A Midsummer Night's Dream (need pictures/music)

[Jake]

If the song itself is old enough to be public domain (and the midi is not an arrangement), is the midi also public domain?

It's not necessarily an easy question to answer, at least for the general case. And bear in mind that I'm not a copyright lawyer, I'm just interested in the area.

Essentially, every time someone makes a 'creative work', they have copyright over it, and you need to wait for that copyright to expire before that thing is public domain, regardless of what sources the creator drew from. So if, say, T.H. White writes a novel based on old writings about King Arthur, you can't say that just because those old original works are in public domain the new novel is as well, because White expended considerable creative effort to write his book. However, if you photocopy an ancient copy of L'mort d'Arthur, then you don't gain copyright over the photocopy because you didn't do anything creative, it was only a mechanical process.

So technically, I believe the answer is that if they perform a straight transcription from a public domain source into MIDI, from a prescribed tempo on a prescribed instrument, making no choices themselves as to the arrangement, then yes - the MIDI file is in the public domain also. However, if they play the music by hand on a MIDI keyboard into a sequencer, then they've definitely got a performance copyright; if they select a tempo or an instrument or fiddle with the arrangement of the notes at all or make any other creative decisions between original music and MIDI file, then they own a copyright over their interpretation of the piece.

So yeah. The safe option is to transcribe/play it yourself.



(On a totally unrelated note, any recommendations for sites for celtic folk music? I'm interested myself, I've been working my way through the sheet music presented here: http://www.cpmusic.com/tradmus.html , but I'm certainly interested in any other sites with collections of similar styles...)

[vlint]

Thanks for the information. Now, I just wish I had my own recording studio (I don't think my microphone will quite cut it for something professional). Back to finding soundfonts, and saving for a keyboard that will work with midis, I guess.

(On a totally unrelated note, any recommendations for sites for celtic folk music? I'm interested myself, I've been working my way through the sheet music presented here: http://www.cpmusic.com/tradmus.html , but I'm certainly interested in any other sites with collections of similar styles...)

Yep I've got lots of suggestions (the first two have tons of stuff):
• http://www.freesheetmusic.net/oneills.html
• http://www.freesheetmusic.net/dance1.html
• http://www.freesheetmusic.net/top100irish.html
• http://www.contemplator.com/carolan/caroltun.html
• http://www.irishpage.com/songs/carolan/carolmid.htm
• http://www2.redhawk.org:8080/irish/index.pl
• http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/
• http://www.tadpoletunes.com/sitemap/sitemap.htm
• http://www.thesession.org/
• http://members.aol.com/kitchiegal/kmmusic3.html
• http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Mead ... table.html

Don't let the freesheetmusic.net site scare you; despite the domain name it managed to get, it actually does have cool free stuff (midis, pdf files, etc.), directly on the site.

I would recommend the second link most, I think. I particularly like A Fig for a Kiss as seen there. The Butterfly is another one of that style. The Snowy Path, by Altan is another of a similar style to those two (but it's not public domain, and thus you probably won't find it in these links, unless someone put it up on thesession.org).

A few of the sites above are just for midis. I don't know if you're looking for those, though. You can turn midis into sheet music (although it's not quite as neat, usually). Try Noteworthy player, Anvil Studio, and vanBasco's Karaoke Player. The last one mentioned doesn't show sheet music, but it does show keys pressed (and it is my all-around favorite midi player; I just wish it did UTF-8 encoding for the karaoke).

Also, if you're into Christmas songs (some of those are Celtic style), you should try out the following link:
http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/
It has tons of sheet music.

Mudcat.org might have some cool stuff, too.

I hope this helps.

[DaFool]

Wow, thanks! Dunno if I'll be up to manually transcribing the sheet music into Anvil Studio (I don't have a music keyboard... it's true, lol!) but Celtic stuff interests me. And if Jake said is true, then I can technically transcribe something, then change timings / instruments, add effects, and it will still be considered a "performance" copyrighted to me, correct?

edit: Oh my. I'll be spending a lot of time at home listening to a big playlist, and hopefully make a decent attempt at converting some of them to Enya / new age style.

[vlint]

Wow, thanks! Dunno if I'll be up to manually transcribing the sheet music into Anvil Studio (I don't have a music keyboard... it's true, lol!) but Celtic stuff interests me. And if Jake said is true, then I can technically transcribe something, then change timings / instruments, add effects, and it will still be considered a "performance" copyrighted to me, correct?

edit: Oh my. I'll be spending a lot of time at home listening to a big playlist, and hopefully make a decent attempt at converting some of them to Enya / new age style.

Yeah, manually doing things with Anvil Studio might not be the best idea—unless you just want to change the tempo and/or instruments.

I might suggest using LilyPond (if you're up to learning it), and/or ABC (with something like ABCEdit). You can get midis out of those. LilyPond is more for sheet music than midis, but if you have midis in mind and don't care about the sheet music, it's not too bad for them.

I've discovered midi2ly recently. This will convert midis into LilyPond source files. Of course, it might not work well for something human-played. However, it's fairly easy to use. Just download LilyPond from the website. Install it. Go to your command prompt, to the directory of the midi you would like to convert, and type midi2ly someMidi.mid and it should convert it. Then, compile the ly file with LilyPond and you'll have a pdf file, hopefully. Hmm, it's not perfect, though; on some midis the durations won't be right but the notes still will be (so, if you know the song, it shouldn't be hard to play, at least).

There's also something called midi2abc, though it's old and for DOS and maybe Linux.

There are a lot of cool tools for converting abc files into midis; you don't necessarily need anything other than abc2midi (or whatever it's called) and a text editor (plus knowledge of abc notation). ABC is mostly for melodies and lead sheets, though, so if you want something more complicated, I'd suggest finding some good midi writing software, or even trying out LilyPond for the purpose (although if you've never used LilyPond your bound to have some questions).

Hmm, anyone know of a more advanced format than midi, even if it's not popular? If that format could convert to some form of compressed audio, it would be very nice for visual novels.