Universal's Audible Watermark (2012)
mattmontag.com
mattmontag.com
There is. Audio watermarking is inherently audible, because that is the only way to avoid being stripped out (deliberately or inadvertently) by the incredible technology we have for removing inaudible information from audio recordings: lossy audio codecs. The artifacts must be so salient that the codecs deem them important, audible information - codecs designed with elaborate psychoacoustic models, especially to make that judgement call with maximum efficacy. There's no way out.
This of course would mean the watermark would not survive transcoding from lossless, but as we can see in TFA the watermark can be made useless all the same without such efforts.
With that said the oxygen malpractitioners that run the music industry have never put actual consumers' satisfaction above implementing trivially circumvented security theater, so pirates win all the same in all scenarios.
> It is modifying what the artist intended you to hear in a destructive way. It is destroying the original performances.
also applies to lossy encoding.
The whole point of audio watermarking is that it survives lossy compression. Inaudibility is merely a secondary concern.
This is an adversarial relationship, and one that the audio watermarking is doomed to lose. By and large, lossy codecs succeed in transparency, and therefore as an inevitable consequence, watermarking fails at it. After decades of development, lossy codecs are just too good - there's nowhere left to hide information.
(It's also worth noting that the consumer benefits from the quality tradeoff that compression makes, in the form of decreased storage and bandwidth. They don't benefit from the audio watermarking at all.)
I'm unable to load the article and haven't heard one in real life, but in theory it could be done in a way that is imperceptible to human ears but detectable by a program. E.g. imagine masking specific frequencies within a noisy section of the video.
There should be less destructive ways for studios to do this, but unless it's in the video or audio signal it doesn't stand a chance of working reliably.
To be clear, I'm also against any kind of watermark, but I'd rather it be done with an imperceptible (to me) audio signal than with a constant graphical watermark as is usually the case. Actually, graphical watermarks could be smarter and less obtrusive as well.
> The difference is that the graphical watermark on e.g. a photograph usually isn't there when you've paid for it.
The same could be the case for these audio ones. It's user hostile if this is done on already paid content (but again, I can't read the original article to confirm).
[1] https://creativepro.com/major-movie-studios-specify-digital-...
[2] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/440...
As for more subtle changes, what constitutes a "plausible sound" in any given context is an AI-complete problem. Sure on a particular song, you might get away with e.g. tinkering with the reverb a bit, or changing the tempo by 0.5% - but how can you possibly do that in the general case?
Remember - all such changes have to be audibly salient to humans, because that's the only thing guaranteed to survive.
You’re saying it’s ok to decimate it - as long it’s replaced with some “plausible” proxy? Plausible decided by who, the artist or business requirements?
We tolerate Netflix releasing films in less than 4k. They do that because of a practical business benefit (cost). Similarly, Universal is making a compromise in the artist's vision to meet a business requirement. I think if the compromise is sufficiently small and the business benefit is sufficiently large, it's ok to do this.
When you're passive listening, you're only perceiving the "outlines" of the music, but listening actively reveals a lot of details, and this kind of wobbling becomes both more noticeable and disturbing.
When listening the music actively, anyone can distinguish between natural and unnatural sounds, and this will bother many people if they listen more actively.
You're assuming that perceptual audio coders do a perfect job at encoding what can be heard* and not encoding what can't be heard*. This isn't true in both directions — they encode detail that can't be heard* in the source, and lose detail that can be heard in the source*.
*This is contextual, depending heavily on the listener and the listening conditions.
The system is called CBET and it's based on the psychoacoustic model as well, except it determines the level at which watermark should be injected at. High enough that it passes codecs easily, but just below perception so you generally can't detect the tones that it has added to the audio.
The trade is that CBET only moves about 8 bits/second of information through the side channel, which is just enough to push a station ID and timestamp through the channel for Nielsen's ratings purposes.
However I'm awfully curious about this system, especially "high enough that it passes codecs easily". I would naively expect that to be highly dependent on the codec and bitrate chosen, and further expect the range between "inaudible" and "codec-passing" to be negative for many common untransparent lossy profiles, like 128kbps mp3. Where can I read more?
There are 10 bands, each of which can carry 1 of 18 tones. 16 tones are to signal, so the stream is 4 bits wide, and the other two tones are used as a "STOP" and "SYNC" marker in the data stream.
All bands carry identical information, but each bit within a band is encoded with a different tone than any other band. So, it appears random or uncorrelated at first glance, but you can see the pattern pretty quickly if you do a long enough analysis. The same message gets identically repeated 12 to 13 times per minute and the message only changes once per minute. Here's an example isolation of the signal [1].
The coder monitors incoming audio and does a psychoacoustic pass to determine which level the tones should be injected at. If it can't find a good level for a tone, it uses the lowest possible level... which usually works out fine due to the 10 redundant signals in the watermark.
Encoders like MP3 see the injected tones as signal and will make the bits available to ensure they're encoded rather than correctly masking them out as non-audible material. The 10 bands help here as well, as even if the encoder fails to code the signal in one band, there's usually enough redundant bands that you can successfully decode the watermark.
However, encoding a series of highly discernable tones into the audio is just dumb. Instead they should use phase modulation at low frequencies. Current compression models don't play with subtle changes of meter much, because they mostly use local encoding and there's not much room for improved compression with (non-audible) modulation. Of course, if Universal wanted to be able to accurately detect 5 second clips (rather than 2 minute songs) this would be a lot more difficult... and of course they want every thing, at the expense of listener experience.
A transmitter could transmit a weak signal in a specific pattern on a number of arbitrary preselected frequencies. They would more-or-less seem like noise lost in the noise floor. Only when you specifically filter for the specific set of frequencies can you discern the pattern that was put there that could not appear by chance. You don't even need to use the same frequencies throughout the transmission. As long as the schedule is decided up-front it can serve like a one-time pad for encryption.
