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Can There Be Open Source Music?
Lemeowski writes "Cygnus Solutions co-founder Michael Tiemann takes an in-depth look at whether music can truly ever be open source. Leaning on his personal experiences of trying to convince the market that a company that provided commercial support for free software could be successful, Tiemann argues that similar to how 'the future of software was actually waiting for the fuller participation of users ... so, too, is the future of the art of music.' In his essay, Tiemann makes a case for open source music, from licensing for quality recordings to sheet music with notes from the original composer in an easy-to-reuse format, and he offers ways to get involved in making music open source."
Apropos open source music, reader rDouglass adds a link to the Open Goldberg Variations project, last mentioned on Slashdot in 2012.
It's called "Traditional" or "folk music".
It's open source by nature, the source is in your brain, you just need to learn enough theory and gain enough hearing skills to be able to reverse engineer it yourself.
With many ears, all bugs are shallow.
Make your own. :D
It seems to me that music for which a written score exists is open source by definition, the score being the "source code" for the music. I'm not sure what notes from the original composer is supposed to entail these days. Back in the old days composers would include notes on how the music is to be played, but we have audio recordings for that now.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yes, yes there can. Have you never been to ocremix.org? It has been around for approximately forever.
Of course there can be open source music. The proper question is, of course, can there be good open source music?
You'll only hear the cool intro, without the bass line because that's still in development, and only the first two verses are written. There should be some updates by the end of the year but we're not promising anything. The drum track is done with crappy open-source drum software but we're totally gonna get someone to record it for real as soon as we scrape together $50 to pay a drooler, I mean drummer. If you complain about the missing parts you'll just get yelled at for not making it yourself by teaching yourself to play the guitar.
All music for all time was open source.
They only attempted the "proprietary" model in the last 100 years or so and it was a complete disaster!
Happy Birthday to yoaskj;lahsdfahsdfoaudsh (is dragged off by copyright police)
The Lilypond application has easy notation (at basic level), a good open source community, and can output both to nice printed sheetsheet music/pdfs and playable midi files. Lilypond is a great start in composing for people at least vaguely familiar with music notation and open source software.Â
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
People in fine arts on average earn far less than the average techie, so you know what? Stop trying to foist your "free" philosophy on everyone. It's disingenuous to suggest that art should be free (or even cheap) when you're pulling in $100k securing networks against people who would use them for free.
I led the effort within Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) to make radio history in 2012 when WPR broadcast the entire Open Goldberg Variations recording on air while simultaneously broadcasting the score on the Web. I think public media would provide a particularly good "home" for this kind of music. I'm fascinated by the idea of "open source music" and I've shared my thoughts about it on my blog, in various posts, such as: Public Music for Public Media: An Introduction, Open-Source Music: 10 More Reasons Why It Fits, and On the Role of Open-Source Music Scores.
Just ask Vanilla Ice.
Open source isn't just free copying. That's just permissive licensing. The real power of open source is the ability to modify and share those modifications. That's always been the case in music.
See jazz.
See folk.
See hip-hop.
See country.
See blues.
See...
The Creative Commons license is perfect for this.
http://creativecommons.org/
BTW, I think Pearl Jam released one of their videos under a Creative Commons license, allowing fans to alter, re-cut, modify it to their hearts' content.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
also this is the shittiest topic i've ever seen seems any arbitrary thing can make /. if you just try to add open source to the title.
If I am in a small crowd that is listening to a musical performance and I let out a cough that the other audience members can hear, could I consider myself a closed-source music hacker?
There are a lot of people out there that make music and supply the full midi or even fruityloops save file for it to be used by anyone for any reason. There are websites dedicated to public domain music. There's open source just about anything, just don't expect the highest quality work for anything that is open source but some people are passionate about providing for the community.
It's called Royalty Free. There is complete music, loops, tracks, and sweetners, all of which you can mix with your own to make entirely new music. Lot's of artist have been doing it for decades.
Music is composed of notes that anyone is already free to assemble as they please.
