For many musicians, copyright laws are a real headache. As the number of musical note combinations becomes limited, there are more and more cases in the courts of artists accused of stealing a certain melody, even if they have not heard it before.
If for an already well-known artist the impact of a situation of alleged serious "plagiarism", the situation becomes even worse in the case of an independent musician. To help deal with this problem, Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin, two American programmers and musicians, decided to create a MIDI algorithm capable of producing all possible musical combinations. The team recorded the created melodies and then made them available to the public.
According to Damien Riehl, who is also a copyright lawyer, in a recent TED Talk, the algorithm created is capable of generating 300,000 melodies per second. In order to register them, the team first needed to put them on a physical medium, choosing as an external medium with 2.6 TB as medium. Altogether, there are 68.7 billion combinations of eight notes in 12 measures.
After recording the project, Riehl and Rubin made it available online under the Creative Commons Zero license, which allows artists to use any of the songs without having to assign them to an author. The most curious can find it both in the project's Github and in the Internet Archive.
For now, it is still unclear whether the tactic developed by the team actually works in court or even on digital platforms like YouTube. It is recalled that copyright disputes regarding alleged plagiarism of melodies are frequent on the website, many of which are capable of jeopardizing the careers of several independent music producers.
