incompetech – Page 3 – Music and also Graph Paper

AI or Copyright. Choose One.

Posted on August 23, 2023 by

DC District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday, August 18th, 2023, that works created by AI are not eligible for copyright protections. The Judge ruled copyrights belong to people. If this decision goes unchallenged and becomes the precedent, content creators will have serious decisions to make.

Example of non-copyrightable image

A content creator could get an AI writer to craft their story, but they won’t own the copyright on that story. If you ask an AI to analyze the world’s data and come up with the absolute best story, that story will be in the Public Domain. Anyone who wants to use it, can use it.

Given the producer’s love of copyright, that’s going to be a tough decision to make.

The currently striking Writers Guild of America just received the biggest piece of ammunition for their cause.

Media producers will, of course, want cheap, good writers. But if producers use AI, they will find themselves competing in the marketplace without the protection of copyright on their stories. That’s not to say that the media won’t be profitable. There are plenty of countries where counterfeiting and piracy are daily occurrences—India, Nigeria, and China all have high levels of piracy, yet they also produce a lot of content.

Even if you eliminate counterfeiting and piracy, copyright doesn’t grant profitability. Studios can be profitable with or without copyright protections, but they will have to do things differently. They may have to work in secret and employ rapid distribution models. They may need to invent a distribution model so innovative that it’s simply better than anything else. Or they could lie.

Another example of a non-copyrightable-eligible image

Who’s Going to Lie to Whom?

It may be obvious that your soundtrack was written by an AI, but dialogue is more difficult to prove. It’s colored by actors, directors, cinematographers, and editors. If I were a writer, I might choose not to tell the studio exactly HOW that dialogue came to be. If studios want copyright on everything, they will need to verify that their writers did NOT use AI. How? No idea.

Or, studios could hire human writers and keep doing what they’re doing. This may prove cost prohibitive.

Could this ruling be appealed or challenged in higher courts?
Yup! This was one ruling in one federal district court.
Studios may push to get alternate rulings in other courts. If this happens, and different courts have different rulings, this could become an issue for the Supreme Court to address.

Not sure what it is, but it is uncopyrightable.

The future is unclear, but I’m enthused about this ruling!

Vampire Meemaw, play my favorite tune!

Posted on August 17, 2023 by

Kevin MacLeod Posted in Music

Southern Gothic

Are you cool? Cool like a vampire planking in a graveyard in Alabama?
Planking is uncool… so, you gotta be really, REALLY cool to pull off this vibe.
Stomp and clap along to the cooperating banjos!

You can purchase from iTunes here!

Dynamic Orchestration, AI, and Video Games

Posted on August 16, 2023 by

Kevin MacLeod Posted in AI, Copyright, Music

There is a lot of hoopla out there with AI generated music and virtual singers. Most folks think these will be used in studios to produce soundtracks, and they are right. For now.

Dynamic Orchestration

Right now, every playthough of a specific game has the same music. Same opening theme, same battle music, same ‘pause screen’ music. If 500,000 people are playing Baulder’s Gate – each of them are getting the same soundtrack.

Interactive Music

With Dynamic Orchestration, each playthrough will have a unique soundtrack. In an RPG, you can use music for setting and mood. There should be a music difference between “campsite music for a party of 4”, and “campsite music for a party of 4 who just picked up a vampire helper… and the night may not end well.”

Human composers are finite. We can’t cover all possibilities. A machine can. In real time.

History

We’ve had hints of dynamic orchestration for a while. Changing tempo to match the situation is common (like when everything speeds up for the last lap on Mario Kart). You can also mute or mix different layers of a piece of music to go from calm to exciting (like in an open world RPG where if you wander to where there is nothing, the music starts becoming thinner, and if you wander closer to interesting things, the music picks up). These are fairly difficult to implement now. They require working in MIDI-like sections, where instead of producing one track, you must produce thousands of individual notes and the instructions on how to put those notes together.

Why isn’t this happening now?

As of August, 2023, there are still a few hurdles.

The audio quality is pretty low right now. Eventually, we will get 48khz resolution on the audio, but now we have to settle for a fraction of that. Every company that does AI audio is working toward this, it’s a matter of time.

Virtual Orchestra

The cost of running these models is comparatively quite high. To do dynamic composition, you would need to stream a lot of audio data from servers OR find efficiencies in the models to allow them to run on smaller, home-scale computing devices.

What this means for Composers

There are still some opportunities for composers, though the workload per-game will be decreased significantly. A composer may still come up with the overall music design and provide some examples of themes for different parts of the story. We won’t be doing 12-hour soundtracks anymore.

Won’t AI also be able to do the main themes?

Yes. Yes, it will.

Ethical Considerations

Many people think the AI will be reigned in by governmental mandates and lawsuits from artists. These actions will slow adoption, but they can’t stop it. There is already enough music in the Public Domain to train some frighteningly good audio AIs. We have access to tons of folk music, music by dead composers like Mozart and Tchaikovski, and music be people who WANT to share what they’ve done like me.

Supercharged Storytelling

As Candy Crush weaponized engagement with their incredible design, Dynamic Orchestration will be a major aspect of weaponizing emotional storytelling… if you want it to. I hope every experience has a settings slider to control the poignancy of the soundtrack. Sometimes… I just don’t want that much.