And then someone will "scratch their itch" and finish the song and write the rest of the lyrics just before the "Official Version" finally comes out with a complete yet inferior product. I will write music when I can get an Emacs plugin for it.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Creative Commons is functionally similar to Open Source in every respect.
My own music, poor and sickly as it is, is available for anyone to use, perform, re-arrange, or modify. I require no payment and grant blanket permission IF you give attribution, are using it non-commercially, and license derivative works in like manner. If you want to use it commercially or change the license terms, etc, then I do require you to ask permission. That's reasonable... I think if you want to treat your contribution in a traditional manner, then you should have to abide by those rules yourself. But CC licenses are varied, and may waive terms like reciprocity, making them more like a BSD license. Some might waive a non-commercial clause, making it more like the GPL.
A lot of vastly better artists than me (like Jonathan Coulton) also license some or all of their work under Creative Commons. Some gifted amateurs get together and hold competitions in which they share and build on each others' work... like SpinTunes, or "Frankensong" events. You'll find many of them on Bandcamp.com, where you can often set your own price for music.
These days I'll buy from independent artists FAR more frequently than from "the labels". I like the Creative Commons, and support it financially.
Could we submit a patch for Avenged Sevenfold's new album? They got confused and think they are Metallica. What's the equivalent of "FTFY" in music?
Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails fame) is composing and releasing open-source music: http://www.ninremixes.com/multitracks.php. Think of it like folk music, but with Garageband files and way more synth.
People in fine arts on average earn far less than the average techie, so you know what? Stop trying to foist your "free" philosophy on everyone.
They knew (or should have known) that when then they took up fine arts as a profession. Nobody is entitled to make a living from art just because they think they should. They have to earn it the same as anyone else.
It's disingenuous to suggest that art should be free (or even cheap) when you're pulling in $100k securing networks against people who would use them for free.
Who said it had to be free as in beer? What is being discussed here is whether it should be free as in speech. I have no problem at all with someone making lots of money from their art. What I DO have a problem with is the artist and their descendants have a perpetual income from those works. Copyright is supposed to be for a LIMITED time and there certainly is no justifiable reason why the copyright should extend beyond the time required to settle the estate of the artist.
If someone is willing to put something resembling an open source license on an artistic work then good for them. They are contributing to the betterment of society by doing so by encouraging more creative works.
Perhaps rather than helping others to give their music away, Tiemann needs to lead the way creating his own open source music and let others follow.
Can I get someone to help debug my music source?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsMidi
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
stop calling every fucking thing open source. ..and btw, "open source" music has been around since forever
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file
or just endless forks of each other, never truly heartfelt, never truly satisfying?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Let us know how it goes.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Even without the source (e.g. sheet music) someone with an experienced ear can transcribe it from a recording. So it is more like JavaScript or HTML on web pages -- everyone can read it and copy it but it still may be under some copyright or whatever -- but if you make it slightly different you're probably okay.
Virually all music is the product of music that came before it, in some way or another. It is a product of listening to other's music, resynthesizing the sounds that come from a lifetime of listening. Like software, there's certainly a grey area between inspiration and theft, which has been certainly perverted by the business side of music, but it was perfectly acceptable among classical composers to base works entirely off other's work. Whether you are a composer or a consumer, music is fairly dependent on memories of other music, of note patterns and sounds that evoke certain emotions, either intrinsic to the music or feelings & emotions related to the first time you've ever heard it or a similar piece of music. Without the strong connection between memory and music, I believe music would mean nothing to human beings. There's no doubt that Queen, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin made intrinsically great music, but the strongest feelings while listening to this music probably comes from your own associated memories & emotions upon first hearing or attending your first concert. It's also particularly powerful when it evokes memories or emotions that lie forgotten for years. Royksopp and Daft Punk have done quite well taking music that surrounded many of us as children and recycle it with a modern sound. This is also why there so many god-awful hip-hop remakes of 70's classics appearing now..
Isn't sampling considered open source?
What's the difference between Open Source music and music that's in the public domain?
Do you really need to create a licensing scheme for some piece of music that you just give away an audio recording with the accompanying sheet music?
