Damien Riehl is a lawyer who has worked on copyright. Noah Rubin is a coder. They were hanging out after a long day at work when a “a lark, a thought experiment” occurred to Riehl:
Maybe they could exhaust all possible melodies—and in so doing, protect musicians from being sued for copying songs they don’t remember hearing.
On another level, the melody project asks some interesting questions about machine creation. Is writing some software to output MIDI melodies to a hard... See More
Damien Riehl is a lawyer who has worked on copyright. Noah Rubin is a coder. They were hanging out after a long day at work when a “a lark, a thought experiment” occurred to Riehl:
Maybe they could exhaust all possible melodies—and in so doing, protect musicians from being sued for copying songs they don’t remember hearing.
On another level, the melody project asks some interesting questions about machine creation. Is writing some software to output MIDI melodies to a hard drive the same as if you’d created the song, played it on your xylophone, and uploaded it to SoundCloud? Did Riehl and Rubin free music from restriction, or did they infringe on millions of copyrights?
