created, 2025-02-12 & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025musicfakereplicaelitismgatekeeping
Thought
Against the new technology the time, the phonograph and reflections on copyright.
For John Philip Sousa anything but the live performance was fake? A recording was an inauthentic, soulless musical experience.
Recorded music would convince people they don’t need to learn instruments themselves, leading to the death of a soul in music.
There’s a lot wrong with the outcomes of this replicated presented here, but the problems still affect us (AI art trained on artists songs etc.) and have been magnified through technological change to the extent that in places it is drifting towards correctness.
“And now, in this the twentieth century, come these talking and playing machines, and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things, which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful, living, breathing daughters.”
Sousa compares this change to the introduction of the English sparrow, welcomed in all innocence but within no time multiplied itself into the “dignity of pest, to the destruction of numberless native songbirds.”
Thought
Some things: Recorded music might be the only way for people to experience certain genres or expose themselves to new musical ideas. Broadcast audio can distribute to many. There is also soul in choice of music and critique of music. Music doesn’t need to be human (and can have minimal human involvement) but the absence of the human from all music would be a regression. But also, Live music is important. Consuming patterns dominate (even replication of a song has a soul, but is difficult). Analysis would need to look not just at a song being made, but the complete removal of humans from the creation of music, or an attempt at killing off music, or analysis of genre forming.
There will be a deterioration in American music and taste, by virtue of music by multiplication of musical-reproduction machines.
Thought
Sousa wrote this in his time with the technology present then. Recording quality and hardware was not what it is today.
Does his point change with modern musical engines?
From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful.
Music rebelled against its mathematical basis to find life and the recording is a return to sterility, and lifelessness.
The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.
For him, it is killing the amateur. Instruments are not being purchased, in favor of listening devices. It also kills the teachers left without students.
Tireless replica:
The country dance orchestra of violin, guitar and melodeon had to rest at times, and the resultant interruption afforded the opportunity for general sociability and rest among the entire company. Now a tireless mechanism can keep everlastingly at it, and much of what made the dance a wholesome recreation is eliminated.
Reproduction is possible *without a penny of remuneration
The composer of the most popular waltz or march of the year must see it seized, reproduced at will on wax cylinder, brass disk, or strip of perforated paper, multiplied indefinitely, and sold at large profit all over the country, without a penny of remuneration to himself for the use of this original product of his brain.
Asked if he claimed the right to take one of my compositions and use it in connection with his mechanical device without compensation to myself, his unselfish reply was: “Under the Constitution and all the laws of the land, I say Yes, decidedly!”
Is the perforated paper roll a copy of the composers staff notation? rel:Transmutation and Transformation
“We are of the opinion that a perforated paper roll, such as is manufactured by defendant, is not a copy of complainant’s staff notation, for the following reasons: “It is not a copy in fact; it is not designed to be read or actually used in reading music as the original staff notation is; and the claim that it may be read, which is practically disproved by the great preponderance of evidence, even if true, would establish merely a theory or possibility of use, as distinguished from an actual use. The argument that because the roll is a notation or record of the music, it is, therefore, a copy, would apply to the disk of the phonograph or the barrel of the organ, which, it must be admitted, are not copies of the sheet music. The perforations in the rolls are not a varied form of symbols substituted for the symbols used by the author. They are mere adjuncts of a valve mechanism in a machine. In fact, the machine, or musical playing device, is the thing which appropriates the author’s property and publishes it by producing the musical sounds, thus conveying the author’s composition to the public.”
Who is responsible for the acts of the reproduction machine?
May I ask, does this machine appropriate the author’s composition without human assistance? Is the machine a free agent? Does it go about to seek whom it may devour? And if, as quoted above, the machine “publishes it,” is not the owner of the machine responsible for its acts?
Could anything be more blamable, as a matter of principle, than to take an artist’s composition, reproduce it a thousandfold on their machines, and deny him all participation in the large financial returns, by hiding back of the diaphanous pretense that in the guise of a disk or roll, his composition is not his property?
His final point here comments on a chilling effect. Rather than publish their works, which would just be consumed by these engines, maybe they will exist as a private art and leave it in controlled manuscripts.