What's next Open Source recipes?
lalala la la lalalala la
done.
free as in beer, anyone is welcome to it
I run OpenGameArt.org, and we host a lot of creative commons licensed music. This is a topic that comes up fairly frequently, and the answer short answer is that, yes, music can be open source. The long answer is of course a bit more complicated than that.
For something to be "open source", this means that you need some sort of preferred source format that's easy to modify. In the case of people composing sheet music, that answer is easy. You provide the sheet music, or some open file type that saves note information (generally a midi file). There are a couple of cases where it's a lot more complicated.
Improvised music
What is the preferred, easy to modify source format for improvisation? The only possible answer is a recording, but recordings are *not* easy to modify in ways that are musically meaningful and still maintain the integrity of the original recording. Of course, this is Slashdot, so some pedant will of course point out that you can get a wav editor and lengthen and change the pitch of notes yourself, but this requires a lot of effort to make it sound good, and if the recording is of multiple notes being played at once, you're essentially out of luck unless you happen to have access to some very expensive, closed-source software, and even then, the results aren't going to be perfect. We could simply stop accepting recordings and start insisting on sheet music, but the only thing that really does is close out submissions of improvised music -- it doesn't increase the amount of "source" available. (Whereas, if you write a program, there's a very good chance that you have access to your source code.)
Musical Instruments
The other problem with a Midi file (and regular sheet music) is that, while it provides instructions for playing a piece of music, it doesn't give you a means of duplicating a performance exactly. For instance, if someone with thousands of dollars worth of proprietary audio software, sound samples, and production equipment produces a midi file of an orchestra, it's going to sounds pretty damn good. Give the sheet music to a conductor of an orchestra, and it's gong to sound amazing. Give the midi file to a random person with a computer and it's going to sound like it's being played on a gameboy. Point is, sheet music and midi files are not complete means of reproducing a performance exactly, whereas computer code is a complete way of reproducing a binary.
So yeah, shoehorning music into the "open source" mold isn't completely trivial, because music isn't completely analogous to software. On the other hand, the problems aren't so insurmountable that it would be impossible to consider certain music to be "open source", particularly if you loosen the definition a bit with respect to music and musical performances.
The business model works already; there are scores of musical instrument manufacturers who sell hardware designed for an open source implementation of music.
Cultural ubiquity is so high, it should be considered to have lost all copyright.
That argument could be used to deny protection to any performance or work of art that has met with broad popular acceptance in less than one week.
Music is sound and sound is in nature so if you want to see it that way, it should be free but not the arrangements.
sounds interesting. i tried playing with MODs / impulse tracker, but i never did finish my song.
anyways, thanks for posting the links
Give the sheet music to a conductor of an orchestra, and it's gong to sound amazing.
I agree, nothing livens up a performance like a good gong hit. For example, a friend of mine who's a Catholic organist was in the Vatican attending the Papal Mass, and was sitting near the front. The priests come over and smack the gong really loudly, so startling my buddy that he exclaimed "Holy shit!"
I am officially gone from
A better question would be, "Can there be closed source music?" I can't imagine how there could be. If you want sheet music for a particular recording, you can just transcribe it. imslp.org has copious amounts of public domain sheetmusic available for download, so access isn't even a problem for the classical tradition that TFA is discussing. TFA is a slashvertisement for a recording by Kimiko Ishizaka, and is using open source as an advertising buzzword. Nobody is "liberating" Bach's "source code." Bach's sheetmusic is in the public domain; you can download a whole bunch of different versions of it from all kinds of places. Anyone who knows how to play the piano can make a recording of it; this has been true since recordings existed. There are a lot of websites that host recordings of public domain classical music, such as pianosociety.com. Nothing new is happening here, and it does not have anything to do with "open source." Someone is making another recording of the Goldberg Variations, and is also releasing another public domain version of the sheet music. You can hear my "open source" recording of the Aria from the Goldberg Variations here: http://recitals.pianoworld.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Coldsalmon along with a whole bunch of other "open source" recordings.
