We would need a voice, and instructions about what it should say or do.
If your voice sounds different from some other voice, we ought at least have some generic modifiable voices or categories of voice, so we can categorise your voice as being either a voice of a certain category or a voice such as one might get using a certain set of filters/modifiers as input to a voice simulator.
Basically if voice synthesisers cannot yet produce a voice such as yours they need improving, and we want the open source version of such a voice-synthesiser.
We do not want a recording of you singing the song with your closed source human voice, we want the instructions as to how a voice is to be used to sing the song, maybe with some hints as to what kind of voice might perform it best for what kind of audience. (Maybe some audiences would prefer to hear it in a gruff voice, others in a soproano voice, others in a male voice, others in a femail voice, others in a unisex or roboti voice and so on and so on.)
We want source code for how to go about singing such a song.
-MarkM-
I wonder do you want any participation of real artists in the devcoin project?You just said you would prefer an open source voice synthesizer instead of those closed source singers.  I installed some of the open source voice synthesizers some months ago on a linux server.... they all sound horribly unrealistic, but I'll admit that they are hilarious and nonetheless funny to play with. lol I hope your opinion is not representative of the devcoin community? |
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The music I create will be free, because I decide so. But the means to create my music are certainly not free. (over the years I spend a few thousand dollars on music software alone, how much money I put in music hardware and instruments I will not tell you because you would cry.)
That is what we are trying to save other people from having to go through!Yes, back in the dark ages before music software was free and open source, when music hardware was not free open source hardware you could print yourself using your home 3-D printer, and instruments were not free open source software or free open source instructions for free open source 3-D printers to print, you suffered horrible expense. No one should have to go through that! This project is all about trying to ensure future generations will not have to go through that! -MarkM- Maybe you misread me. I don't regret one penny I invested in musical hardware and instruments. My older instrument I even consider a valuable asset. I enjoy it every time I sit in front of it. I was just saying that some people might find what I invested a really big amount of money. Amounts they normally associate with the purchase of a new car, etc... There are old instruments, hundreds of years old. You surely heard of the stradivari violin. I for one like harpsichords, and any harpsichord fan will tell you that only the real thing has that special sound. No reproduction whatsoever comes even near to a real harpsichord. (I know I have tested every single harpsichord simulation that came out in the last 15 years) So please forgive me, but I have to chuckle when I hear you propose 3-D printers (that don't even exist yet aside from very basic prototypes) that will recreate whole instruments. Oh and how much will a hypothetical 3-D printer cost, that can here and now recreate a musical instrument will all it's nuances? Wait, they don't exist yet. I see...  I try to live in the here and now (what you call "dark ages"), and won't let dreams about a hypothetical future cloud my judgment. Sorry, but you start to sound like those guys from the zeitgeist movement. |
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Please watch Star Trek...
I watch star trek all the time. I like scifi, but don't let it influence my judgment when it comes to science, especially physics.  |
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For writing, think about fonts.
We do not care what font is used at display time to display an article, we are free to use any font we choose to use.
Oh I absolutely care. There are classical pieces that sound divine when played with a harpsichord, but sound terribly inappropriate when played with a piano. To get a free open source Mona Lisa we would need to discover what brushes and paints were used, how, and in what sequence, to produce that painting.
We would then be free to see what the Mona Lisa would have looked like if it were performed using different brushes, different paints, different sequences.
You assume that every creation process is quantizable into things like strokes, movements, pressure points, whatever... this sure is true for code or text. But much like some music instruments can't be controlled and reproduced by MIDI, many artforms have myriads of such miniscule subprocesses (the artist is often not even aware of) that you would need hypothetical scifi devices to be able to "catch" what happens during the creation process. (Earlier I heard you mention star trek replicators replicating a violin. I don't think wishful thinking about future developments will help us make good decisions about devcoins present.) |
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I think it's important to understand that in contrast to pieces of text, music has to be listened to (meaning with your ears) to be able to review and judge its quality.
lol Bravo on that insight. :p But I know what you mean, they'll have to be admins to listen to the tracks, which will be time consuming. At least until there are enough listeners who can rate the tracks in an automated way like imdb. I would really enjoy rating music, and even giving feedback being primarily a musician myself. This whole idea of devtome moving into music is really exciting, I have a bunch of tracks I'd love to put up on this. No no no.  If you think that listening to the music takes a long time, imagine how long it will take to read the score and perform the music yourself to be able to judge its merit. (because that's what markm is proposing) That's the point I was trying to make. Maybe it did go under. |
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Open Source is ultimately about performance, not the results that a particular performance results in.
