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.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?