[ANNOUNCEMENT] Resumed maintenance of libmikmod and mikmod.

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:16:42AM +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012, Nadav Har'El wrote about "Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Resumed maintenance of libmikmod and mikmod.":
> > hard disk. I think, though, that today mod files still have value, as
> > "open source" music :-)
> 
> I've been wondering, how far are we, technologically, from being able to
> produce free, open-source, *classical* music.
> 
> Unlike newer popular music, classical music is too old to be copyrighted
> (see signature below ;-)), so it should be legal to freely distribute
> new performances of this music. And unlike the typical "esoteric" music
> on the tracker-module scene, classical music is actually popular in a
> significant part of the population.
> 
> Would it be beyond the current state of the art to sample orchestral
> instruments or simulate them, and synthesize their sound? Then contributors
> would input the music's score, add performance instructions to the various
> instruments according to their own interpretation (just like a real
> orchestra's conductor would), and recorded classical music would come out.
> 
> I don't think that with current technology, this is science fiction.
> Does anyone know if anything like this has been tried? With free
> software?
> 
> The end-result of such a project will not only be free, and royalty-free,
> classical music for all, but also an incredible tool for aspiring composers 
> who do not have an orchestra at their disposal - and haven't (yet)
> mastered the ability to imagine what their composition would sound like
> with a full orchestra playing it. I don't think it will be a
> death-sentence to real-live orchestras - I don't believe many orchestras
> actually live on royalties from the 20-shekel classic CDs on the market.

Notes are not a precise enough description of the music.

There certainly are some synthesizers around. Getting them to produce an
exact copy of some specific instrument may be tricky. Something which is
potentially less tricky is getting them to produce a reproducable sound:
Being able to produce exactly the same sound from your sound system.

A while ago I saw (but never tried to use) a project aiming at creating
such a reproducable description of music.

https://github.com/overtone/overtone

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