Slashdot Mirror
Project To Turn Classical Scores Into Copyright-Free Music Completed
yourlord writes "Just under two years ago Musopen launched a Kickstarter campaign covered here on Slashdot. Today that project is complete with the release of a large amount of classical recordings into the public domain. This brings an extensive collection of high quality classical music into the public domain. The project music is hosted on the Musopen site, and on archive.org."
I invested in this. Great idea to set music free. Enjoy the downloads.
Do anything, anywhere, anytime.
Fantastic. Now let's do it again until more classical works are liberated. And visit their "donate" button.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The great weakness with this is that the value of sheet music is in the edition. Just as books benefit from a good editor, so does music.
My girlfriend has a music degree, and is an accomplished teacher of piano. She pulls her hair out whenever a student shows up with something downloaded from the Internet, or even worse, one of those oddball cheap Chinese editions. How the music is edited really does affect how it is played.
Aside from that, it's weird that the music listings aren't by composer. Do these folks not know how many "String Quartets in C major" have been written?
Three Squirrels
I thought the recording industry had definitively proved that if you didn't assert copyrights, there was no possible way for the starving artists* to be compensated for their hard work, and it would spell the end of recorded music?
* all artists are starving. That's why they look good in music videos.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Unfortunately, Musopen provided the content in Apple lossless format instead of a widely used, open, non-patent-encumbered format such as FLAC. Plus, the official torrent contains a single gigantic zip file.
There is a torrent containing all 145 separate tracks in FLAC format here:
http://pirateproxy.net/torrent/7536456/2012_Musopen_Kickstarter_Project_[FLAC]
the torrent link is: http://archive.org/download/musopen-lossless-dvd/musopen-lossless-dvd_archive.torrent
If you browse the music by composer, the list starts with Dvorak, Antonin... then Albaniz, Isaac and all the composers whose last names start with A... then Bach and the Bs... Chaliapin and the Cs... It looks familiar but not quite what we're accustomed to... like something is slightly off. Whoever created the list must have been using a Dvorak keyboard!
Nothing puts me in the right frame of mind for some serious coding than classical music. Can't wait to check this one out.
Different strokes for different folks. I prefer video game music and VG remixes, eg: Stuff from Rainwave and OCR.
Sometimes just environmental electro. I "graduated" from classical when I was a teen, just got burned out on the same tunes and themes.
One thing I have found is that few coders I know prefer lyrics in their programming music...
Oh, and before you think I've abandoned that great orchestral sound altogether, right now I'm listening to the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Andrew Skeet: Legend of Zelda: Suite
May the Triforce be with you.
Wow, I take it back. Some of this music is pretty awful. A good MIDI performance expert could do better. Oh god, listen to the french horn in the 2nd promenade in Pictures at an Exhibition. Oh, and the violins at the end of that. Shiver. Ouch. Damn.
A number of people seem to be confusing the overall musopen library with the recently completed project.
Musopen has been around for some time collecting non-copyrighted performances of various classic works from whatever source was available. For example, you'll note from the musopen page that the Pictures at an Exhibition was performed by the Skidmore College Orchestra.
The Kickstarter project musopen undertook was to professionally record a few of the classics. On the Musopen site, you'll see "Musopen Symphony Orchestra" listed as the performer -- those pieces are listed here: http://musopen.org/music/by/performer/Musopen-Symphony-Orchestra
Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."
Reading the criticisms levied against the site is like listening to those two elderly women who just like to complain: "Boy, the music at this place is really terrible." "Yeah, I know; and there isn't nearly enough of it!"
I think quantity needed to be more important than quality for this project. Sure, they need to have a minimum standard of quality, but the idea was to free as much music as possible. Some kid somewhere in the world would never have heard this music because he's not going to pay $1.29 for some music he's never heard (that they're not playing on the radio) and the sheet music isn't exactly jumping off the page to ensnare his imagination. However, something that's well-written and decently-performed on this site may get his attention and maybe someday he'll perform a better version and give back to us all. But that won't ever happen if he never hears it. That first exposure is key.
The first time I heard Scheherazade it was in a movie (The Man With One Red Shoe). I didn't know what it was, but it got my attention. I was about seven. Years later I came across it again as a track that was tacked onto a $3 budget classical CD, and it got my attention again. I suggested it to the orchestra director in my high school and hundreds of people got to hear it. It's all about the exposure.
If you want to be a snob about the quality, go pay for a performance and share it with the rest of us so we won't have to live our lives not knowing what good music sounds like. Frankly, I prefer the Scheherazade recording on that budget CD to any I've found on iTunes. The first performance of a piece is often the one you like best, because it's the one you fell in love with. I have a very old recording of Stokowski and the NY Philharmonic performing Stravinsky's Firebird suite that is full of hiss and crackle, but I prefer it over a clean-sounding recording of Bernstein and the Israel Philharmonic performing the same piece. Bernstein's performance, which is well-done, just doesn't sound urgent enough to me because I heard Stokowski's first. Perhaps what you're really concerned about is the possibility that the masses may come to prefer a version other than what you like.
