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Mutopia: Where Music is Free
rabalde writes "Check the Mutopia project. In the same spirit of the beloved Project Gütenberg,
but consists of a growing collection of free music.
The essence of Mutopia is that of a growing number of musical scores all typeset using GNU Lilypond by volunteers. All the music is downloadable for free as Postscript (.ps) and PDF (.pdf) files , as well as Lilypond's own LY (.ly) file format."
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Gutenberg is a committed effort run by enthusiastic volunteers, with one *very* enthusiastic volunteer at the center. Exactly like all the successful projects on the internet. No monks needed.
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Sure. So what? The principle of capitalism is not: "Thou shalt pay money to and thereby protect the profits of companies". Quite the opposite: "Thou shalt maximize your own profits". If this latter principle, as a result, kills off some useless company, so much the better. Corporations try to screw consumers, consumers try to screw coroporations: that's the name of the game after all.
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When I started LilyPond, I felt that there had to be a good justification for the existence of LilyPond, so I wrote a little document about a PD sheet-music archive to be called "Mutopia". Some years later, we had gathered too many test-scores in the lilypond package, and decided to host them in a separate archive. I called for volunteers to set this up. Chris Sawer (to whom I owe a big thanks!) made the site that's featured in this article.
Of course, I wanted the files to be usable with free-software, so using Sibelius or Finale was out of the question. There are some other options, like the ABC format, but they have more technical limitations.
Anyway, LilyPond format is flexible (I wrote several convertors to it, among others a Finale to .ly convertor) and Lily also dumps the output as a nicely quantized MIDI file, which is rather easy to import into other programs.
When it comes to music representation there aren't any good published standards: the problem with NIFF is not that it is binary per se, but rather that it is quite limited, and has a tendency to glue together musical and graphical information into a big blob. Also, there aren't any free score editors that support NIFF.
As for SMDL, I don't think that there exists any software that can meaningfully handle SMDL.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
C'mon. That's just silly. If somebody produces a work at say, 25, and die at 75, they'll have had 50 years earning royalties to leave to their children. If this music is still purchased with sufficient regularity after 50 years to make collecting royalties worthwhile, surely it will already have made more than enough money to justify writing the song. Very, very few composers will ever write music that will be played long after their death. Look at, say, the big band music of the 1940's. How much of that is still played regularly today? A couple of dozen tunes, maybe?
Additionally, you're assuming that greater rewards are going to lead to better music. While greater rewards might leave a composer more time to spend on each piece, beyond that I doubt that it makes any difference. Great composers aren't generally motivated by money, any more than great software designers.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If the artist is dead, what difference does it make to them?
True to some extent, but perhaps not as much as it was. However, why does that entitle their descendants to windfall profits?
It's not *one* company that would earn the profits. If copyright lapsed, it would be anybody with a printing press who wanted to run them off. In any case, I don't think my hypothetical grown grandchildren really deserve any money from the book. They didn't write it - I did. And, obviously, if I didn't attempt to publish the book, money wasn't the motivating factor for writing it.
In any case, this is a very rare situation. The situation where this becomes important is immensely popular copyrighted works such as the old Disney movies, and music such as Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. All of these have already earned massive amounts of money for the copyright holders, and have become part of our history and culture. How long are large corporations going to earn a rake-off on these works?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Same reason the waiters and waitresses at restauraunts always "sing" or shout some stupid "yeah, it's your birthday! Your birthday! your birthday! Yeah! Yeah! Whooooo!" song instead of Happy Birthday.
The restaurants would get sued otherwise. Evil, evil, evil.
On a related topic - you know Disney will pay whatever it takes - millions of dollars if neccessary - to bribe Congress to extend copyright again. They will never allow Mickey Mouse to enter the public domain.
The only hope is campaign finance reform.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Am I the only one who thinks 70 years is a ridiculous amount of time for a dead person to hold onto a copyright?
Yes, probably.
Hell, what is the purpose of musical copyright in the first place?
To provide motivation for artists to publish their works by giving them a limited monopoly on them.
Music, like digital information, is nothing more than a specific arrangement of a finite number of symbols. The entire concept that someone can "own" a particular grouping of symbols is at best ludicrous.
They don't "own" the music. They own the copyright to a piece of music. Sigh......
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Now, IANAL, but unless the people who submit scores to the site created them by looking at the composer's original scores, I assume that sooner or later some lawyer will go after them for copyright infringement.
