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?"

Comments

Transacting the undefined

[Empiric]

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

[DonkeyJimmy]

Our categories such as "music", "noise", "data", "spam" are fundamentally perceptual definitions.

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 a base definition, like the above, is neither fundamentally perceptual nor difficult to come by.

Definitions are not so much factual things as they are agreed upon things. You can define cheese as milk and it will be true, that is the nature of language. The goal of a definition should be to have one that is useful, consistent, and fits current (local) public use as best as possible.

Music can also be defined, and that is exactly what this question asks. Not so much what a good human definition of music is, but what a good legal definition of music is. Obviously music is not yet rigidly defined and so it was a mistake to use it in compulsory licensing schemes, which is why your final point hits correct.

If I had to define music legally (which is not nearly as easy as spam), I would define it as any sound structured to be music purposefully. So yeah, by my definition it's a loophole to burn porn images into sound as long as the encryption algorithm has some kind of purposeful musical content to it. I guess they should change the system.

Re:Transacting the undefined

[sustik]

There is one interesting property of music that I read about. This is in no way can classify music since the property shows up in other places but still it is 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 beat rhytm. (The heart changes its rhytm 'randomly' to 'see' whether the faster/slower rate fits the environment better. People who have heart rates ticking always the same rhytm like a metronom have trouble sleeping or running up stairs.)

* if we plot the water level of the Nile on a daily/hourly(?) basis the sequence shows the same signature. (Some adjustment might be necessary because of the tide.)

* earthquake intensity and frequency shows the same 1/f signature for not huge earthquakes. (Huge earthquakes are more frequent than they would be expected by the formula. Oops.)

* if you put a sand pyramid on the platform of a scale and drop very small amount of sand on the top of it continously, then sand will slide off the scale on different amounts. (Every once in a while a landslide will happen.) If you take the scale reading during the experiment the sequence has 1/f signature.

It seems 1/f is present in the nature and is captured by humens through music as well.

Music is Music

[Vaevictis666]

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...

RNA as music for an example

[killthiskid]

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.

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was made to be listened to by a human ear and only by a human ear, it's music.

If the end consumer is a computer, it's not music.

Concealing Code

[tds67]

What a great way to exchange code that violates laws against decrypting encryption schemes...turn it into sound, post it on a website for downloading, and reconvert it back to code at the other end!

Technically, you're not distributing this code, are you?

On a side note.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

PHP

[suso]

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

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

[synaptik]

...compression increases entropy. Listen to this wav file of a Windows BMP file, and the corresponding wav file for the GIF version. The former has definite periods of high and low tones, but the latter sounds like white noise!

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

[turnstyle]

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...

Re:Well, IMHO

[mugnyte]

I disagree.

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.

SO, once the info is released, it's free. Before releasing the info, you have to collect. Just like before the show, you have to pay. This is the premise of this article. A pool is collected and then doled out. The article argues that discimination by type of digital information is useless. Size, quality, format are all vaporous. Ok, so thats just part of the new paradigm.

Collection has to be based on our first metric: Tracking the consumers of the information. Since it is impossible for the technology to get tracked to the individual, we build classes of users. Mandatory license fees for computers, CD writers, CDs, network cards, connections, bandwidth, etc. all try to classify the consumers into contributors for this pool. A corporation setup that Labels, manufacturers, retailers join and pay into based on their sales numbers. It is a license fee for participating in the flow of digital information.

Why? NOT because people do not want to pay for the information on an as-needed basis, but because the technology doesn't ensure it any longer. Even those who play by the rules and buy CDs can't put the genie back in the bottle. This is a "fault" of any type of user, it's simply the fact that the tools cannot be ignored. If all P2Ps were shut down tomorrow, more would take their place. Low-band types of copying would still happen (copying parties, ripping, trades, email, web, etc). We're going to do what we can get away with, simply put. Better to work with that premise than against it using a method larger than the medium - by going to brick and mortar you encompass the digital arena and get to real people.

A second metric needs to track the information "presence". This is already done using very shaky sampling: radio hit lists, TV ratings, poll companies. The public realizes the money is going somewhere, so they just vote it to their favorite target. With a good sample set, this system works.

There will have to be at least one legal entity for this. I don't approve of the government doing much more than enforcement of the fee structure. So, I can imagine at least one company that implements several polling techniques to gather these metrics and selling them as a service (think Neilsen Ratings of TV).

Then, this pool is given to the artists, or the entities they've signed to represent them (yes, a label, shudder to think). The meat is devoured amongst these entities, much as today. However, the accounting is top down instead of bottom up, much as any large business pays for itself with divisions.

Until such a system, or something similar, is put in place, we're headed into years of burned CDs, memory cards of copied music, movies, photos, books, etc. The content creators will persecute only the inept obvious within the pirating world. The savvy will continue to copy info at their leisure. This is how we've arrived at smuggling in the physical world, but it doesn't need to repeat itself in the digital world.

mug

Frank Zappa

[thedbp]

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.