However, cutting-edge technology has always been at the heart of musical creation. The inhabitants of ancient Greece and Mesopotamia were no doubt exhilarated by the melodies and harmonies made possible by tuning technology which allowed the string tension of a lyre to be adjusted. Aldophe Sax’s eponymous creation of the 1840s was a pioneering combination of brass and woodwind technologies, for instance featuring keywork that includes a mechanical logic gate to facilitate more accurate octave tuning. The use of cutting-edge multi-track recorders is thought by many to have been key to the success of the Beatles, and many modern musicians and producers rely on high-performance-yet-affordable computers that allow for hundreds of audio tracks to be layered and manipulated with ease.
Moreover, the link between music and technological development does not stop at creation. The Beatles’ US performances in 1964 being all but drowned out by screaming fans drove rapid change in amplifier technology, and Spotify’s modern dominance of music consumption is predicated on the development of fast and reliable communication networks.
In recent years, the explosion of research and investment into artificial intelligence represents a further opportunity for development in musical technologies. For instance, a recent patent application by Emotional Perception AI Ltd describes a system which uses an artificial neural network (ANN) to suggest subjectively similar songs for a user to listen to by measuring objective properties of a target song (or, in the words of the patent application, to find semantically similar data files to a target file using their objectively measurable properties).
This application has stoked debate over what types of innovation should qualify for patent protection in the first place. The current law is relatively clear: unless a computer program it provides a contribution that is technical in nature, it cannot be patented due to Section 1(2) of the UK Patents Act 1977. In Emotional Perception’s case, a surprising finding before the High Court that Emotional Perception’s system did qualify for patent protection was squarely overturned by the Court of Appeal last year, and whilst the case has been referred up to the Supreme Court there are few observers who expect radical divergence from the judgment authored by Birss LJ (who is a veteran of the debate around patentability of computer implemented inventions).
What remains up for discussion is whether, as AI innovations become increasingly present in all sectors of technology, the law should be updated. Sax patented his inventions despite their fundamentally non-technical goals, so why should innovative uses of ANNs to better create or appreciate music not be afforded this protection?