Slashdot Mirror
Orchestra To Turn Copyright-Free Classical Scores Into Copyright-Free Music
destinyland writes "An online music site has raised over $13,000 to hire a full orchestra to record royalty-free classical music. ('"Although the actual symphonies are long out of copyright, there is separate protection for every individual performance by an orchestra," notes one technology site.') MusOpen has reached their fundraising goal for both the orchestra and a recording facility, and will now record the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky. And because their fundraising deadline doesn't end until Tuesday, they've promised to add additional recordings for every additional $1,000 raised."
Beethoven symphony! (I for one do actually welcome our new free-music-producing overlords).
Every quality song that is released to the public domain makes a future where it will be slightly more difficult for the RIAA to survive. Is there be a more noble cause anywhere on this planet?
I've been considering doing a podcast on board/card game design and music is an issue. I know there's lots of Creative Commons music out there, but who has time to go through it? With this, I can find selections of music that I already have and like, download their version, and Robert's your mother's brother.
I'm also impressed by Kickstarter. I didn't know about it until last week and I ?think it's also pretty cool.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
when they finish i hope to find another story here at /. linking to BitTorrent files to the music :)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Why aren't they doing what broadway did? They can replace the musicians with synthesizers and record MORE music to protect copyrights.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
This is great news, but that's 26 complete symphonies, probably something along the lines of 17 hours of music (at an average of 40 minutes each...that's probably a little low actually). Add in rehearsal times and I have serious doubts about the feasibility of doing this for $13,000. I wish them luck, but I'd rather have less music at a higher quality than more with an amateur-level ensemble.
Dear Sir or Madame,
I represent the estate of Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven.
We see that you have downloaded a copy of Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 by Ludwig van Beethoven from www.musopen.com. Enclosed is a bill for $500, payable immediately.
We are aware that the site you have downloaded our client's work from represents it to be "copyright-free"; however, the musicians who recorded this work did so only after listening to a copyrighted recording of our client's work. Thus, this new work is a derivative work of Mr. Beethoven's and is covered under our copyright.
regards,
H. G. Reckshun, Esq.
Dewey, Cheatham, Howe, and Reckshun
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
MusOpen has a great idea and I am glad to see them pursuing it. Since I've started buying classical music, I've found I'm getting more enjoyment per work than I ever did with popular music.
Before MusOpen, there was the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's giveaway of 10 symphonies:
http://kco.radio4.nl/index.php?lang=en
http://www.concertgebouworkest.nl/page.ocl?pageid=109&lang=en
My favorites are the Schubert, Saint-Saens, Bruckner and Beethoven.
Futurist Traditionalism
While I certainly applaud what they're doing, I just wanted to point out that classical music is generally about the quality of the performances themselves. So what orchestra are they hiring? How much practice/exposure to some of these pieces will they have? Will they be sight-reading some of them? It will be nice to have recordings out there that are free of any copyright issues, but it won't mean much if the performances are mediocre or have glaring mistakes (wrong notes, missed entrances, etc). I'm curious if anyone has asked any city/community or college orchestras if they'd be interested in releasing some of their recordings into the public domain.
Did you ever think that maybe the people involved are highly skilled professionals who are doing this for their love of the music and all time and resources are being volunteered? If that's the case, $13,000 can go a long way. To just assume that the people are cheap amateurs is ridiculously short-sighted.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Most symphony orchestras get taxpayer support. When they record, it's often subsidised by the federal government, or state and local ones. In many cases, the people who manage and broker deals for these orchestras artificially split the funding, so that all the necessary preliminaries to album sales are supposedly based on private investment/contributions. They treat it like all the practice sessions for a live performance are taxpayer subsidised, but the practice sessions for the album are paid for by private sources, so that the law is technically being observed. It's part of that whole "socialise the costs and privatise the profits" school of economics. It makes no sense as a matter of fact instead of law - does anyone really want to claim that they practiced the same piece for live performance and recording, but only put the part of that practice that was funded by one method or the other into their performances. "Yeah, I deliberately held back on that Oboe cadenza, so it didn't sound like all the practice I had contributed to my leet symphonizing skillz!".