I don't know yet. I haven't made my mind up yet. Is devcoin more about open source, or more about free content? And when was the decision made, and by whom? Often those two terms are used interchangeably although they represent different things. Should devcoin strive for a balance between those two, especially when it comes to difficult (open source wise) content like music, or are we going to measure everything with the same yardstick? When it comes to music, if you really want to be all open source about it, you would first need to create all the necessary open source music making tools, because the ones that are available at the moment are not considered at all by professional musicians. This should take a few years. So if you were to go with the open source music making software that is available at the moment you might not attract the kind of musician you want. Ofcourse the situation could change over time. |
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Open Source is ultimately about performance, not the results that a particular performance results in.
So really what we want is not a recording of the output of a performance, such as a static image or a specific bit-sequence that represents a noise or sound, but, rather, the instructions necessary to perform that performance or produce some particular output/recording of a performance.
Open Source is all about performing, also known as executing.
So for a digitally painted painting someone painted with a paint program, what we should be wanting is the full recording of all the brush-strokes along with the code of all the brushes and so on.
Because our freedom given us by our free open source license should include the freedom to modify any of those brush-strokes or brushes, so we can see what that painting would look like if we moved our brush differently in a given moment of stroking a brush, or used a different brush or a different paint for certain of the brush-strokes, and so on.
Thus ultimately any static flat image or end-result-of-performance soundtrack is not really what we want for free open source at all, as that is simply a snapshot that does not include the source code, the instructions, the which brush or instrument to use and how to use it, that is the source code we need in order to duplicate / replicate / re-perform the thing.
-MarkM-
No problem. Especially for music created with a sequencer, it is easy to not only output a WAV file of the music (you can listen to) but also a MIDI-file that gives you information about what keys where pressed at what time and for how long. This should work easily for every MIDI-capable instrument. I think it's important to understand that in contrast to pieces of text, music has to be listened to (meaning with your ears) to be able to review and judge its quality. Much like you are using the appropriate sense (your eyes) to review and judge a piece of text, you should apply the appropriate sense when it comes to music. Music has a psychological component to it that will simply not be existent in pure text or score form. Good luck reviewing that. That's why an acoustic representation of the work will let you much faster decide if the piece of music is decent or not. |
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I hereby happily announce that I have registered
devmusic.org (for compositions, melodies, jingles, etc..)
and
devsound.org (for sounds, noises, voices, etc)
Wouldn't it be better to merge the portal, devtome, devmusic, and devsound under one domain, if we're paying DVC over many mediums? e.g. write.devcoin.org, music.devcoin.org, sound.devcoin.org, portal.devcoin.org, etc? I don't think devcoin.org should ever strive to be more than an entry portal that informs and redirects people to all the different dedicated servers (with their specialized admin- and userfrontends, and forums).. But those are just my 2 cents. |
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I hereby happily announce that I have registered
devmusic.org (for compositions, melodies, jingles, etc..)
and
devsound.org (for sounds, noises, voices, etc)
Wouldn't it be better to merge the portal, devtome, devmusic, and devsound under one domain, if we're paying DVC over many mediums? e.g. write.devcoin.org, music.devcoin.org, sound.devcoin.org, portal.devcoin.org, etc? Feel free to create any appropriate subdomain and point it to the ip of the dedicated server that will host the respective category of content. I don't think that names will be a problem. But trying to put every different content style under one roof will be an impossibility. That's why I am willing to create something outside of devtome. |
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People of Devcoin.
I hereby happily announce that I have registered
devmusic.org (for compositions, melodies, jingles, etc..)
and
devsound.org (for sounds, noises, voices, etc)
and will work as the serveradmin and manager of these two sites.
I will now create websites similar to the design of devcoin.org and will additionaly experiment with a frontend and backend for uploading, reviewing and distribution of music files.
I have been an ambitioned hobby musician for over 30 years, and will create and upload a few pieces of music and sound that will be free for everyone to use.
My dayjob is a flash, php and javascript programmer, and I have been working as selfemployed programmer since 2005.
Please stay tuned. I will post progress here first.
Thanks for your attention.
