The actual music resulting from playing (perhaps by
machine) exactly what
the sheet music says to play, will
strip away some artistic features of the
sheet music, such
as margin commentary, illustrations, dedications to loved
ones, the exact markup about what to emphasize, while adding
new artifacts
such as the pecularities of the performers
voice or instrument.
Such a
performance (whether done on stage or recorded for
publication) is still a
derivative subject to the original
copyright in the sheet music. Which is why
officially
printed sheet music for still-in-copyright songs carries a
premium
price similar to source code access to commercial
software libraries (unless
included as a bonus with the CD,
which is also common in both
realms).
This is also the origin of the real "Sequence, Structure
and
Organization" courtroom test for software copyright
infringement. It is a
legal test that strips away all the
stuff that would be thrown away by a good
optimizing
compiler, figures out what of the remains is original and
creative
coding, and then applies this even to someone who
has run it through any number
of compilations,
decompilations, obfuscations etc.
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