I’ve been scouring the web for sites that might have a tool I could use, but have had no luck yet. I am trying to find a way to prove that two songs are not alike.
Why? Well, one friend, “Sally,” insists that “Welcome Christmas” from How the Grinch Stole Christmas is the same song as “Somewhere in my memory” from Home Alone. I tried explaining why this isn’t the case, but she was reluctant to agree.
Another friend, “Lynn,” says Duran Duran’s “Danse Macabre” sounds too much like Oingo Boingo’s “Dead Man’s Party” and is almost the same song. I am not sure what she thinks is so similar.
I don’t know of any software that does this, but it isn’t hard to tell the difference if you have a good ear. Remember that lots of songs share the same chords, but that doesn’t make them the same song. It generally comes down to the melody. In your first example, the songs share the first 4 notes of the melody, then go in very different directions. That’s not enough to consider them the same song. In your second example, I’m not hearing any similarities.
Lots of sites (e.g. Spotify) start with one song and give you “suggestions” based on music recognition algorithms and who knows what. You may also browse through this kind of stuff music-similarity · GitHub Topics · GitHub if you are interested.
However, as @Disinfectus points out, songs that happen to have the exact same chords or similar riffs or other similarity features that you can program a computer to measure does not make them the same song. People keep rehashing such accusations over and over again, eg
My new wife and I are the same age, so grew up listening to more or less the same music, net of our then-different locations in the USA.
When we do listen to music together from our youth, so 60s-80s, it is remarkable how differently we each remember the tunes. Features I think are salient she does not and vice versa. Lyrics I find memorable she finds unintelligible or indifferent or vice versa. Even among former top 40 tunes there are many I recognize instantly that she claims to have never heard, and vice versa.
We enjoy the same genres, but experience them very differently. Neither way can be said to be more right or more wrong; they’re just different.
All of which anecdote is to say that the perception of music is, or at least can be, highly individualized. Which is IMO part of why the OP’s friends are recognizing similarities the OP does not.
If you can find guitar tabs for both songs and do whatever transpositions are necessary to put them in the same key, you should be able to see if they’re using the same chord changes.
(This is of limited usefulness for jazz standards, which ALL use the same chord changes as “I Got Rhythm.”)
I have no info about proving song similarity, but FWIW I noticed no similarities between Oingo Oingo and Duran Buran (other than subject matter).
But the songs from Grinch and Home Alone caught my attention played back-to-back. The openings were similar enough that I can understand your friend’s point. And of course there was, again, thematic similarity.
It goes beyond pure combinatorics as music tends to have structure and vocabulary, however, that is the exact point they were trying to make http://allthemusic.info/
by enumerating “all” possible melodies and writing them to a computer file anyone can download. The idea being that, as mechanically produced works, they are not copyrightable. Or, if any of them are, they are now in the Creative Commons.
They also base it on what previous listeners liked. So, if a bunch of people listen to “Twinkle, Twinkle” right after “The Alphabet Song” to see if they sound the same, Spotify will start assuming that listeners of one song enjoy the other and it’s a solid recommendation. So, ironically, enough people checking the two songs will reinforce the notion that they’re similar songs.
I’m not sure how well it’d work but I’d think that, to some extent, you could pull up both songs in Audacity (or similar program) and compare the spectrogram for each song to see how similar they are. I’m not an audio guy though so maybe there’s an obvious flaw in that logic.
It is something the courts have struggled with. Say what you like about the lyrics of Blurred Lines, but few actual musicians consider it a copy of Got to give it up. Let alone Uptown Funk somehow being a copy of pretty much everything.
