I've always been a little dubious about plagiarism in music ..... as someone noted in an earlier post, with only 12 notes to choose from there is a limited number of options to choose from.
The two most famous claims that I remember are My Sweet Lord/She's So Fine, and Down Under/Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree (ridiculous in my opinion.)
However, I had something interesting happen this afternoon. I sat down to play nothing in particular, so I had BIAB generate random songs from my playlist (generally old stuff.)
The first song was Marty Robbins' "White Sport Coat & a Pink Carnation," (1957) which I played. The next song was Jack Scott's "What in the World's Come Over You" (1960). When I got to the middle 8 I thought, "You old fool, you've forgotten it, and you're playing the middle 8 from the previous song."
It bugged me, so I consulted YouTube and played both songs, and guess what... the middle 8s are almost identical.
Have a listen on You Tube and let me know what you think. (sorry, forum rules won't allow me to include copyright music here)
It sounds like a duplicate. It also is hard to believe that Jack Scott didn't know Marty Robbins' song at that time. But on the other hand the bridge is not something you usually identify a song with. (How many times have you heard somebody to just sing or hum the bridge? Most people go with the most popular lines...)
That is no excuse for plagiarism, but something like that might occur. And if someone searches deeper that someone will find that sequence probably in many older pieces of music because it is only arpeggiated triads.
So I suspect that also Marty Robbins did plagiarise, even if not knowing.
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Many years ago I was playing around with a melody on my flute. Just the melody of an A section; I never took it any further.
But the melody haunted me and it seems I would play it frequently when putting the flute together. Just 8 bars of music that flowed out of my fingers while checking the flute to see if I put it together right (feel is more important than sight to see if the flute pieces are aligned properly).
Then one day I walked into Barnes & Noble (when they still had a good CD collection) and I say a Dave Brubeck CD of an album I used to have when I was a child, "Time Further Out". When I got home I played it and when the song "Maori Blues" came out, I realized it was the melody I was playing.
Unconscious plagiarism I suppose. It's a good thing I never finished the song and recorded it.
And there are hundreds of cases where one song has a melody or part that is the same as another, especially in folk, country, blues and rock music. But the people weren't as picky about such things in the past.
There were a few famous cases like the aforementioned George Harrison song. Surfin' USA is Sweet Little Sixteen by Chuck Berry, but so was "Twistin' USA" but that record didn't sell enough to warrant a lawsuit.
But listening to old 12 bar blues or I-vi-IV-V7 chord progressions of the 60s and 70s, often the only thing creative about them is the B section.
Personally, I think copyright protection is a good thing, but like all things, sometimes there is abuse in enforcement. IMHO "Blurred Lines" was a mistake, and "Stairway To Heaven" was not worthy of the lawsuit.
But I'm not the copyright czar and my opinion isn't always the best one either.
I've always found it interesting to hear small fragments of similar notes, etc. from one song to another. I believe that most of the time this is not intentional. I myself have stumbled onto something that I thought was brilliantly original, only to have another musician point out how it sounds similar to another song.
One of my favorites is a portion of a Wes Montgomery solo on O.G.D (Road Song) that to me sounds somewhat similar to portions of the verses of John Lennon's Give Peace A Chance.
There is only one chance: Have an extensive library of copyright free music that is electronically searchable. If you write a song somebody says that it is plagiarism, search the copyright free songs for the melody in question and I'm sure Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninow... will have something in there that is awfully close. If not them, a folk song of the Polynesian realm will...
I've always been a little dubious about plagiarism in music ..... as someone noted in an earlier post, with only 12 notes to choose from there is a limited number of options to choose from.
Keith,
I didn't read that earlier post. Surprisingly, the chances on doubling up exactly on a melody are not as great as one might think.
Let's say someone sets out to write a song in a diatonic scale so that the song's range is within the octave....
This gives that person eight notes to choose from as the starting note.
If repeats of a note are allowed then there again 8 notes to choose from for the second note.
This means there are 8^2 = 8 x 8 = 64 possibilities for the first two notes.
Similarly, for the first three notes, there will be 8^3 = 8 x 8 x 8 = 512 possibilities. This means that for two songs to use the same three starting notes, the chances are 1 in 512 (if my logic is correct).
Applying this principle, to a melody that is 8 bars long and contains, say, 30 notes, then there are...
... 8^30 = 1,240,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible permutations.
In calculating the above, I haven't considered that notes can be written with different time lengths.
If I consider that in addition to the 8 choices of pitch, there are 4 choices of timing, then each note has 8 x 4 = 32 possibilities.
This means that the 30 note melody now has 32^30 permutations.... that's a pretty big number.
Using the above scenario, the chances of anyone doubling up on exactly the same 30 note melody is 1 in 32^30.
If one octave of chromatic notes (i.e. 13 notes) are considered in construction of a melody and the above scenario is applied then the possibility becomes...
... 1 in (4 x 13)^30 = 52^30
Regards, Noel
P.S. Please don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong!
Good points Noel, and I admire the Scientific way you reasoned your comments. I think though that perception plays a big part.
E.g. let's take a nursery rhyme, say: Mary Had A Little Lamb.
What if somebody wrote the same song but changed one note? Would that now be considered a different song? I think perception of, or recognition of a similar musical passage is enough to persuade a Court that some form of infringement has taken place. How many notes would need to be changed in those 8 bars to make it a different song. I guess a lot more than one.