George
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With CC BY-SA wouldn't that just mean that whatever music the artist posted could be remixed under those terms however someone wanted? And if the artist felt really inspired they could also post the ingredients to the track, such as samples, separate vocal tracks, transcripts, etc? I think some Jamendo ( http://www.jamendo.com/en) artists release under CC BY-SA. Yes exactly, that is my definition too. My music is free for sharing and "tweaking" even for commercial products, as long as proper attribution is given. (e.g a link to some devcoin sound repository wherever that would be) What is NOT allowed is that someone just takes my piece of work and sells it as his. He must do enough transformation so as it is not anymore an exact clone of my work. PS: posting a reply on bitcointalk is incredibly frustrating today...  I had to retry 10 times... |
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Another thing I start wondering: I have seen that the devcoin wallet looks different than most other coin wallets, because the creator of the devcoin wallet deliberately ommited the usage of the QT library, because it is proprietary. Well, atleast that's my reasoning why the wallet looks the way it does, or am I just paranoid? Now let's analyze how incredibly self sabotaging this would be if I was to create free music without using any proprietary piece of hardware or software. Because then I can surrender and abandon my ambition for creating free music for devcoin-network immediately. Are my fears justified?  The music I create will be free, because I decide so. But the means to create my music are certainly not free. (over the years I spend a few thousand dollars on music software alone, how much money I put in music hardware and instruments I will not tell you because you would cry.) |
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if I create free music, it means I provide the sample materials (WAV files), the midi files, and descriptions about the devices (hardware, software) I used to create that specific sound.
How I distributed the sound on say 8 channels, and what panning, eq and dynamics I used in the mixing. Now THAT does make sense and can be considered open source.
But how do I describe the 10'000 hours I spend training my skills to be able to create the music in the first place?
If "open source" means a person can learn how to reproduce my work, doesn't this mean that he has to learn how to be a professional musician first?
So there is a line that can't be crossed. Open source with music means I explain every step I did, but how do I transmit an explanation for how I moved my vocal chords to create the sound?
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@georgem: No site exists like devtome for music, so nobody has earned DVC from it.  There are not enough admins for a music site. It's not just that. For art and music in particular, free is not the same as open-source or at least the scale of licensing matters a lot. Open-source means being relinquishing the 'source'. Markm wrote about this in the past, that such forms might amount to the core or stepped design process as well as the finished article. So yes that requires people and expertise, but is also requires artists being willing to release the model, layers, components - source. To be able to broadly utilise open-source people have to be ablt to tweak it, change it, adjust it without necessarily going back to the originator. You can't do that with a complied or locked finality without having all the constituent bits that make up the ends. Yes ok, but wait a minute. If I were to be a voice artist, willing to create copyright free (creative commons) voice samples , does open source in the broader sense mean that I have to give the world access to my vocal chords, so they can tweak my voice the way they like? At what point does this argument sound completely ridiculous? I think a devtome for musicians would have to be about free music, meaning the artist has agreed to give the music away for free (well not really, he hopes to earn some DVC) and if available free transcriptions of the notes played (if composition, etc) but open source is not really valid at all with an artform like music, because the musician himself is the source, and he is not going to be able to share his body and spirit not even if he wanted to. So maybe we shouldn't be so fixed on this definition of open source, because some artforms will simply not work with that definition anyway. |
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so, can someone answer me this question:
to this date, has anyone ever earned DVC by creating free music or sound?
With free music I mean a composition, and with free sound I mean stuff like noises, voices, etc..
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That’s not what it’s about at all. I don't think there's any particular reason why it can't be done, it's that pragmatically it's very difficult to do properly. There are currently people involved in signing up writers, others who vet articles for plagiarism and general copy, others who categorise and organise the site, others who administer marketing and revenue, others who host and maintain it. That's all to build the site as a repository, supporting open-source content and more recently revenue generation to be able to put back into building devcoin and what it's about. And that’s still not yet enough. The main aspect is that Devcoin is about open-source. This extends to Devtome. This means there's an issue of copyright. A text written in a foreign language, if it's your own, and translated would be fine in principle. But does an english translation of a german text written by somebody else breach the original author's copyright? Probably. The same problem exists for submitting foreign language writings. There has to be a means of ensuring they're original because once on Devtome it's open-source, and this will take a pretty significant number of people to monitor - many more than now. People can offer to translate from german to english, if anybody's interested in taking them up on it: http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=devtome_translatorsEven on translations, that has to work in the same way as for submitting english work. You can't just take a foreign language text, translate it word for word into english and submit it as original. Checks on this aren't perfect, but there are checks. But existing foreign language articles could be improved upon and submit as 'collated' which means it's based on another article, but rewritten in your own words with improvements, or bringing together