structure carries all the information for the tertiary structure to be created, it still "feels" like less, for its potential is only realized when the tertiary structure is actually physically created.

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

Seems the program has been renamed from Ka-Blammo to Baudio, and Not-Ka-Blammo to Baudio Decoder.

Steganogrphic obfuscation of copyrighted works..?

Okay, it's a heady subject, I'll admit. I read this article in Linux Format magazine [linuxformat.co.uk] about steganography, wherein the least significant n bits of an image's pixels are hijacked for hiding data. The image changes so little that the average viewer can't detect it, and heaps of data (pardon) can be hidden there. Will the next P2P app use steganography to hide (music, et al) files in very large graphics? I'd think that courts would have a hard time determining that the original file wasn't just coincidentally the same as the encoded bits.

Compulsory licensing is a bad idea.

This example just goes to show what a mess will be created if the govt. simply collects a pot of money from ISPs and then tries to divy it up to the recording inductry. Everybody and his lawyer will be in line for a piece of the action. In the Soviet Union people stood in lines too for similar reasons, and look how that turned out. The system is inherently unfair because the one who gets the most money will be the one with the best lawyer and the most lobbying money, instead of the person with the most talent and the ability to write something someone wants to hear.

A whole new world for obfuscated code ...

Wow, I think obfuscated code is pretty 1337 now (e.g. Perl code in the shape of a camel [perlmonks.org]), but I'll be seriously impressed when someone writes a "Hello, World" program that converts to an audio file of them saying "Hello, World." Any takers? :)

Cheers,
IT

M$ Music

I imagine if you converted Windows into music it would probably be a pirates tune with some background singers saying things like 'World Domination'.

Compulsory licenses?

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.

wahoo!

Boy bands aren't musically talented, so they're music must be free! ... Wait, that doesn't help us at all!

I know, I know.

If you're being sued by the RIAA, it's 'music'.

this is the best argument i have heard yet

this is the best argument i have heard yet against this scourge on the face of humanity:

The OpenBSD 3.4 Song: Theo Sings Back-up [slashdot.org]

On a side note.

If you have ever read "Dirk Gently's Holistic detective agency" by Douglas Adams, you might recall that the piece of software that was being written by one of the main characters Richard, was called "Anthem" and converted factual data or basically anything with numbers into music.

Art and life eh?

Hey, Guess What? You Have To Use Judgement

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

Several posters have commented that music is best defined similarly to obscenity ("I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . . " [findlaw.com]), and thus the output of Ka-Blamo doesn't count as music. Allow me to provide a counter-example.

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

I don't know what's more interesting, that he wrote this program or that he wrote it in PHP?

Re:Ka-Blamo is also a good demonstration of how...

Yeah, that's a neat thing I found -- compressed files (zip, mp3, gif, jpg) tended to sound like steady static and uncompressed files (especially pictures) had more interesting rhythms -- if you listen to the Photoshop image, my guess is that the 3 "doings" at the end are the RGB channels, but that's just a guess...

OK, Here's Another Idea

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!

Back in '82 I found someone throwing out their collection of Apple ][ cassettes. Up the street, someone was tossing a cassette player that still had batteries in it.
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

Frank Zappa once said that ANYTHING can be music as long as you can score it out and reproduce it. To use his example, even someone just swallowing orange juice can be music if you score it out and reproduce it faithfully.

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...

Music must be in 4/4.
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

If it is copyrighted by a RIAA member company, it is music. If it isn't RIAA, then it is not music, and would be illegal to listen to.

--jeff++

Re:Hmmm....

Perhaps it has to sound different if played backwards to be music?

Nowadays that's an outlawd technique. Decrypting satanic messages by playing tracks backwards is prohibited by the DMCA (Demonic Message Comprehension Act).

Re:Well, IMHO

While I can appreciate you displeasure with the RIAA, MPAA, etc, your approach is fundamentally flawed. Not to mention your language...

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.

Re:suck it!

According to websters: Music \Mu"sic\, n. [F. musique, fr. L. musica, Gr. ? (sc. ?), any art over which the Muses presided, especially music, lyric poetry set and sung to music, fr. ? belonging to Muses or fine arts, fr. ? Muse.] 1. The science and the art of tones, or musical sounds, i. e., sounds of higher or lower pitch, begotten of uniform and synchronous vibrations, as of a string at various degrees of tension; the science of harmonical tones which treats of the principles of harmony, or the properties, dependences, and relations of tones to each other; the art of combining tones in a manner to please the ear. Note: Not all sounds are tones. Sounds may be unmusical and yet please the ear. Music deals with tones, and with no other sounds. See Tone. Rap contains only beat, and is therefore not music,