Saturday, January 08, 2005

Why restaurant staff usually don't sing "Happy Birthday to You"

Have you been in a restaurant when someone is celebrating a birthday and noticed that instead of singing the popular "Happy Birthday to You", they sing some chant like "Happy, happy birthday, hope you dreams come true, ..." instead? Ever wonder why that is? It's probably due to copyright law.

Sure it's possible that the waiters and waitresses can't carry a tune. But it's much more likely that the management realizes that "Happy Birthday to You" is still under copyright (until 2030) and they'd rather sing (or chant) something else than worry about paying royalties for the modern classic "Happy Birthday to You".

According to snopes.com:
Does this mean that everyone who warbles "Happy Birthday to You" to family members at birthday parties is engaging in copyright infringement if they fail to obtain permission from or pay royalties to the song's publisher? No. Royalties are due, of course, for commercial uses of the song, such as playing or singing it for profit, using it in movies, television programs, and stage shows, or incorporating it into musical products such as watches and greeting cards; as well, royalties are due for public performance, defined by copyright law as performances which occur "at a place open to the public, or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered." So, crooning "Happy Birthday to You" to family members and friends at home is fine, but performing a copyrighted work in a public setting such as a restaurant or a sports arena technically requires a license from ASCAP or the Harry Fox Agency (although such infringements are rarely prosecuted).

ABC Music Notation File Format

Just the other day, I became aware of a terrific music file format called ABC. Apparently, it's been around for a many years, but I didn't even realize it existed. I haven't spent a lot of time using it, but so far it seems pretty cool.

It reminds me of GWBASIC/QBASIC's PLAY command, but ABC is much more powerful. Apparently, it was originally created to describe traditional music (melody-only). Fortunately for piano and ensemble enthusiasts, extentions have been added to allow polyphonic harmony.

There are various freeware and Open Source programs out there that support ABC. Many of them haven't been updated recently, but I've found that they still work pretty well (some patience and trial-and-error is required, though). The open-source program iabc tries to bring together many functions under one roof, but I had trouble getting it to work right. There are some shareware and commercial programs that allude to fancy GUI editors and integrated approaches, but I haven't checked them out yet.

Home Pages
Command-line program websites:
  • abcMIDI: converts ABC Music (.abc) into MIDI Music (.mid) files
  • abcm2ps: converts ABC Music (.abc) into a PostScript (.ps) document
  • Ghostscript: converts PostScript (.ps) into Portable Document Format (.pdf)
John Chambers' tutorial: Steve Mansfield's tutorial: BarFly's comparison of multivoice extentions

Sample Windows batch file to produce a MIDI and a .ps file:
set abcfile=i:\media\midi\mysong
erase %abcfile%.mid
cd \prgfiles\abc\abcm2ps
abcm2ps.exe %abcfile%.abc
copy out.ps %abcfile%.ps
cd \prgfiles\abc\abcmidi
abc2midi.exe %abcfile%.abc -o %abcfile%.mid
pause