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I wonder... can you be a Topic-Murderer of a person? If that makes sense?

I remember on the first forum I ever went to, I had a friend there and we'd talk over PMs a lot and post in the same threads and get along great. And then I sent an email to him (I was sending him a chunky animated GIF that wouldn't attach to a PM), and that was the last I ever heard from him. He just disappeared after that, and I worried that I was the reason he'd stopped posting anywhere. I know it made no logical sense, but I had that nagging feeling that I'd somehow ruined something or made a bad impression, and that's why he just poofed. Never to be seen again.

I'm not quite sure what you meant there about the public domain and the comparison of Beethoven, Jacob... not all classical music is old enough to be in the public domain, and the Pi Symphony was written in the 1990s, and its composer is still alive.

edit: never mind, I think I got you now. You mean to say that if a contemporary composer were to use something as old as Pi in their work, it would be like using something in the public domain such as a quotation from Beethoven. I think that's fair.

(To be honest, classical musicians have done a lot of sneaky quoting of their living contemporaries, even sometimes very mean and unflattering quotation. Stravinsky's Nightingale rips a bird-sounding passage from Wagner's ring cycle, Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra makes a grotesque reference to the march theme in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad". But that tends to fall under any or all of artistic license, parody, or the copyright laws not having been implemented as seriously in their day.)

Thing is, I listened to both of the recordings and they do share the same "tune". They develop the tune in very different ways, but it is the theme at the centre of both of their ideas. Also, both artists used the idea of creating a chord progression based on the digits of Pi. That means their "accompaniment" to the tune also bears some similarity.

Personally, I don't think that either of these composers directly stole the idea from each other. They both extrapolated from the pattern 3141592653589..., and made the obvious choice to let 1=1st note of a scale, 2=2nd note, 3=3rd note and so on to produce a tune. I think once the idea enters a composer's head, "hey, let's make a tune from Pi" that would be the logical way to go about it.

I agree with Yoyti that it is unfathomable that a composer could attempt to copyright a number. Needless to say, Erickson did not invent Pi.

The matter becomes tricky, though, because it's hard to define what exactly Erickson owns. 3141592 is not a tune when it is just numbers on a page. But it is a tune when you play it as a sequence of notes. That is the innovation that Erickson claims to have done. But is it enough? Is making a number into a catchy tune enough of a transformation to warrant it an original and creative sample of music?

There are some other differences in the tune, though. Erickson varied the rhythm of it, so when the theme is first introduced it sounds tentative but exciting, good for the opening of a symphony. Blake played it as a constant ticking stream of notes (he names his metronome speed at the beginning of the piece!), giving it a contemplative and self-consciously mathematical appeal. Both composers made different decisions about how they would handle the sequence of notes and, rhythm being the most important element that can be creatively varied when the pitch has already been set, this indicates that the composers creatively used the source code of numbers in a different way.

So, I don't think Erickson has that much of a meaningful claim to sue Blake over using Pi as inspiration for writing a piece of music. Pi exists independently of the composer's creation, and the mere sequence of notes and chords based on its numbers is basically the only thing that links the two pieces of music together.

Four years ago I was in year 10... that was 2007. I was super Harry Potter crazy because that was the year that Deathly Hallows was to come out. I read and wrote a lot of crackpot theories and I loved it.

And I drew a lot. My old art school had closed down, and that was sad, and I wasn't doing an art subject at school until second semester, so for the first half of the year I made myself draw a whole digital painting every weekend. (Or most weekends anyway.) That was epic, I remember. By the middle of the semester, I felt like I could paint anything, anything at all.

Gee, and those paintings would take between four and ten hours of work... every weekend. That was all before I filled up my Saturdays with hours and hours of orchestra practice.

And I used to do my painting in clunky old Paint Shop Pro 7, while listening to classical music through my headphones. Although the texture I got from painting in PSP7 was sometimes yucky and oddly pixellated, I still miss some of the "feel" of using that brush tool. Namely, I love the way it linked pressure sensitivity to brush opacity... AND allowed the artist to build up greater opacity by running the same stroke over itself multiple times without lifting the pen from the tablet. If I try to do the same thing in Photoshop, I just continue to get a glaze of about 50% opacity unless I press really really hard with my tablet pen, or lift up the pen and lay another separate stroke over the top of the previous one. For that reason, the move to Photoshop CS3 in 2009 took me a lot of grumbling and getting used to, I remember. (But I don't regret it because PS is awesome and makes things look awesome.)

...What did I do in the second half of 2007? I had a work experience week with an artist (a magnificent pastel artist, Judy Drew). I brought in a painting I was doing as a 50th-birthday gift for my favourite violin-teacher/conductor/mentor person, and set myself up on an easel in the artist's studio and painted the time away. It was a very pleasant work experience. And she was a nice lady. I wasn't very useful to her when she actually gave me work like sorting through her filing system.

Hmm... flugelhorn. And euphonium.

Ah, my apologies. I... don't know why I brought it up.

I found this really cool thing that one of the articles linked to - Ancient Lives, an interactive tool that lets you help decipher ancient papyrus fragments that have until now been undeciphered and aren't even in order at all. I guess it's not really a "game" as such, more like a crowdsourcing project, but it's awesome. They've discovered a lost play by Euripedes, and an apocryphal gospel already.

I just wish they had stuff like this in Latin, or if only I knew Greek. <3 Then I'd spend like half the time trying to recognise the words written on the fragments.

edit: Ninja'd by Komori!