Am I being too paranoid? If so, why is that most sheet music I've bought has a very prominent 'do not photocopy' sign on its first page? It's not that they can copyright the music itself, but it seems they sure can copyright that particular transcription.
So, if a score contains an extraneous # somewhere, or some extra ligature or something that can be attributed to a specific edition, and you blindly copy it and post it to the site, what do you think your legal position would be?
I know this is a can of worms, and I can understand the book publishers that want to protect their investment (especially if the score in question is an arrangement or a reduction of an orchestral score to a piano score) but at the same time I would love that somebody created a repository with freely available sheet music, so musicologists and enthusiasts would be able to study a composer's work without having to resort to online ordering to find the score they're looking for.
P.S. the last time I bought sheet music I was still living in Europe, so maybe here in North America the 'do not photocopy' signs do not exist
-- the cake is a lie
Puhleeze....
What kind of society will this kind of thinking lead to? I am an amateur musician, and I have made many a transcription (or should I say 'interpretation') of songs I like. I have friends who play as well, and I have no qualms whatsoever in giving them these transcriptions. Am I 'stealing' something now? NO.
Music is still a form of art, no matter what the 'music industry' wants us to believe. It is not a 'product'. Pre-packaged recordings may be 'products', but the music itself (the 'composition') it not. Ask any musician, and (s)he'll probably agree. Unless, of course, they're in it *just* for the money. But in that case their music probably won't be interesting enough to transcribe anyway. There's nothing wrong with *making money* on music, but when it becomes the sole purpose there probably won't be any music worth listening to anyway (right, Dr. Dre?).
Where do you think music comes from? What do you think it means when some musician tells you she has her 'roots' in this and that artist or such and so style? Do you think she means she signed a contract with those artists, a licensing agreement whereby she gained the right to use parts of their 'intellectual property' in her own works? Is that how you want the music of the 21st century to be?
Not me. If I hear a song I like, I'll try to play it. If I like the way it came out, I might write it down. If someone else likes it, they can have it. Sue me...
--frank[at]unternet.org
If NIFF is a flexible as it claims to be, then there's absolutely no reason why a perfect converter couldn't be written to take lilypond input and spit out a NIFF file (and vice versa). If a perfect converter could NOT be written, it displays exactly the reason why the use of the lilypond format is needed: the flexibility to take advantage of a particular implementation's quirks to result in the best possible output.
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I've contributed a Bach Prelude to the project, and it was definitely a worthwile experience. I hope to contribute again sometime soon.
With regard to its legality, you really ought to read their page dedicated to legal issues: here is the Google-cached version. In a nutshell, there are three sets of copyrights to take into account: The Composer's, the Editor's, and the Typesetter's. The typesetter's doesn't matter, because in this case, the computer (or more specifically, Lilypond) does that. We try to avoid the editor's copyright as well, by (surprise!) inputting from music that isn't edited! These are referred to as "Urtext" versions.
So taking both those things into account, it's perfectly legal to input music from an unedited score if the composer has been dead for at least 70 years.
Now on the technical side, music typesetting is not an exact science, and Lilypond, though mature and under very active development (current release is 1.3.124, I believe), still has its weaknesses. Though much of the output it produces is very readable and usable, sometimes it's less than ideal. You can tweak almost anything, but it often requires knowledge of its complicated implementation (C++ and Guile, I believe). Not only that, but it's SLOW! Typesetting a piece of 8 or 9 pages on my PII-300 96MB RAM takes about a minute, which sucks when you're going back to make small corrections. The run-time increases exponentially (it seems, that's not an exact observation) with more voices and more pages.
Input is done in plain text, in a terse-as-you-can-handle grammar, which is fairly simple to understand, though a bit more complicated once you actually try to assemble all the voices into a completed score. The example that's on the lily home page (I'm guessing it'll be slashdotted before long) is:
\relative c'' { \key c \minor; r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4 }
Which is pretty self-explanitory. Every note is assumed to be the closest note of that name, unless you override (see the last g, the comma means down an octave), every note is assumed to have a duration of the note that came before unless you override, the pipe is a bar check, and it'll warn you if the bar doesn't end up where you told it to be. Really not too difficult, especially if you download an already completed score to base your work on.
The project is fairly small at the moment (42 scores, many of them different movements of the same work), especially compared to Gutenberg, but it can only grow. The biggest problem I've run into is finding unedited copies from which to input.
I'd encourage anyone to contribute! I look forward to the day where there are great archives where you can download expired music for quick reference, or for scholarly curiosity. It'll never replace printed, published music, of course, there's nothing like having a real, bound copy, but it could be great for certain things.
