Riehl and Rubin’s work is provocative on several levels. One, it raises some of the same issues about originality that haunt many discussions of creativity. A recent 99 Percent Invisible podcast episode about the song “Who Let the Dogs Out” provided an especially evocative example of the possibility of unintentional duplication. Ben Sisto, an artist who spent a decade tracing the origins of the woof-woof-woof hook, found variation after variation of that horrible song throughout musical history, some seemingly connected by a chain of transmission, others not at all. “One of the big myths we tell ourselves about art is that it is made by individuals, and that myth is what the art market is propped up on,” Sisto told the show’s hosts. He’s come to believe instead that it is impossible to reliably distinguish what people invent from what they borrow. “I think that all these ideas apply to every piece of creative work ever made,” Sisto concluded in the episode. “It’s just about the very nature of art and life.”

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On another level, the melody project asks some interesting questions about machine creation. Is writing some software to output MIDI melodies to a hard drive the same as if you’d created the song, played it on your xylophone, and uploaded it to SoundCloud? Did Riehl and Rubin free music from restriction, or did they infringe on millions of copyrights?

At the very least, the work highlights the long-standing flaws of the current music-copyright system. But legal experts were decidedly less enthusiastic about whether it would actually help musicians in a live-fire copyright case.

“I just don’t get it,” Lawrence Lessig, an eminent copyright scholar at Harvard Law School, told me in an email. “Whether or not melodies can be represented in math, they are not just math. So that seems like a dead end.”

Lessig did agree that it’s unfair that anyone can be dinged for “copying” work even if they could not be shown to have consciously done so. “The whole doctrine of subconscious copying is absurd. So I get the motivation,” he said.

Kristelia García, a law professor at the University of Colorado, saw things in mostly the same way. “It’s an interesting thought experiment,” she told me in an email. “And I think it does a good job of exposing the absurd point we’ve reached in music copyright infringement.” But she didn’t think the project could prevent copyright-infringement suits over melodies. “I am not at all convinced it does what they hope it will do (i.e., give artists a free pass out of infringement suits) since so many of their melodies are almost certainly already ‘owned’ by someone else,” she said.

Undaunted by the somewhat chilly responses from copyright lawyers, Riehl and Rubin are expanding their range of notes and starting to account for rhythm. Ultimately, Riehl hopes that legislation, not coding projects, can reform how copyright works in the United States. He would not want to see their melody project adjudicated in court. “A better place to do it is in Congress, to modify the copyright law in a way that makes sense,” he said.