various sources for example - and making it clear what those sources/original articles were. It's still quite early days with devtome. I'm not sure what to say except that as a project started by english speakers it's going to take a while until there's enough of a trusted foreign language base to translate and check articles. You may be open, honest and understand the ethos of open-source but not everybody is. As you can probably imagine people are quite hot on checking that other's aren't abusing the system with complete nonsense, effectively giving a growing foundation of accountability. Even then it's still sometimes necessary to delete/edit writings. That's difficult enough in english and just not possible in other languages until more non-english natives get involved over time. As Devtome is evolving from simple earnings for words to earnings for quality and readership, that builds the system towards one that might later be able to incorporate more. But imagine if now it was open to all languages without a base of global native speakers with the added ability to actual vet the submissions. I’d guess even wikipedia had to begin in one language. Thanks for trying to clarify. I still don't understand it 100%, but new (more general and not necessarily related) questions arise, since I consider myself still a devcoin-noob. For example this link you gave : http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=devtome_translatorsI have no idea how I could have ever found this link on my own. What other devtome-site does link to this specific subsite? That is one of the big problems I have with devtome. I understand there is a lot of knowledge hidden in it, but I really struggle to find all the right articles and lists, because there seems to be no suitable structure behind it, to make it easy for me to find the information I am looking for. For example I can't even make out on devtome where the separation line is between the wiki-style articles and all the devtome-related articles and discussions that are going on. Also when is something true content (like a wiki article) , and when is it more like a news-piece / opinion of somebody (like for example http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=what_does_dogecoin_teach_us) I can't imagine to see http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=what_does_dogecoin_teach_us ever on wikipedia, because it wouldn't meet the criteria, it is not a descriptive article, but rather an opinion. Seriously? "What does dogecoin teach us?" could never be in an encyclopedia, but it can sure be a blogpost or a small slant in a newspaper... So does devtome just lump all the content together in one place? Encyclopedia-articles mixed with slants, blogposts and poems? Is there a structure to separate inbetween those categories? Also why does no article at all mention any source whatsoever? No links, no referalls, no sources. Is this the basic rule? To NOT post anything? I understand that a poem I write does not need any citation. But an article about the WW2 sure does. I still haven't grasped what devtome tries to achieve (other then distributing DVC to the participants)... is it more a wiki (encyclopedia) or more just text-submits of all sorts (for example I could write a poem or fiction) If devtome wants to have both, it really should separate those content styles.I will need more time, I admit I am a little confused. But it's quite a struggle... (sorry for this messy deranged post, I am just reflecting my state of mind, lol) |
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Georgem: I think a German translation is a good idea for the same reasons others gave, if the additional management is not too much hassle. But if it happened think it would be best to wait until there's a section on the portal (like a FAQ) which makes clear devtome is in english only.
Now wait, did I hear that correctly? devtome is english only, but not devcoin. So I understand that the admins of devtome can decide what they want and don't want to have on devtome. But what if I were to create my own portal (similar to devtome) and focus it on the german language. Would it be possible to merge this new site into devcoin, or is this the only marriage from now on and forever: devoin <--> devtome and they decided now and forever to be married and reproduce happily in english language only? |
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Georgem: I think a German translation is a good idea for the same reasons others gave, if the additional management is not too much hassle. But if it happened think it would be best to wait until there's a section on the portal (like a FAQ) which makes clear devtome is in english only.
I think it would be a pity (and wrong) to have devcoin only allow english texts. Imagine wikipedia in only one language? Is it atleast thinkable that we have english texts but also some kind of translation departement that coordinates the translation of all those english texts? So every english text can have translations. But no text can exist in german only, since there always must exist an english version first. That would be easy to manage database- or id-wise. Since there is always the english text as parent-node, and all the translations of this parent-node are simply child-nodes and can't ever be parent-nodes. |
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 Here the first page as a test translation into german. It has some errors, I just wanted to show a first impression. It would be great to have country flags at the bottom of the site. It has some problems with the upper menu buttons, since german needs a little more longer words there, that's what made the layout burst. |
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Hi all, I am happy to report that I have finished the devcoin.org site redesign: http://devcoin.org/Thanks to Weisoq for his wiki page and whoever created the Devcoin press release that went out a couple of weeks ago - really saved me a lot of time compiling the content. Let me know what you guys think - I will be sticking around as the new Devcoin web guy so I can certainly make edits and additions going forward. I like the new website so much. I would like to make a german translation for this site. (and continue to update the translation as the website grows) Where can I sign up for that? Can I do this as my first job earning dvc? Please explain how I should proceed. I am sure a german translation will help a) rank the site better within google b) bring devcoin to the german speaking people of germany, austria and swiss. (all big fans of cryptocoins and opensource) |
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