Damien Riehl, lawyer, programmer and musician, with
musician Noah Rubin stop future copyright infringement lawsuits related to allegations of music plagiarism. To implement this idea, a huge array of MIDI melodies was generated, copyrights were obtained for these automatic melodies, and then the melodies were transferred to the public domain.
The essence of the idea is that music can be thought of as mathematics and that there are a finite number of possible melodies. If some compositions seem similar, this is not always plagiarism, but probably random coincidences due to the finite number of possible melodies and the inevitability of repetitions. Over time, there are more and more musical compositions, and in the future it will be increasingly difficult to find unique melodies that have not been found before.
The generation and publication for free use of all possible tunes will protect musicians from future claims of copyright infringement, since in court it will be possible to demonstrate the fact of an earlier creation of this tune and its distribution for unlimited use. In addition, if one considers melodies as predefined digital constants that exist from the very beginning, it may be possible to prove that melodies are related to mathematics and are just facts that are not covered by copyright.
The authors of the project algorithmically tried to determine all possible melodies contained in one octave. Created to generate melodies , which records combinations of 8-note and 12-beat melodies, using a tactic of enumeration of all possible combinations, similar to guessing password hashes. The implementation of the algorithm allows generating about 300 thousand melodies per second. The melody generator code is written in Rust and on GitHub under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. A tune can be considered copyrighted once it is stored in a playable format such as MIDI.
Ready-made archive of generated melodies (1.2 TB in MIDI) in the Internet Archive in the public domain.
Source: opennet.ru