Melodyne DNA vs Coldplay

Tonight we bought Melodyne Direct Note Access. You’ve probably never come across this software, but we’ve been impatiently waiting for it ever since it was first talked about more than two years ago.

The original version of Melodyne was pretty incredible. The program would take a line of monophonic audio, (a sound that only plays one note at a time, like a vocal or a trumpet), split the sound into its component notes and then allow you to change the pitch of each part as you like. You can use it to correct wrong notes, or completely re-write the melody, if you choose. Pretty amazing.

However, this new version of Melodyne, ‘Direct Note Access’ (DNA), not only allows you to change a monophonic melody line, but it will also analyse polyphonic audio, bursting the sound out into individual, manipulable parts. To give you a basic example, when you load a piano chord into the program it will separate out all the notes from the chord in front of you and allow you to change the pitch and position of each one. Take a look at this video to see for yourself…

Now as incredible as this is, I wouldn’t ordinarily write about something as geeky as new software as it’s only really of interest to us. However the ramifications for copyright and intellectual property that Melodyne DNA suggests have been gnawing away at me since I first saw it demoed, and now using it for the first time and seeing how powerful it is has sparked off these thoughts again.

A huge portion of dance music is, and always has been, based around sampling, the act of taking a portion, or ‘sample’, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording in one’s own work.
Without going into the legal ins-and-outs of sampling, Melodyne presents a brand new twist on the claims creators have against people who sample their works.

Let’s carry on with the piano chord example.

Let’s say I sample a series of piano chords from Coldplay. There are many ways we could manipulate this sample. We could pitch it up or down. We could chop it up and only use parts of it. We could reverse it. We could do all sorts of things to it, but fundamentally it’s very, very hard to alter the genetics of the sample. The notes are still the notes that the band played, the relationships between the notes are still the same and remain immutable no matter what alterations we make to them. The changes we would make to the sample are, relatively speaking, cosmetic

The confusion that Melodyne DNA throws over this situation is that you can now alter a sample fundamentally, rather than just cosmetically. If we use DNA to deconstruct every element of the Coldplay chords and rearrange them into a completely new set of notes, then alter their sequential relationships, at what point does it stop being anything to do with the band?

If we end up with notes they never played, making up chords they never played, in an order they never played, what claim do they have over the sound? Is it the texture of the sound? Is timbre a copyrightable thing? Probably not, or the 20th Century would have been full of piano players suing each other for having similar sounding recordings.

Melodyne DNA represents an absolute paradigm shift regarding intellectual property in music, as well as offering sample-based producers ways of taking advantage of the timbre of a sound without having to also steal someone else’s sense of melody or harmony.

Big subject, big ramifications. If you have any thoughts then add them in the comments section below.

Anyway, aside from that…excellent software and highly recommended. You can buy it here. Our sample library just got a new lease of life.