All the Music

Brute-forcing every melody that can exist — then giving them all away — to defend songwriters from 'you stole my melody' lawsuits.

Watch on TED.com · Project site: allthemusic.info · FAQs

Melodies are math

A melody is a finite sequence of notes within a scale — and finite means countable. With software, Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin set out to write them all: an algorithm that brute-forces every possible melodic combination and records each one to disk as a MIDI file. The catalog already spans hundreds of billions of melodies — effectively every melody that has ever been written, and every one that ever can be.

Then they gave them away

Every melody the project generates is dedicated to the public domain under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). The logic is a one-two punch: if a melody is copyrightable, it’s now CC0 and free for anyone to use; if it isn’t copyrightable (because it’s just math — an unoriginal combination of notes), then it was always a fact, free for the taking. Either way, no one can monopolize it.

Why it matters

Modern “substantial similarity” lawsuits can punish songwriters for independently arriving at a short run of notes they may never have heard before — with legal defense costs running well into six and seven figures. By exhausting and publishing the combinatorial space of melody, All the Music gives those defendants prior art and a principled argument: many melodies are simply too unoriginal to own.

The result

Before the talk, defendants in "you stole my melody" lawsuits routinely lost. After it, they started winning — Katy Perry, Led Zeppelin (for "Stairway to Heaven"), and Ed Sheeran (twice — in the UK and the US) all prevailed using the same argument Damien made on the TEDx stage: maybe those melodies are unoriginal, and therefore uncopyrightable.

A lawyer, musician, and technologist, Damien continues to speak on what All the Music means for creativity, copyright, and AI — see Speaking, or return to Music.