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Avoiding all plagiarism is impossible and undesirable?
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| Anxieties |
There are universally enjoyable Musical ideas that will repeat for lifetimes. "I love you" can be sung in infinitely different ways. 4 chord songs will never stop because people will never stop liking them, and the younger kids will always be hearing the new versions of those cliches for the first time. Every band or artist who used the same progression was merely doing a cover of a universal idea that no one owns.
I'm not saying that I don't see a problem with plagiarism, but I am not bothered by any similarities in songs. There are only so many acceptable permutations within a certain number of measures or seconds. Every single line can't be unique (like every line in every poem can't be), it's how the entire work was produced. A musician can only hear so many songs in a lifetime before making their own, and unintentional similarities are bound to happen.
The internet has expanded our access to an enormous set of free material and there are hundreds of millions of ears listening to it all. Sometimes people spot striking similarities and point them out claiming the artist is a thief, but these people don't realize that you can point out similarities in all works if you had the total set of Music, which is something we're close to achieving. It's the reason we can even mix songs. Only so many keys, only so many acceptable rhythms with subtle groove differences. There's no way every artist could know every song, even if it's popular, it doesn't mean they heard it.
They think that their favorite artist is exempt from this, but that isn't the case at all. Eventually, we could "expose" all songs if we automated the task, but if we did that, we'd just get closer to understanding Music theory. Same chords, different sounds and tempo; same sound and tempo, different chords, etc. If people made music, they'd realize how inescapable plagiarism is. Especially for wide appeal music. Total plagiarism is almost certainly avoidable, but after that, you're only reducing instances of plagiarism from prior works: you will never reach 0%, even total silence has been done before.
Originality isn't the point: authenticity is. “Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” W. H. Auden |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by Anxieties
Originality isn't the point: authenticity is. “Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” W. H. Auden |
This is an important distinction. It makes me laugh when people will pull apart a piece of music and say "Oh, those floaty synths are ripped off from [x] and those dub basslines are clearly inspired by [y]." You can do that with any piece of music. Everything has a precedent, nothing is created in a vacuum. There are occasional cases of mistakes, accidents, malfunctions or deliberate mis-use that have created new sounds and even movements in electronic music, but ing around with technology for the sake of innovation is misguided. A good artist rips off everything they love, and not just from the medium they're working in. If the artist has good taste and good creative skills and instincts, those combined influences will come together into something individual, even if the constituent parts are recycled. |
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| Anxieties |
The ignorant members of the internet bother me because they're too clever by half. They all share the luxury of mass communication and free access to countless songs within seconds. They're realizing how all Music (and everything else) is interconnected. But they misinterpret their discoveries as evidence of artistic theft and ineptitude. They spreading the wrong message of how today's artists are nowhere near as great as earlier artists because of the inevitable similarities that new, good music will always have with older, good music. Every new example reinforces this misguided contempt at the perceived creative poverty of today's artists.
As we get older and experience more, we lose our sense of novelty while our sense of nostalgia grows. Deja Vu happens more often. We're experiencing an endless string of unique variations of simple musical properties (some we prefer, some we don't, it's just taste). We will never hear all examples but we will always recognize the underlying properties. I understood this perfectly as I got older. But many don't, and mistakenly believe they've seen through a deceptive illusion or figured out some "secret trick" every time they recognize those properties. Any good new thing with the properties is just an earlier work in disguise, proving to them how creatively bankrupt artists are (and how the Youth are being "fooled" and should listen to the older works instead). Any new bad thing that lacks the qualities is proof to them that even when artists try to be original today, they fail terribly (unlike failed artists of the past), and this reinforces their bias and sense of nostalgia.
This situation is horrible. Nobody's being exposed, we're just developing a deeper understanding of music and the limits of originality in our "good" taste (or subjective filter). No artist can entirely escape sharing similarities with the past, but so many don't understand that and miss the point entirely: it's the unique variations of non-unique good ideas ad infinitum. That's all any artist can ever do after a certain point. People have to realize this, especially in today's world: there are hundreds of millions of songs out there and more released every day. |
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| Vector A |
You're making things too simple, probably to fit your rhetorical purpose.
When people accuse artists of unoriginality, they're not usually doing so because they expect everyone to create music that sounds unlike anything else ever heard, free of any influences whatsoever. That's just a straw-man. Rather, most of the time an accusation of unoriginality is an accusation that the artist has borrowed from one or two easily identifiable sources in a straightforward and boring way. Of course, what counts as "boring" is always up for debate. |
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| Anxieties |
| quote: | Originally posted by Vector A
That's just a straw-man. Rather, most of the time an accusation of unoriginality is an accusation that the artist has borrowed from one or two easily identifiable sources in a straightforward and boring way. |
Not a straw-man. I don't approve of total plagiarism but I'm not bothered by striking similarities either. Even those will occur more frequently over time (not an exact copy of the audio, but one of the elements might be near identical). But many can't distinguish a truly original idea from somewhat common conventions or intuitive progressions. If the entire work is creative and substantially different as a whole, then it wouldn't matter even if there are recognizable parts of pre-existing works within it. The line between plagiarism and heavy influence is extremely blurry and no hard number can establish it. That's assuming the artist even knew about the work, which isn't always true. |
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| EddieZilker |
| I like the idea of the writing but, as Vector A hinted at, I think you should devote some thought to distinctions between what actually constitutes a derivative work and the 'authentic' sort of music that great artists steal. I know you've done some discussion of how good compositions/styles are creative amalgamations of earlier works but I think its point is diluted with your address to appeals from nostalgia. Additionally, not everyone who complains that a song is derivative is compromised by habitual music rotations nor is nostalgia always misguided. |
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| Mattsanity. |
| *insert the jackie chan picture* |
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| dj_alfi |
There isn't an infinite amount of possible melodies, so it's nearly impossible to make something that doesn't resemble other works.
And even if you haven't heard it before, there might be a song by some ekorean guy, and it has the exact same melody as the one you're writing.
In my opinion, plagiarism went obsolete with the advent of recorded music, where the sound/form of the artist/band comes 'ITB', whereas sheet music is just instructions on how to perform the music.
That being said, I feel queezy every time I hear a blatant rip-off of another artist. |
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| zyklon-jay |
| Cor version: Good artists copy, Great artists steal. |
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| euphoria |
| quote: | Originally posted by zyklon-jay
Cor version: Good artists copy, Great artists steal. |
Thanks for that :p |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by dj_alfi
There isn't an infinite amount of possible melodies, so it's nearly impossible to make something that doesn't resemble other works. |
To be pedantic, there's no finite limit to the number of notes a "melody" can contain, therefore there actually is an infinite amount of possible melodies. Although when it comes to melodies, what's more important is how they're used in the track - how they're harmonised, counterpointed, deployed in the polyphony and in the overall structure. It's also about musicians using certain kinds of melodies - only ever using arpeggiated riffs in trance, for example. You can take a melody from a rock song and it would sound very different in the context of a trance record. |
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| dj_alfi |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
To be pedantic, there's no finite limit to the number of notes a "melody" can contain, therefore there actually is an infinite amount of possible melodies. |
*facepalm*
math never was my strong suit.
| quote: | | You can take a melody from a rock song and it would sound very different in the context of a trance record. |
That's just because synthesizers can't do power chords duh |
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