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A thought experiment about time travel as a musician

Bluemount Score

Bluemount Score

Senior Member
Suppose you are a musician and could travel back in time. Suddenly you are 10 or more years ahead of the present. Maybe even 100 years.

Many of your current favorite songs and melodies from the future have not yet been released at this time, but you still have the melodies in your head.

Since no one can claim copyright over the musical ideas at this point in the past, you're safe to use your favorite tunes before someone else comes up with them in a few years, maybe change them up a bit, maybe make a more or less exact copy, just how you like. Maybe you get famous with "your" unlimited supply of fantastic musical ideas.

Would you steal ideas from the future that aren't your own? No one would notice, but it's theft. Or would it be?
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Not to wrinkle spacetime on this, but having the basic melody, or even an entire arrangement doesn't necessarily buy your ticket to success. A couple thoughts as long as we are daydreaming (I"m a big fan of daydreaming):

1) If you are preceding the writing or recording of a hit by much at all, the world may not be ready for it.
2) I love Van Halen, Rush, Thomas Newman, James Newtom Howard, Elton John, etc etc. Even if I had notated versions of their biggest hits, I don't have the collaborators, the gatekeepers, the raw horsepower in my hands, to create such amazing things. An approximation, sure, but as those pieces would standout as different from anything I could create on my own, I'd be limited to whatever I could recollect from the present, in the past.
3) The recording or musical tech might not exist yet. Just saying, for many decades, everyone was constantly seeking the newest and best recording studios and tech in order to be cutting edge. It's hard to be cutting edge if you are still years away from that edge.

All my negative comments aside, I've had the same thought, haha. This thought experiment should also make us revere those amazing artists that much more, because unless they managed to do this, all that amazing work is tied solely to their own unique ability to make it happen.

Fun stuff though!
 
Yes, it's stealing. No, I wouldn't do it. Yes, I wish I could travel back in time before AI was imminently threatening to take my job.
 
Bluemount Score said:
When accepting a job offer, I'm also stealing someone elses future opportunity. Or when snatching the last bag of chips at a store
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Well. Has one of the other candidates already gotten the position? Or did you take the answers they gave during the interview and give them verbatim? Have you used their work without exerting any effort yourself?

The person who is the best fit is chosen for the job offer because of the work they've done and the talents they have. In a capitalist society, we're assuming that whoever gets to the last bag of chips has the right to those chips. But by taking the imperial march back in time 50 years, you've (hypothetically of course) utilized something you didn't create and presented it as something you did create. To me that's the problem.
 
Wouldn't steal/use anything I didn't create, just for self-gratification, but I would certainly have fun becoming some kind of mythical being of musical knowledge and give myself a funky name like Lydian Euclidean.
 
Depending on how far back you go, most likely any modern music you try to peddle will get rejected/ignored because it's not what people would be accustomed to hearing. Cue the scene from Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox shreds at the prom dance, resulting in dumbfounded stares from the audience, to which he concedes, "Your kids will love it."

Let's say we go back to the 1940s. 3-chord and 4-chord pop/rock songs wouldn't stand a chance, given the jazz-infused harmonies of popular big band music at the time. It's hard to imagine nowadays, but Benny Goodman was considered radical. And the further back in time you go, the more limited the cummulative musical vocabulary would be.

I'm reminded of an experience my high school physics teacher related. He said when he was 10 years old in the 1950s, he and his friends saw The Day the Earth Stood Still at a Saturday matinee. When the robot first emerged from the spaceship, he said half the audience ran screaming from the theater. He and his friends stayed, but were terrified and ducked down behind the seats in front of them. It's hard to imagine an audience, even just kids, reacting like that to any movie nowadays.

I've often wondered what the reaction would be like if I were able to take Star Wars and show it to an audience in the 1950s. Their heads would probably explode :shocked:
 
Nico5 said:
That difference may be in the eye of the beholder :grin:
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Well...no. I stated quite clearly why there was an objective difference. I do respect your opinion, but are you saying (this isn't a rhetorical question) that there is no difference between the two scenarios? The scenarios in question being:

1. Paying a ghostwriter composer to write music for you after fully informing the composer that you will get the credit for it, and

2. Copying a composer's work without their knowledge and selling it as your own without compensating the actual creator.

To me, there is a difference between these two. One involves a paid and completely disclosed agreement. The other involves using someone's music with no agreement or reimbursement.

I fail to see how this could be remotely construed as being solely "in the eye of the beholder." What is your take on the matter?
 
Onemandown said:
To me, there is a difference between these two. One involves a paid and completely disclosed agreement. The other involves using someone's music with no agreement or reimbursement.

I fail to see how this could be remotely construed as being solely "in the eye of the beholder." What is your take on the matter?
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I think this depends how you view prevailing power structures and resulting laws, regulations and other societal conventions as playing into morality that crosses time and space boundaries as proposed in the thought experiment of this thread.