I do wonder where else these show up. Does Audible put them in audiobooks for example?
Don't use Universal as a publisher then. At a certain point, its up to the artists to ensure they publish their music as they want, and any artifacts of making the wrong choice is ultimately them making the wrong choice.
And these shills always want the choice to be individual--hey if you don't the water label, don't use Universal. And in fact every label has something about it like this, like if you don't like getting the cover art discounted from your CD, don't use Warner Bros, if you don't like x, don't use y.
But what they hate is when it's collective, like we got together with 1000 other artists and all of us are negotiating collectively to get the watermark removed. Because that actually has an impact.
There's reasons these publishing/distribution industries exist, and I'd not wish their work on artists. The art is hard enough to do on it's own.
The bar for publishing has significantly reduced so really it’s a question of the marketing piece you mentioned. Does an artist really need to sell to a label just to get marketing?
(Not sure I understand your reference to the travel industry so well, but that's just me being dim.)
I still think that if you scramble, you should take on as much work as you (or your group) can handle DIY, so that you have leverage when the publishers and the record labels start paying attention. But if you want to be able to continue to make music after seeing some of that success, you'll start to understand why 'the industry' exists.
Only tangentially related, but he's done some clever stunts in the band's history, such as releasing an album called "Sleepify" which was 10 completely silent tracks, and told fans to run the album on loop all night when they sleep to game the Spotify system, and the money made from that was used to put on a free tour.
As an artist I want to associate with a label because they already have an audience for the kind of music I work on. As a consumer I take note of the label and keep track of their catalog because they somewhat consistently release and promote music I am interested in.
The label owners have a self-interest in promoting their catalog, doing work I personally want to spend as little time as possible on.
My music has only cost me money in aggregate, and I've almost exclusively released music for free, as a hobby outside my day job. Thanks to labels I have reached an audience without doing much else than producing music and suggesting my music to labels. This has gotten me an audience where I might not have found one myself, for example in Russia (because I released an EP with a Russian netlabel in the mid 00s that then caught on because they promoted their catalog by hosting regular parties).
You just have to be very wary, as I suggested, of what labels you sign with and what conditions. This is easy for beginners to overlook.
But by all means, tell me more about why I should spend time "making a label" instead of making music, and explain how running a business around my music will affect my artistic integrity positively.
Not at all. Galleries don't necessarily own the work they're showing, likely can't legally modify the paintings & that painting is likely 1 of a kind vs a copy meant for a specific application. The musicians/engineers were paid for their work, and, barring some gross legal oversight on Universal's part, everyone involved understands that the audio can be edited when they do this.
I feel bad for the artists and engineers
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The "control" was just plain old mp3 compression artifacts, which seems to match the effects observed in the case of the music watermark. In my case, there were definitely a few instances where things sounded a little off in some of the clips, but most of the time they sounded totally normal. It really made you wonder if you were just hearing things. I always wondered how accurate I was but they wouldn't share the results!
Website is down at this time for me, but web archive works.
There is a listening test up here that trains you to hear it. I couldn't hear it at first.
It largely stopped me knowingly buying anything associated with Sony.
Of course, they always claim that. Never mind that it's theoretically impossible. Such marketing should earn a fraud prosecution.
Lossy compression algorithms specifically compress out everything imperceptible to human hearing.
That was a few years ago, and I lost track of what happened after that but evidently UMG actually fixed the problem at some point because YT Music seems fine now, and I no longer notice the problem on other streaming services that were also formerly affected by it.
I've imagined some sort of video watermark that would be dynamically injected into video streams from services like Netflix.
The watermark would ID the account to which the stream was sent. The purpose would be to catch whoever is making the web-rips the make it into the wild.
I don't actually expect anything like this to be practical. It's a lot of technology to develop and support just for the slight chance of catching video pirates. But it's a fun mental exercise.
Questions I ask myself include:
1. What would the watermark look like visually? I image a slightly off-colored pixel appearing at various x,y locations at various time intervals. Sort of like the yellow microdots on laser printers that ID an individual printer.
2. How would the visual data be injected into the existing cached video byte chunks residing on CDN (I'm not sure of the correct technical term for the packets). I suppose the altered packets would have to be created on the fly and sent to the CDN host serving the individual streamer.
As far as catching web rip culprits, that becomes a cat and mouse game when easily available stolen credit card numbers are a thing.
In the end, i think these type of schemes end up protecting information security division income more than they protect the artists' income.
(I know they're wireless headphones; but some wireless headphones such as previous Sonys have optional wired connections)
The effect is really obvious to me in wired headphones, and my ears are pretty much trash. I struggle mightily to tell the difference between FLAC and good mp3/AAC encodes and struggle to understand people in real life sometimes.
The Universal watermark is really egregious to me, particularly in the last few seconds of that "Three Doors Down" clip. It's kind of a fluttering sound in the guitars themselves, not a noise laid over the top.
Not shaming anybody if they can't hear it. Like I said, my hearing is pretty bad and I have other physical disabilities.
It's pretty subtle. I could imagine that in pieces with a lot of long sustains it would start to be annoying, especially since you can't unhear it.
(Sennheiser wired headphones listening on my Android phone, in case it matters)
Jokes aside, watermarks are generally a detriment to what ever medium they're applied to, but as someone who doesn't have a bunch of audio/visual IP I'm much less invested in them outside of being a consumer so I have no idea what the trade off an artist is willing to make in order to balance the IP preservation vs artistic preservation. It feels like a personal question, but once you move your IP over to universal or any other publisher, in my mind you've given up a bit of that creative control in exchange of the publishers services.
Surely a watermark shouldn't be removable? Yet this seems trivially removable.