Musicians Generate Every Possible Melody and Make it Public
Musicians Generate Every Possible Melody and Make it Public

Using algorithms musicians generated every possible melody to give access to other musicians.

Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin generated and saved every possible MIDI melody and then shared it with public under Creative Commons Zero license, making it now possible for any musician to use it.

Musicians generate every possible melody. Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin.

The goal of their amazing feat is to make it easier for songwriters to write songs. They have published the code on Github. It is all about enabling musicians to create freely, without being scared of a potential law suit. If you’ve ever thought one song sounded similar to another, the culprit may not be an unethical forger, but rather the limited mathematical musical equations that our favorite artists have to work with. Copyright law is at risk of severely limiting future music creation and future human creativity.

Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This is similar to what hackers use to guess passwords: brute force, that is getting through every possible combination of notes. Their algorithm generates roughly 300,000 melodies per second.

In his Ted talk Riehl said:

“Under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all. So maybe if these numbers have existed since the beginning of time and we’re just plucking them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copyrightable.”

You can see Riehl here:
['Przemek Chojecki']
['Technology', 'News', 'Music', 'Programming', 'Law']