[cc-community] Net Band "Packet-In" releases CC BY-SA licensed album

Giorgos Cheliotis giorgos at smu.edu.sg
Wed Mar 19 02:18:37 EDT 2008


Your understanding of music source files, esp. regarding MIDI vs. sheet music is accurate. MIDI can be translated into sheet notation and vice versa, though an automatic translation will not be fully satisfying. And in cases where no MIDI instruments are used, the audio tracks are all you have to work with. It is not that different to graphics actually, where vector graphics are relatively easy to manipulate and modify, whereas bitmaps, jpegs and the like cannot be fully decomposed into their constituting elements. 
 
But, as with graphics, given the audio tracks, project files, any MIDI files, patches and notation, one can regenerate the music. (notation is actually complementary, it is helpful in understanding and, if that is the aim, performing the music piece, but not really necessary to recreate it, if you have all other elements)

________________________________

From: cc-community-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Terry Hancock
Sent: Wed 3/19/2008 1:44 PM
To: cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [cc-community] Net Band "Packet-In" releases CC BY-SA licensed album



Michael David Crawford wrote:
> However, I would argue that even individual audio tracks that go into a
> mix aren't really the source code - rather, sheet music is.

Interesting point. I had a discussion on this topic with a potential
contributor to a project I was working on, and I wasn't satisfied with
the outcome.

I would argue that the "real" "source code" for a piece of music only
strictly exists if it can be generated automatically from the source --
which means that you need a bit more than the sheet music, really, and
also that live-performed music doesn't really have "source code" in this
sense.

What I think is really the "source" for synthesized music, would be:

1) MIDI or other representation of the music notes and instruments
2) Instrument patch files
3) Tracks for non-MIDI audio
4) Project files for mixing of elements 1-3

As I understand it, this is sufficient to programmatically synthesize
the music. #3 is a bit of compromise, but you definitely need it for
things like lyrics or sound effects that aren't strictly instruments at
all. It's also the closest you can get for music that is performed by a
person and recorded.

One question we were not able to answer, but I'd like to is: can you
generate "sheet music" from #1. I.e. is there a program I can use to
construct readable sheet music from a MIDI file?  And of course, can you
do the reverse -- convert a sheet music format to a MIDI automatically?

I can imagine that this might not be fully roundtrippable. I gather that
the MIDI file can contain more information than the sheet music, in
terms of subtle variations in note timing, duration, and amplitude that
are not fully encoded into sheet music.

I'm not a musician myself, so this is somewhat foreign territory to me.
I was more interested in what I should consider accepting and/or
archiving on an open content project. Strictly speaking, we don't have a
legal "source code requirement" with the By-SA license, but I wanted the
project to store source code for reasons of both principle and practice.

Since it seems likely that on a long-running project that musicians,
artists, and programmers will come and go, it seems like we need to have
 music in a modifiable form -- something that another musician can come
in, rearrange and adapt, and then use (for example) in another part of
the project (or for that matter, in a new project).

With graphics, I know what I'm doing. We're using a combination of PNG,
JPG, and SVG files, and probably also .blend files for 3D (though we
have none yet). This gives enough flexibility that I'm not worried.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com <http://www.anansispaceworks.com/> 

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