What the federal government funds is normally held in the public trust, not subject to copyright. I know several symphony soloists and conductors who are generally uncomfortable with this legal ruse, and have heard accounts of many more. Most orchestras don't have the stature to sell a lot of recordings, and taxpayer funding generally takes any profit from CD sales into account, so it seldom benefits the performers much, if at all. It's more likely they see the same overall pay, with a shift in just when they get each check because some of it is coming as royalties after sales figures are processed. It makes bookkeeping for symphonies much more complex, and some managing directors see it as a big gamble, where they might get lucky and see really impressive sales, but doing classical music at the major orchestra level isn't gambling to most people, it's a steady job with a safe floor for income. Just like some people in rock/pop/rap/whatever become studio musicians because they want a steady paycheck instead of a high risk venture, people who shoot for a job in the second row violins for the New York Philharmonic want a reliable career instead of a 1 in 10,000 chance of a mansion with leopard skin covered volleyball courts.
Who is John Cabal?
Very few orchestras make money from recordings, and even fewer make them from recordings of public domain music. The definitive recording of Beethoven's symphonies, for example, is usually regarded as being Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, recorded in 1968 and 1972. Compare the sales of this to any other recording of Beethoven's symphonies, and you'll see a massive difference.
Orchestras make money in two ways: concerts, and commissioned recordings (like the ones in TFA). For example, last night I went to the Prom in the Park, where the BBC National Orchestra of Wales were performing. If you read Slashdot, you've probably heard them before - they recorded the them tune to Doctor Who (which they played last night just after the Stravinsky). They also played a Karl Jenkins piece, which is still very much in copyright (it's only a few years old).
It's not like people will stop writing music and they'll still want orchestras to record it. It's not like live performances will be completely replaced by recordings, either. The Prom in the Park was broadcast on the radio (and streamed online), and our contingency plan in case of rain was to listen to it in my house and have the picnic indoors. The weather was nice though, so we decided to pay the entrance fee and go and listen to it in person.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The BBC tried this in the UK with a set of free-as-in-beer Beethoven symphonies. The music industry whined about it and the typically gutless response of the BBC Trust was to promise never to do it again:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23652107-end-this-downloads-ban.do
http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/070207-NL-downloads.html
For everyone here, content is supposed to be free for the taking, yet no one wants to pay for the "creating" of it. Interesting.
Actually, 363 people want to pay for creating it. At least when I checked... More now I am sure.
There's more to a performance of an orchestral work than the employment of "a renowned orchestra". What conductor will they use? Nowadays, most of the major orchestras choose their conductors (as opposed to the opposite-way-around practice of yesteryear), but I wonder if their employment contracts will allow the conductors to do this sort of "pro-bono" work.
I'm not saying this couldn't or shouldn't happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if this issue that will comes up.
Under U.S. law, these commissioned works won't be in the public domain. There is no way to "create" a work into the public domain. Work only enters the public domain upon expiration of the copyright term. (The one way to create a work into the public domain, is that governmental works are not subject to copyright.)
What the project can do is create a contractual license that says that all-comers are granted a perpetual, non-exclusive license. Even then, presumably the resulting works would be works of joint authorship, with copyright residing in all of the authors. And under the reversion provisions of US copyright law, those orchestra members, or their families, could have the licenses terminated after about 30 years.
Pretend I said something meaningful or insightful here.
I play around with sampled music all the time because it is a lot of fun, and I CAN'T afford to hire out an orchestra just to goof around. If you want to check it out go to soundsonline.com, they are the samples I like. Very realistic. You can do some amazingly realistic performances with them too... But it is a real pain. To do so you have to spend a lot of time programming (MIDI programming, not computer programming). It requires a lot of adjusting what sample is used, the various data (modulation, expression, etc) sent to the sampler and so on. So you probably can make something that sounds convincingly real, if you spend a lot of time.
However with a musician, you just tell them what you want and they give it to you. You can say "Make it sadder," or "I need this part to be light, this part to be heavy." You can be vague and use emotional terms, and they can handle that and give you what you want.
So unless you are really skilled with your sequencer and have tons of time on your hands, you aren't going to get a highly realistic sound. I sure can't. I can get it pretty realistic, which is all I want for fooling around, but I could have something sound much better and much more like I want just by giving it to an orchestra along with some instructions. As it stands I can spend an hour choosing string samples and mixing them to try and get the sound I want, where a real strings section would take 5 minutes and get it right on.
It appears that they will be playing the core canon of classical music that all the musicians will have been learning and playing since they first picked up their instruments, thus rehearsal time will be minimised. Plopping a hired $1000 mic (or three) down on the stage (on stands) may be all that is required, unless anybody else can comment on up-to-date classical recording techniques.
Without reading TFA I would confidently predict that the recordings will be made available in (at least) high quality Ogg Vorbis, lossless CD-quality Flac and some 24/32-bit/96/192Khz format for those who can appreciate such differences. As for 'a process for disseminating' the music, many of us have been using bittorrent for the last decade. Your scenario is not 'unlikely', it is guaranteed.