The web page is also available at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/ (in case www.mutopiaproject.com goes down), though it may be the same machine, I'm not sure.
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BTW. I remember a story about a Japanese businessman who owned at least 2 Van Gough's painting. He was planning to be cremated with them. Ah the joys of un-restrained capitalism.
You're looking at it from the wrong end. Look at it from the author's standpoint. If her/her descendants will possibly benefit from the work, that person will likely work harder to produce better works, thus benefitting you and me.
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It's not an assumption I made, but rather an assumption the founding fathers made:
But I'll take a crack at defending it anyway.
While great composers may produce a few truly great and eternal works, on the whole, it's probably the only reasonably skilled workers who produce the greater amount of works. And probably, when you sum it up, the mid-level people probably produce the greatest benefit to society, by using and abusing and fully exploring the inovations of the great ones.
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both the Berne Convention and the EU directive have accepted the standard that copyright should protect the author and two succeeding generations. Based on the numerous viewpoints presented to the Committee as it has considered these issues, the Committee concludes that the majority of American creators anticipate that their copyrights will serve as important sources of income for their children and through them into the succeeding generation. The Committee believes that this general anticipation of familial benefit is consistent with both the role of copyrights in promoting creativity and the constitutionally based constraint that such rights be conferred for "limited times."
Among the primary justifications asserted for the adoption of the life-plus-70 term under the EU Directive was the conclusion that the life-plus-50 term is no longer sufficient to protect two generations of an author's heirs.
The Register of Copyrights informed the Committee that even for post-1978 works, which are afforded the basic life-plus-50 term of protection, the current term has proven insufficient in many cases to protect a single generation of heirs. For example, Walter Donaldson, who will forever be linked via his songs to the extraordinary success of the 1927 film "The Jazz Singer," composed many of his most famous works when he was in his twenties and died in 1947 while in his fifties. Were the current life-plus-50 term applied at that time, all of his works would fall into the public domain at the end of 1997. Nevertheless, Ellen Donaldson, the composer's daughter, remains extremely active in publishing and exploiting her father's music and in protecting his copyrights. Like the children of composers such as Richard Rogers, Irving Berlin, Richard Whiting, Hoagy Carmichael, and many others, her legitimate interest in her father's copyrights can be expected to continue for decades, and most certainly for the next 20 years.
In order to reflect more accurately Congress' intent and the expectation of America's creators that the copyright term will provide protection for the lifetime of the author and at least one generation of heirs, the bill extends copyright protection for an additional 20 years for both existing and future works.
The Committee is aware of the criticism of the proposed extension by those who suggest that it marks a step down the road of perpetual copyright protection. The Committee is unswayed by this argument for three reasons. First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works. Second, the emerging international standard, to which the bill purports to adhere, and the movement of international copyright law in general are not toward perpetual protection, but to a fixed term of protection based on the death of the author. Third, the principle behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill. The 20-year extension proposed by the bill merely modifies the length of protection in nominal terms to reflect the scientific and demographic changes that have rendered the life-plus-50 term insufficient to meet this aim.
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Actually, that's not a bad idea. Take Lilypond as one of the accepted submission languages, but maintain everything in the repository in one of the more standard formats.
I'm not sure how perfectly convertable they are, though. Converting from NIFF to Lilypond would be lossy at best. Converting the other way is probably like converting from Fortran to C. (Have you ever looked at the output from f2c?)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
While Coda did withdraw support (though there is an Open Source project which is an ETF to NIFF converter), it is supported by Mark of the Unicorn, Musitek, Musicware (which probably covers most of the non-Finale market), plus some of the most prolific publishers such as Boosey & Hawkes and Hal Leonard.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Naturally, they had to pick the least compatible music notation format there is.
The most compatible is NIFF. It's non-proprietary, and supported by all major music notation software. The only problem is it's a binary format, but then so is PDF. A good cross-platform ASCII format would be SDML, which based on SGML and currently in ISO draft standard status.
After years of pleading with others to stick to published standards, is it too much to hope that we do the same?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
It gets worse. We geeks often think we're breaking new ground with our hatred of insane copyright law and regulations, but it's been going on for years.
In Australia, performing Grand Right Works (basically anything intended to be performed on stage, such as opera, musical, revue, pantomime or choral work over 20 minutes long) requires paying money to AMCOS, no matter how long the composer has been dead. You heard it right. Performing a Bach Chorale requires paying the copright meisters even though Bach has been dead for 250 years. How can they do this? Simple: if you don't pay them money for these works that are out of copyright, you don't get the rights to copy or perform anything that is under copyright. They have you by the proverbials.
