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.
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.
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...
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsMidi
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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.