Shimon the Marimba bot Working to make Jazz great again
NPR has 24×7 music channels called All Songs Considered heating up the annoyance with your local NPR affiliate, competing for the ear space of Public radio listeners
Your New Robot Overlord Turns Out To Be A Pretty Good Marimba Player
Thanks for the All Songs Considered reference. I had not heard of it. It is very hard to find any musical podcasts originating withing the USA. Public station KEXP has some as well, but the vast majority seem to be from Canada’s CBC or Australia’s ABC.
Even here, I noticed that All Songs Considered focuses on new music. I don’t think you will find anywhere in the world a podcast featuring Beatles songs… the lobbyists and politicians have made that illegal through international treaties.
If I was king of the world, music copyrights would extend only to protect the original artist and not be transferable – perhaps something like the shorter of 20 years or time of death + 5 years. Of course collaborative works, get more complicated.
The marimba playing bot inches toward a really dangerous question. The guy who is the brain behind it describes his hope that by relying on algorithms and a database of examples, the bot will create new music that no human would be capable of creating. Who would own the copyrights on its music? This issue is poking its head up in things like YouTube videos from unattended cameras. Does just owning the camera confer ownership rights to what it records?
You don’t own your DNA sequence, your fingerprint, or your retina scans. They can be used by anyone. If you sang about them, you would own the song.
If you develop a drug that cures cancer, you own the rights for a few years after it is approved, but if you sing about it, you own the song from beyond your grave.
It’s all based on lobbyists and donations. 😉
Just in the news today- the 1970s German music group Kraftwerk lost their lawsuit in Germany where they sued a hip-hop artist for “sampling” some of their music and using it in new music.
Sampling is an interesting gray area and somewhat similar to writing a new book and in it quoting from someone else’s book – you can use quotes but you can not publish the original book as an appendix in yours. 😉
If I use the sample taken by the hip hop artist, does he assert a copyright on it?
If a million marimba bots played a million marimbas for a million years, could they copyright every possible riff?
I’d have to look into that, but I think they could put Shazam into bankruptcy faster than they could hire Bob Pittman. 😉
Replace Marimba with accordian and I think I’ve just seen hell.
The EU is ready to tackle whether robots can own copyrights
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/robots-allowed-trade-money-claim-8265094
Can robots comply with the Kenyan anal test?
They can certainly perform them. They won’t be squeamish about doing prostate exams