Recently Katy Perry was sued by the Christian rapper Flame about, of all things, a synthesizer riff in the song Dark Horse (2014).  The accusation was that that synth riff was stolen from the song Joyful Noise (2008).  While there were several irregularities in the proceedings, Katy Perry was found to be guilty of this plagiarism.

Note that this was not the melody, nor was it even in the foreground, but in the background of Dark Horse.  Musically it is referred to as an ostinato, or an element to support the melody.  Otherwise the songs did not share the same melody, chord progression or drum rhythm.

If you are interested in the whole discussion, you can see it in a short 9 minute video by Adam Neely on Youtube here:

If songwriters are able to copyright short sequences of notes, then we have a big problem.  There are only so many keys and so many notes and only so many ways to combine them.

This was the situation that caused another lawyer, Damien Riehl, to ally with a programmer by the name of Noah Rubin to do the unthinkable.  They created a program that would generate every possible melody.  Once generated, the melodies occupied 2.6 TB of drive space.  By copyright law, once those melodies were ‘afixed’ to a physical medium (the hard drive), they are copyrighted. 

Adam Neely (again) interviewed the two in a Youtube video here:

Then the duo also did one more unthinkable thing, they made the file available to everyone.  If you have 2.6 TB of free drive space and plenty of time to wait, you can get the file here:

https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets

Why did they do that?  By putting all the music in public domain, now anybody who writes a song has to prove, in a court of law, that they did not have exposure to this file.  Pretty difficult to prove a negative.  In short, these two have thrown a monkey wrench into the copyright works to show the problems with the current situation with music.  In essence, music is demonstrated to be just math with a limited number of possibilities.  So, similarities may not be plagiarism but merely the result of the limited mathematical equations that the artist has to work with.

Damien Riehl originally revealed their feat in a TED talk called ‘Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement’.  You can find it here:

I never thought I would be this age.  You just don’t consider it when you are younger.  So many things take up your time and thought processes that years pass without you realizing that the time has passed.

At this point, I have now lived 10 years longer than my father, who passed away at 58 from pancreatic cancer.  My father only survived his father by four years.  My grandfather lived to 84 or 86 or 88 depending on which agency you consult for his age.

At 68, I’m now two years past retirement and still working with no definite end date. I’ve held some sort of job for 51 years and now up for a promotion at the current company.  I now have four published books with the fifth to be released sometime in April, with at least three more books in the process of being written.  I have released 81 music tracks on Soundcloud with probably another 20 or 30 in some state of progress.  I’ve been selling on eBay for over ten years now.

And, no, none of this should matter to anyone but me, just taking inventory so to speak!

I’m too busy.  I think I’ll stick around for a while.  The Bible says (Genesis 6:3) that men will live 120 years.  I think I’ll claim that.

Finally, thanks for all the Birthday wishes.  It’s motivating to see everyone who has responded.

Thank you.

I hadn’t realized how long it was since I last release a musical piece. Turns out it was two years ago, as Soundcloud listed it. So, just yesterday, I release my first new song/musical piece in two years. It is called ‘The Kolpherani’ and, as you might have guessed, it has to do with the fourth book of the Raven of Iskandar series.

The song is called ‘The Kolpherani’ and is somewhat unusual rhymically. You can find it on Soundcloud here:

My ‘musical’ avatar is Syemak and if you visit https://www.soundcloud.com/syemak/, you will find 80 tracks that I’ve done over the past 7 years (7 years! Yikes).

If there has been more of a time interval between my posts over the last two weeks, it is because I said ‘yes’ to the Pneumonia Vaccine.

Once you reach 65 (I think they may have lowered the age recently), your doctor will suggest you have the pneumonia vaccine. In my case, it was administered right in the office. Before you just casually say ‘yes’, think about the week ahead and whether you can afford to be run-down and have flu-like symptoms. That may not happen, but there is a pretty good possibility of a reaction to the vaccine.

For my part, it began 24 hours after I had the vaccine. Just about 100% of the patients that receive the vaccine will have arm swelling and pain in the upper arm where the shot was applied. That occurred to me right after the shot and taking a pain-killer (Tylenol or Ibuprofen) did manage that. Almost exactly 24 hours later, I began to get chills. The next morning I felt foggy and had whole body muscle aches. That lead to low energy and congestion.

In total, I lost a day and a half of work, but only because I had the shot on a Thursday and lost Saturday and Sunday to the symptoms. In total, it was was 9 days until I felt reasonably decent and then the running nose and congestion lasted another 4 or 5 days.

It did also cause me to miss a scheduled trip for my employer. That was probably the first time in my career that that has happened.

Now I’m NOT saying to not get the vaccine. In fact, do get the vaccine, but time it so that your most important activities are not delayed by a week or two, just in case.

This is just to let you know what can happen so that you won’t be unpleasantly surprised like I was. So, go ahead and get the vaccine, but just plan the timing wisely!