Timeline

<Speculation> There are still a few challenges to get this to market. I expect someone will have a streaming service capable of doing this for under $10 per hour in under a year. Maybe another year to get an optimized model that can run on a graphics card or TPU. So… about 2027 you’ll be seeing the games show up on Steam. </Speculation>

Going Beyond

Dynamic Orchestration has a lot of other capabilities that can be realized before real-time inclusion in video games:

Bar and Restaurant background music: You can get an endless playlist of jazz standards that perfectly read the room and adjust dynamically to the goings-on there.
TV/Film Scoring: A composer will be able to guide the Dynamic Orchestration into an excellent soundtrack pretty quickly. Record it once, and incorporate it into the film!
Personal Soundtrack: While going on a walk, working out, or just cleaning your house, you’ll be able to have a dedicated soundtrack perfectly suiting to inspiring you! (It may also include some musical warnings if your family is coming over soon).

Text to Morse to MIDI App

Posted on August 13, 2023 by

Kevin MacLeod Posted in AI, Apps, Music

Text to Morse to MIDI takes text, and translates the text to Morse Code, and then outputs a MIDI file of the text.

I understand this is pretty niche, but it didn’t exist yet – so I had to make it.

The Background: I’m currently doing sound design for a Steampunk-based video game. One of the “characters” is the Navigational Computer, a Babbage-style computer that talks in Morse Code. To get her to talk, I needed to translate the dialog to Morse Code that is loaded into my audio editing software. I can then assign the notes to a Tesla Coil sample, and we’re done!

Fun Fact: If you experience the game enough, you start learning Morse Code by following along with the subtitles.

This doesn’t output theoretically perfect Morse Code. It was designed to have a semi-randomized “hand” (like having an accent, but in Morse Code).

Built with Flask, a web framework in Python.

PDF Auto-Duplexer

Posted on August 12, 2023 by

Kevin MacLeod Posted in Documents

The number one request I’ve gotten for graph paper is to add a function that makes 2-page documents that can be easily duplex printed. I haven’t done that because it will further complicate the interface. Also, it isn’t fun to work with a 20-year-old codebase written in a dying language.

The new duplexer is written in python with a JavaScript interface. It doesn’t work well with Firefox, and I’m fine with that. It does work well with Edge, Safari, and Chrome.

# read the file, duplicate the page and write to a new pdf pdf_writer = PdfWriter() pdf_reader = PdfReader(file) page = pdf_reader.pages[0] # get the first page


    pdf_writer.add_page(page)

    pdf_writer.add_page(page)  # add the page twice
    # save to in-memory file

    pdf_bytes = io.BytesIO()

    pdf_writer.write(pdf_bytes)

    pdf_bytes.seek(0)  # go to the start of the file
    # create response and set custom header

    response = make_response(send_file(pdf_bytes, mimetype='application/pdf', as_attachment=True, download_name=new_file_name))

    return response

Chat GPT4 makes graph paper!

Posted on March 31, 2023 by

Kevin MacLeod Posted in AI, Copyright, Documents

It does take an extra step, but it figured it out in python!

The Prompt:
Please write a python script using fpdf that will output a file “my-grid.pdf” which is a landscape a4 pdf file with a background color of dark purple, and has a border of at least 2cm. In the remaining space, figure out how many 1cm x 1cm squares would best fill the remaining space, and build a 1cm x 1cm grid with thin white lines. Do not draw partial squares.

The Code:
from fpdf import FPDF


# Constants

A4_WIDTH = 297  # Width of A4 paper in mm (landscape)

A4_HEIGHT = 210  # Height of A4 paper in mm (landscape)

BACKGROUND_COLOR = (41, 31, 88)  # Dark purple

BORDER_WIDTH = 20  # 2cm border width

GRID_SIZE = 10  # 1cm x 1cm squares

GRID_COLOR = (255, 255, 255)  # White
# Initialize PDF

pdf = FPDF("L", "mm", "A4")

pdf.set_auto_page_break(False)

pdf.add_page()
# Set background color

pdf.set_fill_color(*BACKGROUND_COLOR)

pdf.rect(0, 0, A4_WIDTH, A4_HEIGHT, "F")
# Calculate grid dimensions

grid_width = A4_WIDTH - 2 * BORDER_WIDTH

grid_height = A4_HEIGHT - 2 * BORDER_WIDTH

grid_columns = grid_width // GRID_SIZE

grid_rows = grid_height // GRID_SIZE
# Draw grid

pdf.set_draw_color(*GRID_COLOR)

pdf.set_line_width(0.3)  # Thin lines
for row in range(grid_rows + 1):

    y = BORDER_WIDTH + row * GRID_SIZE

    pdf.line(BORDER_WIDTH, y, BORDER_WIDTH + grid_columns * GRID_SIZE, y)
for col in range(grid_columns + 1):

    x = BORDER_WIDTH + col * GRID_SIZE

    pdf.line(x, BORDER_WIDTH, x, BORDER_WIDTH + grid_rows * GRID_SIZE)

# Save PDF pdf.output("my-grid.pdf")

And the final PDF output (after the script is run locally)

my-grid

If you run into problems at any step of the way, paste your errors into ChatGPT, and it’ll help you out!

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