CASH Music is an entire open source platform designed to support independent musicians, many of whom are adopting and Creative Commons model. Worth checking out and supporting. http://cashmusic.org/
Very few works of art have reached the cultural saturation Happy Birthday has.
Good-bye
The other problem with a Midi file (and regular sheet music) is that, while it provides instructions for playing a piece of music, it doesn't give you a means of duplicating a performance exactly.
That's a different problem. Sheet music (or MIDI) is like source code, whereas a performance is like a compiled executable. There are many tools that work well for source but which don't for executables (e.g., version control systems like git or svn) so we should not be surprised when not all concepts work perfectly for music either. Indeed, the purpose of open source music has got to first be to allow others to create their own performances from the "source", and secondly to allow others to create their own derived "source".
What's more, I can assure you that not all "performances" of programs — compilations into executable programs — are the same. Even with the exact same codebase, picking a different compiler (i.e., a different instrument) can make significant differences to the quality of the results. (I have source code where one compiler produces a resulting executable that goes more than twice as fast as output produced by another compiler, despite everything else being the same in every respect.) This does not invalidate the idea of open source. It just shows that things are never as straightforward as you might hope, and that there really are some interesting analogies. Yet music is still not the same thing as computer programs; we shouldn't expect perfection in our analogies.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
...at least, algorithmic composition: SuperCollider
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
That is roughly what I said, except perhaps for what you said about compilers, which, while technically true, doesn't really detract much from my point. If you compile the same code with the same version of GCC running on the same operating system and the same architecture, you will get the same result, every time. This is doable for a normal person. Playing a song on the exact same set of instruments as the original recording is *not* doable for a normal person, if you even have the resources to get access to those instruments *at all*. Even if you do, and you have the exact same musicians playing the exact same notes, it's *still* not going to be exactly the same.
I didn't feel like writing a whole paragraph about that, so I simplified it... but once again, this is Slashdot.
So how is a musician going to make a living in music? Would you ask your doctor to be open source? Would you ask him to operate "for the door? Would you ask you mechanic to work on your car "for exposure"? Do you expect people to give money to musicians out of sheer appreciation? Let me tell you from experience - this does not happen. I have yet to compose and record a sound track that I was paid for out of the goodness of the client' hearts. My wife has several CDs out, performances done on camera, and she needs the royalties from singing, composing, publishing, recording, rights to the master, re- use, etc., to live off of. Let me ask this question, then - why are musicians held to a different standards than doctors, teachers, workers, etc., who expect to get paid for what they do? Would you guys code / IT for free? Of course not.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
If you use csound you have both the "orchestra" and the "score" in one text file, so with csound compositions yes you can have open source music.
Considering copyright has been around for less than one percent of the time that music has, I think it's safe to say:
WTF is wrong with people that this is even a question to be taken seriously?!?
There's something dystopian about the current state of discourse. It's like the bar scene in Cherry 2000 where men and women all have lawyers present to negotiate a one-night stand. They would probably ask: "Is open-source sex possible?"
And that's where we're at with music.
:(
He is one of the greatest unsung heroes of our time, and ironically he has music on his mind.
Most intruments make a single sound with varying pitches. The human voice can alter sound and pitch.,/quote> Trumpet and electric guitar approach this. A trumpet has a "mute", a filter that affects the timbre of the sound coming out of the instrument. Some, such as the Harmon wah-wah mute, can be controlled while the instrument is played. Likewise, an electric guitar has a "wah-wah pedal", a crude pedal-controlled parametric equalizer that was inspired by the Harmon mute.
There are plenty of music formats that contain both the wavetable and the score, dating all the way back to Amiga MOD files (and likely even before then). That being said, you can't just magically convert a recording of a live performance into one of those files.
My point is that yes, of course you can have open source music, but the the analogy doesn't hold perfectly in all cases.
Nothing prevents other people (those not stupid enough to sign away all their copyrights to a record label) from placing their musical creations in the public domain
Other than that FM radio won't play your music unless you're "stupid enough to sign away all [your] copyrights to a record label", and not all of your listeners have hundreds of dollars per year for a data plan to listen to Internet radio on the commute. Labels do at least some level of curation and promotion, a service on which mainstream DJs rely.