My mother is a music teacher. Music teachers need to bang their collective heads against these ridiculous regulations all the time, because one thing that music teachers do a lot of is get students to perform music, which requires obtaining performing rights, photocopying rights and so forth. She lived in almost perpetual fear of the AMCOS inspectors. At one point (she doesn't do this any more BTW), she kept her cache of photocopied music in the boot (note for Americans: trunk) of her car and only brought into the office that which was needed for that day.
Oh, and just being out of copyright doesn't necessarily help you. I don't know if you've ever read a composer's autograph, but they're often almost illegible. (I know, I edited a Bach's "Musical Offering" once. I should type it up and submit it to Mutopia.) You really need an edited and published version. But editing and publishing slaps a new copyright on that edition.
IMO, if we geeks spoke to musicians and music teachers over the insanity of copyright law, we would find a strong and vocal ally.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Sigh. Yes, I suppose the Mona Lisa is no longer covered by copyright. Unfortunatly, unless you manage to purchase Miss Mona and slap her down on a Xerox, the fact there is no copyright is really meaningless. If someone photographs or copies the Mona Lisa (which I understand is hard to do; No flash, dim lighting) copyright starts all over again.
Same goes for TV music. Say I want to sample a 1920's ragtime for a bit of house. I go out to the store, buy a copy of 'Greastest Ragtime Hits of 1921' on CD. But alas! The copyright date is 1999! Why? Somewhere along the line, an owner of the original recording did a little tweaking to it, say he transferred it from Edison Pressed Celluloid to magnetic tape, and copyright started all over. He sold the rights to his recording to someone else, who ran it through a series of filters to make it sound more lifelike, and copyright started all over again. They do the same thing with TV; Check out the copyright line on, say Rocky and Bullwinkle. It runs late at night on Cartoon Network. That's right, boys and girls, it says "Copyright 1987 Jay Ward Productions"
.sig: Now legally binding!
He bought the right, from the galleries, to photograph the paintings. He also bought the exclusive right to all future conversions of those photographs or future photographs into a digital image for public display. The gallery owns the paintings, and controls what can and cannot be done with them.
On the other hand, if I have copyright on an older photograph of the painting, I can digitize it at will. I hold copyright on that particular image, and not even Billy Boy can bitch at me.
.sig: Now legally binding!
While the OLGA network was shut down due to threats from the Harry Fox legal agency, a new incarnation of OLGA was started that is legally acceptable to both parties; the by-ear guitar tabulature of songs it contained may be posted, but they must be without the song lyrics which are copyrighted. New songs can be found at OLGA or Harmony Central.
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time, ever since I tried to arrange a Mozart sonata in middle school and found I'd have to pay through the nose for the sheet music. The great works of classical music -- just like the great novels and paintings -- are part of the world's heritage, and since their original creators are long dead, there's no reason why they shouldn't be electronically available.
But this project is important for more than just personal access to music -- it might also be very useful in academic research. I'm a medieval history major, and my professors have been raving about the availability of digitized versions of medieval texts -- you can search for a word or build a concordance in no time flat, and that's brought a number of new discoveries to light that before would just have been lost amid the thousands of parchment manuscripts.
What I wonder is whether this same effect might be seen by university music departments if something like Mutopia becomes very successful. If the entire works of J.S. Bach are available in a single library in a standard format, you could probably teach a computer to search for chord patterns, etc., and develop new ways of analyzing the score that require far less effort than just reading it through (especially for someone as prolific as Bach). If your library is big enough, you could even compare the styles of various composers and identify connections and links that before would have been entirely missed.
Of course, that would require some serious work, which means serious funding. The Mutopia "how to contribute" page talks only about music, not about cash; would there be a way to turn the project into a larger effort? This is something that universities, private charitable foundations, corporations looking for feel-good gifts, or anyone who supports the local symphony might be happy to sponsor. (And who knows? Maybe NEA would be happy to join in -- it would certainly be less controversial than Mapplethorpe photos.)
While Project Gutenberg may be too general to recieve this kind of support, a specific and research-focused project might go further than we expect.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/charities.cron/
Take a look at denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in earlier stages, but should take at least some of the bit out of composing.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Some of these artists did not record or compose in 1931 or earlier. For example, Robert Johnson recorded in 1936 and 1937. Les Paul/Mary Ford dates from the early 1950s, I believe.
