Someone tried copyrighting all the possible pop music melodies. "Most pop melodies run fewer than 12 notes. If you generated every possible melody with just the eight notes of the C scale, that’d be 8^12 melodies, which is 68,719,476,736." So they generated all of them, as MIDI sequences, and stored them on a hard drive.[1][2] Arguably, all those are now public domain.
That was back in 2016. If you applied machine learning to pop music, you could probably establish a classifier for melodies that don't sound awful, and get that number down into the millions. Spotify has about 100,000 uploaded tracks. The space of listenable pop music may become fully populated. It would be amusing to have something that classifies songs as "Standard melody #67426564".
That was back in 2016. If you applied machine learning to pop music, you could probably establish a classifier for melodies that don't sound awful, and get that number down into the millions. Spotify has about 100,000 uploaded tracks. The space of listenable pop music may become fully populated. It would be amusing to have something that classifies songs as "Standard melody #67426564".
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/whats... [2] https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/lawandarts/a...