The Place Of Modern MIDI Music?

-1-Lone_Eagle writes "With the free availability of literally thousands of MIDI files on the Internet, and increasingly powerful home desktop systems and software, virtually anyone can take a MIDI file and using a program such as GarageBand or Reason create a near-studio-quality rendition of their favorite song. This opens up an interesting discussion, is a remixed MIDI file an original creation? Or is it simply a copied work with the rights belonging to the original author? Is it piracy? What do you think?"

Is there an free or open source version of

[Travoltus]

GarageBand and/or Reason for Windows or GNU/Linux?

It would be nice to know of equivalents that you don't have to pay an arm and a leg for.

Re:not piracy

[Sirch]

Funny, a lot of people say/said that about MP3... And does the RIAA listen? No.

Not that I think MIDI is particularly worrying to music publishers... Presumably it's in the same legal area as guitar tabs (eg OLGA) and other music transcriptions? What about transcribing lyrics?

MIDI is akin to printed music

[smilinggoat]

MIDI, the Musical Instrumant Digital Interface, merely sends instructions for an instrument (could be a synthesizer or a sampler or any number of other devices) to then create sound. There is no actual audio. MIDI data can be represented in many different forms, be it a list of instruction in hexadecimal, a matrix of controller values, or even as printed sheet music. Asking whether or not a MIDI "remix" or re-writing is an original creation is similar to asking whether or not someone who takes previously written sheet music and transcribes it and changes it is creating a new work.

It all depends on the level of art and interpretation in the work (think about Cage [wikipedia.org], for instance, and his work in creating scores from astronomical maps) and the legalities. I cannot comment on the legalities of rewriting music, as I am just a musician and an engineer, not a lawyer.

As far as I know, it is not illegal to transcribe audio into sheet music, which is basically what one does when creating a MIDI file from digital (or analog) audio.

Re:Studio Quality?

[Neva]

Well, actually that has been tried too. Makes some tunes even more listenable than their original high-pitched performers version ;)

http://www.dictionaraoke.org/ [dictionaraoke.org]

Legal

[Mr_Silver]

IANAL but I did work in the mobile phone content world for a while (including ringtones) and I believe that producers who assert their rendition to the specific artist had to pay the appropriate rights society for each sale. Those that just said "this is 'baby one more time'" without mentioning Britney didn't have to.

If creating your own midi files/ringtones was illegal then companies such as handy.de, musiwave and WES would not have been able to start out.

(probably worth pointing out for the pedants that handy.de was bought by one of the big producers a couple of years ago and renamed to Arvato)

Embrace the fakeness of chip.

[tepples]

No matter how good a composer you are, a little 1MB piano sample is going to sound, well, fake.

But some composers embrace the fakeness of a 12 KB toy piano sample and make something like this [jk0.org].

All digital works are akin to the set of integers

[ClickOnThis]

My subject line actually is derived from an interesting article I read ages ago on a legal website. (I wish I could remember now where it was.) Viewed in a utilitarian way, a file/stream/CD/DVD or any other digital rendering of a work is essentially a set of instructions to a device to reproduce the work. Taking this even further, one can consider the entire file/stream/CD/DVD to be a single integer. While I'm not suggesting there isn't a great deal of skill and artistry to "find the integer" that creates the work and that copyright holders are entitled to protection, the fact that copyright law forbids unauthorized copying of digital works in essence means that you can't make a copy of an integer.

Define

[The Angry Artist]

A song as a MIDI file is a cover, and simply that. Asking Is it piracy? is a ridiculous question, since piracy is a dumb word the entertainment industries use to refer to the infringement of their works' copyrights. Is it copyright infringement? is a valid question. That, of course, depends on whether or not you have the original artist's (or record company's) permission to sell or perform the song in question.

Of course, MIDI files are hardly realistic. It's doubtful that any record company would consider a MIDI file a threat to a song's sales. What would really concern them would be a MP3 of a MIDI: a MIDI fed through a Virtual Studio Technology plugin (VST plugin [wikipedia.org]) - audio plugins that can be used in conjunction with MIDI sequencers to give MIDI tracks a whole new sound. VST plugins can make a MIDI track infinitely better, since VST plugins use actual audio samples. It's possible to make a song that sounds just like the original though VST technology, and I'm sure record label executives would take notice if they found songs like that floating around on the p2p networks.