Anyway, maybe I'm being pedantic, and regardless, I do like the math that you presented. All the best Trev
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Noel, I think your second scenario, the chromatic scale one, is more accurate then the diatonic one because, as you well know, one is not limited in using only the scale notes as the second, third, etc, notes.
I also know that the math for the chromatic scenario would yield much larger numbers.
I want my last spoken words to be "I hid a million dollars under the........................"
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David Cope wrote a program called EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) which was capable of creating music "in the style" of composers. Re-composition of music was accomplished by using a composer's work as a model, and then replacing each bar in it with a functionally equivalent bar from another of the same composer's works.
EMI was capable of performing pattern matching by searching through a composer's work, and finding strings of notes that a composer re-used often enough to be considered "signatures", which it would then attempt to weave into the reconstructed work.
Interestingly, Cope found that these "signatures" of classical composers tended to appear in the cadences, rather than in melodic themes.
On the other hand, another theorist (who's name inconveniently eludes me) claimed that classical music could be best understood as a borrowing of various elements (horn flourishes, cadential extensions, dance forms) that were well known the the listener.
Importantly, one of the elements of classical composition was "quoting" of other composer's works. It was expected that composers would make reference to other popular songs of the day, with the intent that that the contemporary listener would recognized these "quotes" - something that hundreds of years later we fail to see, and instead assume that these works were created entirely from scratch.
Music isn't composed in a vacuum, and intentionally or not, composers are influenced by what they hear. Jimmy Webb has an anecdote where he's complaining about people using musical ideas without giving credit. His companion is nodding in agreement, until Jimmy points out the lyrics of a current hit, lifted from a Beatles song:
Take these broken wings/and learn to fly...
The guy who's listening turns pale and says "I wrote that!, only just that moment realizing he's borrowed the lyric.
There are so many songs that nobody is going to consciously remember every song they've ever heard.
I was always taught to question the first melody that pops in your head because it's most often something you've heard before. I also believe, due to the huge number of songs that exist, it's entirely possible to write a melody that's much closer than you would ever think to a song you've never heard. And I'm just talking melodies...
So although I agree with Noel in theory - in the real world sandbox of music the majority of us play in - I think the chances are much higher. Successful songs have to be different but still be somewhat familiar enough or most people in our culture won't like them.
I hear songs that sound like other songs all the time. In my experience anywhere you listen to new music - you're going to hear some sound a likes. Even here.
It's just part of songwriting. You write the best you can then rack your brain to be sure it's different enough from every song you remember. You change what you need to when your brain (or others you ask) registers an unintended match and then you hope for the best. I believe that's what most writers do and even then it still happens.
One interesting suit was years ago when the writers of "Rocky Top" sued and won for their slowed down melody being used in "You're The Reason God Made Oklahoma" which resulted in them being credited as co-writers on this big Country hit song. If you listen to the two songs, this one is so obvious I imagine they were embarrassed a bit. Probably weren't too happy about losing the money either. But those same writers went on to write more hits.
For the record; "Mary Had A Little Lamb" is "Merrily We Roll Along".
Elton John and Bernie Taupin quoted the Diamond's "Little Darlin" in "Crocodile Rock" which was very appropriate since the song was about pre-English invasion rock.
T-Rex quotes Chuck Berry in "Bang A Gong" (U.S.Title)
The Wrecking Crew / Beach Boys did an instrumental quote of a Chewing Gum commercial in "I Get Around".
Mary Wells' "My Guy" starts with "Canadian Sunset".
Deep Purple quotes the Beatles' "A Day In The Life" in "Hush, Hush"
There are thousands more of these examples, and they should neither be considered plagiarism, nor should they be admitted as a suit in a court of law.
They are not stealing anything from the original, if anything they are paying homage. They are not taking any money away from the original, in fact they might be encouraging a sale of the original.
IMHO It's unethical to sue for damages when there has been no damage.
Copyright should be used to protect someone's work, but too many lawsuits are filed where the quote or few notes are either borrowed or unconsciously appropriated.
I read that to illustrate copyright abuse, Stan Kenton copyrighted a song that had 32 bars of rests for the entire orchestra followed by one drum tap at the end. So in theory, every song with a drum tap or a measure of rest is violating his copyright.
Although there are indeed zillions of combinations of notes available, there are far fewer good sounding combinations of those notes.
That's what happens when composers are no longer commissioned by kings, and now there's potentially a lot of money to be made (although one may argue that it's in line with "potentially there's a lot of money to made off the lottery, as well", and you know how that goes). Many of the famous classical composers died destitute, so they weren't doing it for the money.
John
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Commissioning is still around. When my grandmother died my parents commissioned a piece in remembrance. I thought it was an incredible gesture. Of course, then it had to be performed somewhere, which was another significant gesture done by many local musicians.
I think it was about an 80 piece band or so, very cool experience. I was living out of state and flew in the day of to take part, trumpet in hand and score in my case. One of the lead trumpet guys I'd never met kinda looked at me funny (like who is this?), and I just told him "We'll be OK, I actually knew her. I'm ready." I had one 4 bar solo .. easy job. I hadn't played in a lot of years, but was prepared and I think that was the last time I actually performed with my brothers, probably the only time with one of them (the one with a doctorate in music). I used to play a lot with the other. Talk about bitter/sweet.
Make your sound your own! .. I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome
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