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

[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.

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?

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...