Given the well-known copyright assertion and lobbying practices of the current owner of Lucasfilm, yes, you will get sued if you start distributing copies of a musical composition owned by Lucasfilm.
There's no reason for those two programs I wrote in 1983 to still be covered
One solution to this is to release your work under a time-delayed open source license. Monty's "business source" license and the Founders Copyright arrangement are examples.
Pro-tip: It is limited and is not perpetual.
How is a limited copyright term that is legislatively extended by about 20 years every 20 years (cf. Copyright Act of 1976 and Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998) any different from a perpetual copyright in practice? If no further extension is enacted before 2025, I'll agree with you, but until then, it smells to me like the Congress is pulling an end-run around constitutionally "limited Times" by enacting perpetual copyright on the installment plan.
Try to open up a musical project from few years back, that was created with a multitude of commercial software and plugins.
Now you know why I compose in ModPlug Tracker. S3M, XM, and IT aren't going anywhere any time soon.
Considering copyright has been around for less than one percent of the time that music has
The world population in the era of copyright happens to be far greater than the world population prior to the enactment of the Statute of Anne in the early 1700s. How many people's lives has copyright been around for?
It's like the bar scene in Cherry 2000 where men and women all have lawyers present to negotiate a one-night stand.
That would likely be the consequence if rape law was made tougher.
Public domain is not open source, that's not what this article is talking about. And GPL as it is makes no sense to apply to music, because then you have to re-define words like "binary" and "source" for it to even be applicable. In a legal document, which the GPL is, you just don't do that kind of shit. You have to say what you mean, or it's unenforceable. And by the time you re-defined everything, you have re-created Creative Commons in a much more verbose way and deserve to be cock-punched (or kicked in the box if that's your anatomy)
It sounds like the author has not heard of Creative Commons, but there is one mention of it ("bring together the ideas of the Creative Commons and open source to create a new, sustainable future for music"), and the article is licensed as CC. What it actually is, is someone who is unable to write a coherent thesis, mixing terms and concepts that don't make any sense together except metaphorically.
The core of the article seems to be about applying ideas that Glenn Gould put forward in 1966 to today's music. This is already taken care of by CC licensing. Kanye West, Peter Gabriel, Radiohead, and others have already allowed people to do most of this, legally.
The closest to true "open source" is Chapel Club, a band that I've never heard about and don't really care to after reading that article.
That was Nov. 2012, pretty much a year ago now. Kanye was in 2008. The example given is Open Goldberg Variations, which is Creative Commons licensed, which is different from open source (conceptually the same but the terms are different). Apparently some or all of it is now Commons Zero, basically public domain. So if there is already a name for this, and a license permitting it, what is the point of this article?
Can there be open source music? Let's all just say no, it doesn't make sense to stretch the idea of "source code" which, thanks to court cases like the SCO debacle, already have a well defined meaning (legally I mean).
I'm not a lawyer, but I see no way the vast majority of tracks on OCRemix are technically anything but infringing derivative works of video games.
Isn't sampling considered open source?
Not in practice, because if a musical work or sound recording is recognizable enough to sample, its copyright owner forbids any sampling without advance negotiation.
If you compile the same code with the same version of GCC running on the same operating system and the same architecture, you will get the same result, every time.
Gentoo users who tune their compiler flags would beg to differ. (Add "same compiler flags" and I see your point though.) Besides, in a rolling-update distribution, you don't have "the same version of GCC" for very long.
if you even have the resources to get access to those instruments *at all*.
The analog here would be $6000 ARM or Green Hills compilers.
We could simply stop accepting recordings and start insisting on sheet music, but the only thing that really does is close out submissions of improvised music -- it doesn't increase the amount of "source" available.
One thing you could try is using a pitch detection algorithm to come up with a notated approximation. If Auto-Tune can recognize what notes T-Pain is trying to sing, and if your phone's GSM speech encoder can compress your voice into fewer bits, a similar pitch detector can recognize what notes your musician improvised, provided the instrument was miked in a way that reasonably isolates a solo performance from other band members' instruments. So you could stop accepting fully mixed improvised recordings and insist on multitrack masters and reward someone else for notating it.
