>Microsoft was recently (May 19, 1998) granted a United States patent
>(#5,753,843) for a "System and Process for Composing Musical Sections"
>(including 47 claims), this patent clearly pertaining to the algorithmic
>generation of music. Computer Music Journal invited Laurie Spiegel to
>write a guest editorial (below) about the implications of such patents.
>
>
>
>The abstract of the Microsoft patent describes:
>
> "A system and process for comprising [sic] a musical section in response
>to a user's interaction with a multimedia presentation. The system
>includes a composition engine, performance engine, and arbitrator. The
>arbitrator provides an interface with an application program running a
>multimedia presentation. The arbitrator receives parameters from the
>application program indicative of a user's interaction and the type of
>music the application program requests in response to the interaction. The
>parameters are passed to the composition engine which composes a musical
>section having a chord progression and other data therein. The musical
>section and a style provided by the arbitrator are used by the performance
>engine to generate music sequence data for driving a musical instrument.
>The performance of the musical sequence data by the musical instrument
>occurs substantially contemporaneously with the user's interaction which
>caused the musical section composition. Because the composition engine uses
>processes which vary the composition of musical sections, the user events
>which initiate composition of a musical section and which occur at the same
>place within a multimedia presentation, still vary the performance at each
>user event."
>
>The claims includes the following text:
>
>"A system for composing music in response to a user's interaction with a
>multimedia presentation comprising: an application program interface for
>receiving parameters identifying a style, a shape, and a personality for
>music that conform to said user's interaction with said multimedia
>presentation; and a composition engine for composing a musical section
>corresponding to said parameters so that a user perceives the performance
>of the musical section to be related to said user's interaction with said
>multimedia presentation."
>
>Copies of this patent can be obtained for US$ 13 from MicroPatent;
telephone
>(800)648-6787; World Wide Web http://www.micropat.com.
>From Computer Music Journal:
>
>Editorial by Laurie Spiegel
>
>There have been patents for musical inventions, such as piano action parts,
>for many years without apparent detriment. However, throughout the 20th
>century, the designing of artistic processes and creative techniques has
>increasingly come to be considered an integral part of an artist's creative
>work, rather than being seen as the province of a separate tool-building
>specialist. Entire fields such as algorithmic composition, interactive
>multimedia, and literary "process art" have become established in recent
>decades, based on the premise that the designing and implementation of
>specific creative processes and artistic techniques constitute artistic
>creation, every bit as much as do the data that such processes generate.
>
>If specific compositional techniques are now to be privately owned, must
>each composer, especially composers of computer-based interactive process
>pieces, now stop to do patent searches routinely as part of their work or
>else risk being taken to court? With the floodgates now open for a gold
>rush of corporate claims to very specific compositional techniques, how are
>we composers supposed to preserve our sense of freedom, our exhilaration at
>exploring, and our deep psychological immersion in following musical ideas
>wherever they may lead us, while knowing that we cannot ever be sure
>anymore of the simple legality of any new refinement we may make in our own
>process-based works?
>
>Are we composers going to end up having to pay a royalty to the owner of
>each technique we use, when the royalties we receive from the music we
>compose using these techniques typically would not even pay for the
>paperwork of just keeping track of them? Must the education of every
>composer who wants to make process-based music now include courses in what
>techniques are exclusively owned by whom and for how long, what fees or
>methods will decriminalize their use, and the penalties to expect for
>unauthorized use? Will process-based composing or composer construction of
>interactive algorithmic tools now become so legally complex (and possibly
>dangerous) that such approaches will simply die out? When we want to use a
>specific compositional technique, how do we keep the question of who owns
>it from interfering with our personal sense of creative freedom?
>
>As a method of motivating new development for compositional techniques, how
>would the use of patents have worked in historical contexts? To hypothesize
>an instance, what if someone had patented the replaying of a musical theme
>at a time delay to itself, early in what was probably the last great era of
>process-based composing: the era of Bach? Would Bach have been able to
afford,
>and also willing to pay, royalties (or--perish the thought--legal defense
>fees) to use or build new techniques based on the patented imitative
>contrapuntal processes his works required? Or would composing the way he
>did have made him a criminal, as Galileo and others came to be considered
>criminals for their scientific work? And could any patent-holding tool
>designer ever possess sufficient understanding of the working requirements
>of composers of Bach's artistic caliber to be able to create procedural
>tools that were adequately fine-tuned for every possible such composer's
>unique musical approach? Or, in another hypothetical example, could any
>tool builder whose products had been fine tuned for Haydn's methods have
>anticipated the ways in which Beethoven would need to break out beyond
>their scope, or why this would be important, or how to accommodate the
>change in advance?
>
>Then why does our own society assume that the definition, implementation,
>and provision of any such creative technique should be done
>non-competitively, non-pluralistically, under the complete control of any
>single corporate monopoly? Why should the monopoly we call "patent" include
>artistic methods, tools, or techniques within its domain? Simply because
>these can now be constructed within the medium of computer software, and
>because the law now allows the patenting of such processes if implemented
>as computer software?
>
>The only arguably successful scenario I can envision that takes as a
>premise the existence of an 18th-century patent on time-delayed repetition
>techniques, and that would still allow us the Well Tempered Clavier, the
>Musical Offering, and the Art of the Fugue, is one in which Bach got
>himself hired as Company X's official court (well, company) composer in a
>corporate reprise of the aristocratic private patronage system. But in all
>likelihood Telemann would have gotten the job instead.
>
>We specialists created the field of computer music collectively but from
>the intersections of our very own personal visions and desires. This field,
>our lifework, is increasingly influenced by differently motivated entities.
>The legal departments of large corporations, or those concerned with the
>price of corporate shares trading in international markets, might govern
>whether or not the next Art of the Fugue will ever be made. The current
>situation is neither without precedent nor easily resolved, but we do want
>to preserve what we value in our art and its potential to evolve.
>