It's sad to say that this will be my final blog post as a student in the Honors American Literature class. Innovation time has been one of the coolest in/out of class learning experience. I've gotten to explore things I am interested in not just for a single project or for busy work during the week before a long break it school. It has been all year and something I looked forward to every week. While my ideas bounced around a lot throughout the year, it was all focused around music. One of the biggest things I did learn is trying to do anything with actual music is a huge headache. For that reason, if someone is really trying to create something that requires music to function, I would not recommend it at this stage. The music industry just simply seems to made to make it as difficult as possible to legally use music. To me this seems wrong as it is so easy to illegally use music. In conclusion, I don't think I would take this route again. I was really hoping to see tangible results at the end of the year, like an app or a model of an app but I realize now that that is not realistic. Despite all this negative talk, I still took a lot out of what I did. Doing the research the past few weeks on musician's influences and those they have influenced has been fascinating. I've gotten to learn a lot about some of my favorite bands and a lot about block coding on Scratch. I feel if in the future anyone needed an expert in either of these fields for a future innovation project I could be of some use to them.
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In the past week I have continued the chugging along of picking an artist, finding out their inspirations and finding out who they have inspired. It is a little bit tedious but I have come along some interesting information in the process. I have the list to around 50 different artists now, varying in genre. To make things easier in the long run, I took the list and put everything in alphabetical order. When it comes to putting everything into scratch is another story. I have run into problems with this program where things run incredibly slow if there is too much information running at once. To get over this problem, I consulted Andy because he seems to be an expert at things like this. So next innovation period I will talk with him and see if he has any good ideas with that. I don't want to input anything into scratch until I have a set plan with it. This will save me some time as well as give me more time to find other artist information. I have a good foundation of information to input going.
I'm at the point of just giving up on Sony Music. They are useless and to expect a response from them seems unrealistic at this point in time. That being said, there is still work I can do, it's just not quite as exciting. From Sony, I compiled a long list of well known artists who they have as an option to license music from. So in the past week or so I have been taking this list of artists, close to 30 in total, and finding as many of the artists who have influence them and as many artists they have influenced as possible. This is a little bit tedious, and requires quite a bit of internet searching, it is interesting work and I have gotten a lot done thus far. Due to a rather crazy week coming up (AP Stats Research Project data collection and the Capstone presentation on top of the usual track meets), I don't see myself actually inputting this data into Scratch yet, as this is a time consuming effort. Instead, I will dedicate the little free time I have to getting more than just ~30 artists influences and influencers.
It has been awhile and I still have not heard back from Sony Music. At this point, I am considering retrying on requesting to download some of the music. Since I am currently stuck in a waiting phase, I am going to look back on the scratch page and see if there are any improvements that I can make so that it functions better once music is actually added. This could include testing code to see how the program would run with actual music or aesthetic improvements.
I again am a little bit stuck on my innovation project, in a waiting phase. I sent in a request to download one song and explained the situation I was in, including what and how I intended on using the song. I am not entirely sure if a single request for download allows me to download any song, so I am waiting on more. If I do have to make a request for each individual song (81 to be exact), this may take a while. Hopefully the response comes a lot quicker than expected, like the original music license request did. For now it is fingers crossed!
So some mildly good news. Sony music got back to me much quicker than originally expected. This essentially gives me a music license for any music made by Sony. However, when I did some digging, it appears that there is a sort of additional license needed to actually use the music? There is a short little application to obtain this synchronization license from the publisher of the song/composition. On the front page of the application it states: "For NONPROFIT requests, please include a copy of your 501c3 form along with this request. Please note that if your request is approved, there is an administrative charge of minimum $500. Sony Music does not grant gratis (free) nonprofit requests." This is clearly not an option, as I am not running a nonprofit and I don't have a minimum of $500. However, exploring further that you can also request a track download. For this, of course a reason for the request is needed. The site asks that one: "Please explain why you need a download of this track." I wasn't really expecting this to happen. I am unsure on if I should fill out the application and see what happens, or just go straight to requesting a track download.
Hi, hello. So I am currently stuck. After spending the previous innovation time research fair-use policy for music, and it does not look like there are any potential loopholes. So without getting a music license from a music company, there's really not anything I can do legally. I applied for a music license at Sony Music, but from everything I have read it could take as long as three weeks to hear back from them. None of the other major music labels made it all that easy to apply for a license. I am wondering if, because of the amount of time it could take just to get bad news, I should try to take this project in a new direction. I have definitely learned that the music industry is very uptight and strict.
Okay, so since my last post I have essentially figured out everything I want in this step of Scratch. All nine boxes can be clicked, turning into nine totally different boxes. The only thing that needs to be added now is music, which is up to 90 different songs. However, a major problem I have just ran into and totally didn't think about earlier is that in order to use music legally, I have to have expressed permission from the artist or associates of the artist. I don't really want to do it illegally, so I'm kind of stuck right now. If anyone has any ideas on how to move forward from here, it would be greatly appreciated.
A decent amount of stuff has happened with my innovation project since my last blog post. I have continued to work on the "structure" part of the project. I need to do more of this than anything before adding anything musical at all. I'll give a simple summary of what my project on Scratch looks like right now. The page opens with just a screen that has a start button. When it is clicked, the screen changes to one with 9 identical boxes on it. When your mouse hovers over the box, it changes the same color for all nine boxes (at this point, which I hope to add in soon, a song will play, with each of the nine boxes playing a song from a different genre. When you hear a song that sounds appealing to you, click on it). When a box is clicked, for a split second the background will change to another color, and then all of the 9 boxes will turn to that color as well (the background returns to a normal color at that point). Each of the nine original boxes will lead to a new set of different colored nine boxes (I need to add into these boxes a color change when the mouse hovers over. At this point music from the same genre of the box previously clicked will appear in all of the nine present boxes). I am still working with what exactly will come up at this point of the experience also. At the same time I have been doing some research of famous songs from each genre, to kind of determine what will go in each box. This will be a somewhat lengthy process.
Hi all, back this week with some updates on the innovation project. I think one of the hardest parts of this project, and what I worked on this week was dividing music up into genres and subgenres. This is necessary to make my idea work like I want it to, so I have been doing some research here and there about it. I have a general idea of genres of music that belong together, but putting it all together exactly how I want is going to be difficult. I will try my best to figure this all out soon!
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AuthorThis page is apart of my Honors American Literature innovation project at my high school. Archives
May 2017
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