As history has evolved, what's deemed fair and acceptable has, and keeps on changing. And especially around intellectual property, there's entirely different senses at the same time in different locations around the planet. The very idea of intellectual property is a relative novelty in human history. And emerging economies generally look at those as instruments of oppression.

What I'm trying to express is that authorship has been and continues to be a rather flimsy property. It's flimsy in the example of travelling back in time - and it's flimsy when travelling forward in time: Disney takes stories documented by the Grim brothers, who themselves may have been merely writers of stories originated by someone else. A significant body of classical music is based on folk melodies written by who knows who, with the classical composers getting credited and the original authors merely getting lost in time.

So in the modern example, it's currently legal to force the credit of authorship to be transferred via contractual arrangement. Not just transferring the material wealth, but actually making it perfectly fine to misrepresent the truth. But is that any less shitty than pretending to be the author in the time travel scenario?

For example in patents, the name of individuals is commonly still on patents that are wholly owned by the company that employed the inventor. I'm not a U.S. IP lawyer, so I have no idea, if that's by law or by convention, but it's most certainly different than the composer behavior shared in the video I linked.

So in a world where whoever has the power has the right to do whatever, it's perfectly fine to misrepresent authorship as long as you have the power to coerce someone into signing that deal.

So arguably our imaginary time-traveler is also in a position of extraordinary power and uses that power to misrepresent authorship.

If however you believe that misrepresentation of authorship is detestable across all times and all geographies, then the behavior of some modern composers isn't so different than the behavior of the mythical time-traveler.
 
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Funny you should ask. Many years ago I wrote a story about this exact thing. A guy in a cover band travels back in time accidently and does in fact play all the classics as his own. It was a pretty involved story that I was thinking about turning into a screenplay until Yesterday came out. Killed the whole idea as the Beatles were a big part of my story too.
 
Nico5 said:
I think this depends how you view prevailing power structures and resulting laws, regulations and other societal conventions as playing into morality that crosses time and space boundaries as proposed in the thought experiment of this thread.

As history has evolved, what's deemed fair and acceptable has, and keeps on changing. And especially around intellectual property, there's entirely different senses at the same time in different locations around the planet. The very idea of intellectual property is a relative novelty in human history. And emerging economies generally look at those as instruments of oppression.

What I'm trying to express is that authorship has been and continues to be a rather flimsy property. It's flimsy in the example of travelling back in time - and it's flimsy when travelling forward in time: Disney takes stories documented by the Grim brothers, who themselves may have been merely writers of stories originated by someone else. A significant body of classical music is based on folk melodies written by who knows who, with the classical composers getting credited and the original authors merely getting lost in time.

So in the modern example, it's currently legal to force the credit of authorship to be transferred via contractual arrangement. Not just transferring the material wealth, but actually making it perfectly fine to misrepresent the truth. But is that any less shitty than pretending to be the author in the time travel scenario?

For example in patents, the name of individuals is commonly still on patents that are wholly owned by the company that employed the inventor. I'm not a U.S. IP lawyer, so I have no idea, if that's by law or by convention, but it's most certainly different than the composer behavior shared in the video I linked.

So in a world where whoever has the power has the right to do whatever, it's perfectly fine to misrepresent authorship as long as you have the power to coerce someone into signing that deal.

So arguably our imaginary time-traveler is also in a position of extraordinary power and uses that power to misrepresent authorship.

If however you believe that misrepresentation of authorship is detestable across all times and all geographies, then the behavior of some modern composers isn't so different than the behavior of the mythical time-traveler.
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I would definitely say that unpaid and uninformed "misrepresentation of authorship" is worse than paid and informed "misrepresentation of authorship." And since these two scenarios are the ones I was addressing, I think my point comes across in a rather conclusive fashion. However, to your point about folk music, that is quite true. Composers do take existing motifs and use them in their work. While one might argue that composers usually credit the original theme, this is not always or even largely what happens, so this is an excellent point on your part. However, in this example, the folk music writers have already gotten credit for the music. Not to mention that since in the temporal timeline the variation comes after the theme, it would technically be possible for the listener to research the original melody and find it.

My view is that it is unethical to carbon copy someone's work without crediting the author. I should hope that we all share this view.
 
Just go to the Performance Samples thread. Feels like you're time travelling backwards each time a new video appears but the library doesn't get released 😆

On the question itself, I guess in a world where time travel exists, there's nothing to say that the musical idea wasn't always yours and that the people that you think you stole it from, stole it from you.

I mean, I think it kind of works like that anyways. We pick up a million bits of information from what we hear. Our brain cobbles something together out of them, and boom. "Original" song. I suppose the question becomes about what's happening in your brain, and in that case, we just don't know the answer for anyone who has written apparently original music.
 
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