Before AI Music: The Piano-Roll Fight Over Human Creativity

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Who deserves credit and payment when a machine plays music? The piano-roll dispute offers a revealing history of authorship, listening and creative work. Follow Sousa's concerns, the Supreme Court's 1908 decision and Congress's 1909 compromise, then consider what those distinctions can and cannot tell us about today's AI music debate. Context: the published Artist Rights Symposium programme for 19 October 2026; no claim about unverified event outcomes. This episode uses an AI-generated narration voice. Original Diminished History narration, diagrams and four-note procedural demonstration. Illustrations are not historical photographs or facsimiles. No commercial music recording or cloned artist voice is included. Typography: approved URW Base35 fonts. Historical primary texts are paraphrased; sources below. Sources and further reading: Artist Rights Institute — Symposium 2026 https://www.artistrightsinstitute.org/symposium-2026 John Philip Sousa — The Menace of Mechanical Music (1906), MIT OCW reproduction https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21m-380-music-and-technology-contemporary-history-and-aesthetics-fall-2009/18ab3aba9fe7aa1502a55cd049333659_MIT21M_380F09_read02_sousa.pdf White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co., 209 U.S. 1 (1908) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/209/1/ Copyright Act of 1909, section 1(e) https://www.copyright.gov/history/1909act.pdf US Copyright Office — Music Licensing Reform (2005) https://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat071205.html Library of Congress — Sousa and the Talking Machine (2020) https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2020/05/sousa-and-the-talking-machine/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — The Philosophy of Music https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/ Diminished History on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClgHD8z4ITuAYqrDqn9UWnQ