Give the midi file to a random person with a computer and it's going to sound like it's being played on a gameboy.
Which Game Boy? The Game Boy Advance is capable of playing an orchestral recording. I even wrote a music player app for it back when I was in the GBA homebrew scene. There's a huge difference in capability between a Game Boy Color, which compares to a Nintendo Entertainment System, and a Game Boy Advance, which compares to a PC with an old 8-bit stereo Sound Blaster.
It's called folk music.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
The other problem with a Midi file (and regular sheet music) is that, while it provides instructions for playing a piece of music, it doesn't give you a means of duplicating a performance exactly. For instance, if someone with thousands of dollars worth of proprietary audio software, sound samples, and production equipment produces a midi file of an orchestra, it's going to sounds pretty damn good. Give the sheet music to a conductor of an orchestra, and it's gong to sound amazing. Give the midi file to a random person with a computer and it's going to sound like it's being played on a gameboy.
Occasionally I've pondered releasing the MIDI (or Rosegarden) files for some of my songs, and that's one of the reasons I've balked at it - you need to have a fairly good grasp of MIDI to be able to play it back at all. Most MIDI files you find on the 'net are GM standard, with 128 preset instruments which will play back more-or-less the same on any GM-compatible device.
That works for the music in DOOM, but it all goes out the window once you start writing MIDI files for a Korg Triton EX on one interface, Hammond Organ clone on another, a digital mellotron clone daisy-chained to that, and on the other interface a bunch of analogue polysynths and a monosynth with custom patches, filter sweeps on the controller usually used for changing the MIDI bank, and a pitch bend wheel that spans two octaves. With a bit of effort you could map it to GM (assuming you're not doing minimoog solos which depend on monophonic note priorities), but you'd end up with a pale shadow of the song compared to the recorded version.
This is ridiculous. How is an artist supposed to make a living without protections?
its very ridiculous http://texas-wholesale.com/contact_us
The written score is the source, the recorded sample is the binary.
Free Martian Whores!
That's how I look at it as well. Actually playing/generating the music from its score is compiling.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Consider the history of the realizations of the canons in Bach's Musical Offering. First, a canon is published as a puzzle to be solved. Look in the Dover Edition from the Bach Geselleschaft Edition (BGA). The first canon "Seek and You Shall find" has two entirely different solutions discovered years apart. Counterpuntal puzzles offer a challenge akin to programming and can be considered Open Source. They are in fact derived from something that may be copyrightable, but to the extaxt that strict or free solutions are possible, these offered solutions can be considered open source.
Now Bach did not complete the last fugue in the Art of Fugue, with the poignant epigraph by C. P. Bach on his fathers dying over the unfinished fugue in three countersubjects. For sometime after J.S. Bach's death (1750) it was not always regarded as part of the Art of Fugue. It took Donald Francis Tovy and a century later to prove that a variant of the AOF theme fit perfectly with the three countersuvjects, still no one has to date produced a satisfying realization of how the work should end and we hear performances today where the fugue just fades out after all the countersubjects have been stated and worked through and where we expect the entry of the main theme and conclusion, and yet no one including Tovy has come up with anything that matches the satisfaction we would have gotten if Bach himself had finished it.This is intangible, we know somehow that a realization, one of many actually written, is not Bach, but it is very hard to describe.
Still, aside from the copyright issue, a composer could put a piece out there, even copyright his version, and say to the community "Here, add to this and modify what I have done, but don't claim your work as my own." There has been speculation that J.S. Bach deliberately left that last fugue unfinsihed to prove that no one else could complete it. I don't really believe it. even one of his students whose name is all over his music, Krinberger, didn't try to finish the fugue, or was undistinguished.
So many opinions, so few actual musicians.
it has been for probably longer than i realized, people make music for fun it's 'not' called pop
idiots tried to commercialize it and missed the point
im glad that happened
you figure it out
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?