Slashdot Mirror
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".
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.
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.
It has been around for approximately forever.
...rounded up to the nearest whole eternity.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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...
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?
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?
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsMidi
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
or just endless forks of each other, never truly heartfelt, never truly satisfying?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Then stop complaining that your jobs are going overseas or to H1B visas because "[n]obody is entitled to make a living from" IT "just because they think they should".
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.
Yes, I agree. But why is it that OS supporters, who are invariably geeks and other variety of sysadmin, feel they need to constantly opine on arts-related copyright issues? Just because you listen to music and store it digitally does not make you an expert in the industry. Listening to geeks yammer on about alternate copyright for music is like listening to Lady Gaga talk about coding.
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.
Yes, that's nice. Pro-tip: It is limited and is not perpetual.
Now I'm going to listen to Bob Dylan mumble on about how developers should be forced to release their source code after a limited time that he deems long enough for them to have made a reasonable return.
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.
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.
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'!"
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.
:(
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.
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).