From megabytes to masterpiece

[mountain_rage]

Just as the Rolling Stones were about to release their 1997 single Anybody Seen My Baby, a band member discovered that the chorus sounded a lot like k.d. Lang’s Grammy Award-winning song Constant Craving, which had been released five years earlier. Hurried arrangements were made by the Stones to add Lang and her co-writer’s names to the credits.

An iconic rock band and a country singer—the two have notably different music styles, and yet, with infinite possibilities for composing a song, almost identical scores were written. Surprising? Not really, says Örjan Sandred, a composer and researcher at the University of Manitoba. “It’s almost impossible to compose music with truly new structures,” he says.

Most artists use their creative intuition to write music—their ideas come from their subconscious, which is based on past experiences, including music they’ve heard or studied before. In other words, new music is inspired by old music. “But, if we can develop a new method of creating music, we will get a different result,” explains Sandred. He hopes to develop just such a method at the university’s Studio FLAT, a state-of-the-art studio for computer music research, slated to open in September 2008 .



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The interesting part I get from this is that a composer is arguing that music has a limit and is created solely off of previous works. If this can be or has been scientifically proven I would imagine it would become grounds to end the copyrights of music. Think about it, if all we are capable of doing is imitation then why should that be protected, naturally people are going to break a copyright whether they like it or not. Music should return to its root as being a means for a performer to make money for a performance.

[HelenaP]

...If this can be or has been scientifically proven I would imagine it would become grounds to end the copyrights of music. Think about it, if all we are capable of doing is imitation then why should that be protected, naturally people are going to break a copyright whether they like it or not. Music should return to its root as being a means for a performer to make money for a performance.

Bingo.
Just wonder how long the "research" will run...

[-0-BACKLASH-0-]

very interesting. I can't wait to read the results.