There's still a lot to be added, so go ahead and donate. Sure, they've got Stravinsky's Firebird, but not The Rite of Spring. The Rite of Spring was so radical and jarring to the ears of the "more cultured representatives of society" at its 1913 premiere in Paris that the audience began yelling so loudly no one could hear the music. Eventually the scene devolved into chairs being thrown and fires set. So go ahead, throw your chairs at this new site in disgust because it doesn't agree with your notion of how the music should sound. The music that stripped away the cultured veneer of those Parisans is worth hearing, and a public domain music site that so-ruffled the feathers of the "free-as-in-beer" and "information wants to be free" slashdot crowd is worth visiting.
It is really good to have music in the free. But it could be organized better. I tired to search for "Locatelli", a baroque composer I know a little about. The first hit found a "piece" with a headline "Battista, Locatelli & J.S Bach - Concetos". What passes for a comment for the music is some details about Vivaldi's life, and under that is a composer Bio, also of Vivaldi. The "piece" consists of four parts, starting with a Concerto Grosso by Vivaldi, followed by Pergolesi, something by Bach, and finally a single movement of a Locatelli concerto. Last there is a fact box that lists Vivaldi as the composer, and fails to mention anything about the performer or period...
In Murphy We Turst
http://www.blockmrecords.org/bach/ Played by James Kibbie, and as a quote from the website: "This project is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, with generous support from Dr. Barbara Furin Sloat in honor of J. Barry Sloat, and with additional support from the Office of Vice-President for Research, the University of Michigan."
Yet another poster who has not understood what Musopen does or what this Kickstarter was. Pictures at an Exhibition was not recorded as part of this project. In fact it was freely contributed to Musopen by an amateur orchestra.
Didn't it tip you off that a lot of the music on Musopen actually are midi performances? Anyone can contribute!
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Sound editors aren't magic, you can't take a bad performance and make it great, and you can't edit out systemic noise like wow and flutter from a tape. You also can't edit out a sound from under another sound, without major audible artifacts.
What a big label would do is go and use better quality equipment to record the track. It isn't even that expensive these days. Then they would record multiple takes as necessary and edit those together.
Hell forget big labels, this is what a university recording studio would do. It is not too much to ask that if the idea is to get "open" replacements to professional music that a professional job of it is done.
I'd like to add that the Musopen Symphony Orchestra is, in essence, the Czech National Sympony Orchestra. They're a very solid commercial symphony orchestra (i.e, mostly playing for films and commissioned concerts, as opposed to being attached to an institution or subscription program).
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Perhaps we can now start a project to match new popular music against this database, and figure out that all new music is just a shameless copy/basic rewrite of existing classical music.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
MusOpen is for music recordings, not sheet music.
No.
Musopen provides sheet music and recordings.
IMSLP provides sheet music and recordings.
From the database size it seems that IMSLP has more sheet music and more recordings than Musopen.
From a IMSLP board message http://imslpforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=840 I conclude that Musopen was founded in a response to a temporary shutdown of IMSLP for almost a year in 2007. When IMSLP re-opened, Musopen didn't shutdown but continued their own platform.
Did you actually LEARN anything about politics, laws, and public debates?
Yes, and after looking at the political action committees who determine who is allowed to actually get elected, I've determined that politics is controlled by the old-boys club. "After having considered your proposal, we have concluded that it is not in line with our current business goals."
A) look to find concerts elsewhere that allow 18+
Please see my reply to RaceProUK's comment above.
B) petition the business or local township to allow 18+ at concerts. Signatures on a petition like that turn into dollar bills when thrown in front of a business owner as they stare at all that lost revenue.
Not necessarily. In order for the state not to classify the establishment as a "bar", the venue would have to prepare and sell a lot more food. A lot of these venues make so much money from selling alcoholic beverages that it would exceed the marginal revenue from selling tickets to people not of drinking age.
If the musician won't listen to the fans, why should the fans support the musician? After all, ultimately it's the fans that may the musician's wages.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
To everyone posting here, thank you all for the donations and thoughts. It was a long and challenging project but I am very proud of the end result. I'm considering a second project, if anyone is interested in hearing about it in the next couple of weeks, please make sure to follow us on Twitter/FB/our blog etc: https://twitter.com/ajdunn83 or /musopen or
our blog at blog.musopen.org
Thanks again,
Aaron Dunn
Musopen.org