And yet more assumptions are being made. If thees people are actual professionals, they don't need a lot of time rehearsing as they probably have already played these symphonies many times over. You're also making an assumption that this is going to be a 9-to-5 job, when it might actually be an evening/weekend recording session. The musicians involved might be unemployed or they might housewives/househusbands while the other member of the family brings in the money thus allowing these people to volunteer to do this. There are many people of college age who are ridiculously talented and might be able to give their time during a semester break. These are just some examples.
So, once again unless you actually know these people and can ask every one of them about their financial situation as well as get the specifics of these recording sessions, you're making wild assumptions that could very well have no basis in fact whatsoever.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I agree the life+forever extensions are too much, but most people want to leave something for their heirs and whether that's cash or stocks or property or royalties it's still money.
So why can't they leave cash or stocks or property which they earned from their job writing/composing/performing etc. just like everyone else? I don't see the families of teachers, policemen or nurses etc. continuing to get income for their family after they die because of their job (excluding retirement or life insurance which authors/composers etc could also purchase). You could argue that a work takes X years to make the money which would support a fixed term copyright of X years but dependence on the life of the creator is not justifiable.
The donations are now nearly up to $25000- that could be doubled if people vote for Musopen in Pepsi's "Refresh Project."
I thought there was an extensive library of high-quality copyright-free classical music recorded by Soviet, Eastern-bloc, and Chinese orchestras prior to 1989. None of those countries were Berne Convention signatories at the time and no copyright was ever claimed nor desired since they were "the people's" orchestras performing for the people. If I remember correctly, Muzak used to use Czech orchestral performances as they were copyright-free in the 70s and 80s. Why not use those recordings?
The difficulty is in producing the algorithm, not in its possible existence. In fact, the best algorithm we know of is a distributed system with a complex neural network in each node that can asynchronously produce a part of the sound, but keeps timing right using a simple message passing protocol.
Not to be too sarcastic, but it's called 'hiring an orchestra'. At the moment that gives you the most bang for the buck, and I don't expect the situation to progress any more quickly than AI or general purpose robots. That's not to say such progress wouldn't be exiting to this geek's mind, but I don't quite see the point of explicitly doing things the hard way when there's a ton of highly skilled musicians out there.
Anyway, the words "no matter how" are clearly too strong, but I'd say you can tack on "for the foreseeable future" at the end.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
You can't put going to a concert, classical or modern in a CD! The music might be there, but this is only a small part of it.
The audience participates, the sights, the vibrations. All of the things making it worth going. Performers so dead they are like playing a CD are no performers at all.
1.) They're planning to hire the London Symphony Orchestra. Would you call them a "pick-up player"?
... but for those /.ers who want to support the project in a way besides direct donation, there is the PepsiRefresh program, where they can vote for the project to receive $25,000 in funding.
/. editors see this, please, please add the PepsiRefresh link to the article summary!
2.) Many people from Slashdot have donated, more than doubling the amount of money raised since of the time of this article's posting.
If any
'Where can I buy a 50 year old CD?'
This actually raises an interesting point. Obviously the out of copyright material on modern reissues has been digitally remastered for CD from analogue sources. Sometimes (especially for older recordings) extensive audio restoration is also required, a process that can involve a great deal of skill and musical judgment (i.e., you don't just hook up your turntable to Audacity and hit 'record'). Is this sufficient to create a new copyright for the digital version? Perhaps not, but the legal situation is apparently not entirely clear:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9lTosTfacJYJ:www.tknet.co.uk/soundrec.htm
http://www.freeculture.org.uk/copyright/faq#Doyougetanewcopyrightfordigitalremastering.3F
So in a couple of years when the Beatles' recordings will start to come out of copyright if EU law remains the same, would it be OK to rip the recent remasters and put them up on your website, or would you have to go back to the vinyl and do a 'needledrop' transfer..?
Yes but Im not asking you to compare champagnes, I'm asking to produce something we can all drink for free :)
They will imbue their performance with some level of emotion. Computers can't do that.
Not true. If there is some characteristic of the music that you can hear, then it is a modification of the pressure wave that reaches your ear. If it's a matter of changing the waveform, then computers absolutely CAN do it.
I admit that it would take a lot of research to discover what we perceive as "emotion" in the music, but if it's there then it can be emulated. However, let's admit right out of the gate that if you played Piece A to an audiophile and told him it was humans, then Piece A again and told him it was machines, guess which one he'll hear the "emotion" in!