The Web democratized publishing, and gazillions of people have now published the equivalent of short articles via the internet -- they're called web pages. As for full-length books, there are (see my sig) something like 150 free-as-in-beer or free-as-in speech books that I know of (not counting old public-domain books). Commercial publishers have even started making books free-as-in-beer (example).
What about music? Mutopia is doing a great job with public-domain music (does anyone understand how tedious it is to enter a long piece of complex classical music into LilyPond notation by hand, with no GUI???), but it's amazing what a wasteland the net is for music intentionally made free by living artists. I made an ill-fated attempt to create a site for free-as-in-speech music (focusing more on recent stuff). Now I made a lot of blunders, so really I just have to count this as an learning experience in how not to build an online community. But it's still just a little shocking that there's virtually no free-as-in-speech modern music on the web. (I contributed a few of my own jazz tunes, but I don't claim they're anything earthshattering.)
This is particularly pathetic because there's so much music notation software that's either free (LilyPond) or cheap (Lime).
Maybe it's just that the musicians' culture hasn't gotten hip to free information. I guess musicians are so used to getting ripped off by record companies, etc., that they are in defense mode, and won't even consider setting their music free?
The Assayer - free-information book reviews
Find free books.
70 year old music? /hot jazz club of france.
Easy.
Les Paul and his trio/ Les Paul and Mary Ford.
Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli
Gershwin, Ira and George
Berlin, Irving
Robert Johnson
Big Bill Broonzy
Blind Lemon Jefferson
and others.
all over 70 years.
In my cd player at this moment is Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Gudonov.
Either you failed at music appreciation class or were one of the poor souls who didn't bother to take it. Your loss.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Les Paul began recording in 1932. His era of biggest hits with Mary Ford, including the Les Paul Television Show, was in the 50's. So yes, you're right...
I guess I was responding to the notion that older music (even if it's as recent as the 20th century) has no value.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
American creators anticipate that their copyrights will serve as important sources of income for their children
the composer's daughter, remains extremely active in publishing and exploiting her father's music
Excuse me? I find the logic in this quote to be severly lacking. What right, exactly, is being upheld by allowing children to milk the creative efforts of their parents for profit long after their death? Who's interests are being served here?
This just proves to me that the only point of these copyright "laws" is to return our society to some sort of medieval caste system in which everything a person may hold as their own is determined by something as vaporous as "birthright". This benefits only a select few at the expense of many, and I find it reprehensible.
We are supposed to have moved beyond this sort of situation in which the undeserving yet well-born are given a leg up on everyone else. This is not fair and it is not equality. If government refuses to pass laws to promote equality amongst all peoples, then it becomes the duty of the right-thinking to violate government whim in direct opposition to their bourgeois policies.
I will continue my long crusade against all forms of copyright by utilizing Napster, Gnutella, Freenet, and any other source of revenue-harming protest I can.
From the website:
Seventy years after a composer dies, the copyright on his work expires and anyone can copy it.
Am I the only one who thinks 70 years is a ridiculous amount of time for a dead person to hold onto a copyright? Hell, what is the purpose of musical copyright in the first place?
Music, like digital information, is nothing more than a specific arrangement of a finite number of symbols. The entire concept that someone can "own" a particular grouping of symbols is at best ludicrous.
I think this is why in movies at birthday parties the kids always sing "For he's a jolly good fellow" instead of "Happy Birthday". I always wondered why they sang that, because REAL kids don't sing that. Like 2 weeks ago I learned "Happy Birthday" was still copyrighted and "For He's a Jolly Fellow" was not so they save money by using the free one. There are 2 old ladies in Cleveland who wrote it and they get royalties or something like that. These copyright laws really need to be reviewed... maybe 5 to 25 years or something... Or maybe they become public domain when the guy stops making music or something.
I'm learning to play piano (although with an electronic keyboard) but I want to learn classical music, not modern stuff. I've found a couple of sites that have downloadable scores, but not much. This site will be invaluable.
On the downside, why is everything an FTP link? I'd really like to click on a MIDI or PNG link and have it just play/show--as it is I have to download the MIDI or score and view it "manually".
Also, can anyone answer me this: I download lilypond a few weeks ago (along with a million other required packages). Finally got it all installed and lilypond just crashes. Boom, it dies. Is there a mailing list or FAQ or something?
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MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Olga was like this. . .
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Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.
Is this a troll? We're talking about the music of J.S.Bach and Mozart. It really, really, really is in the public domain. No question.
I didn't pay for my operating system either