with a 4/4 (which is most of music is these days) there's only so much slicing you can do to have relative times between notes differ.
There are also a number of things that change the expression but not the melody. eg Hallelujah vs Zombie:
- have different melodies but use the same chords
- can be sliced and diced both with various rests and palm mutes and arpeggios and strumming yet still have them individually identifiable (and sometimes very close, possibly even overlapping in some sections, but that's perfectly normal and how one does a good mashup)
Even the time signature doesn't mean much, one could play Zombie on a blues shuffle and it would still be distinctively Zombie-esque.
Throw in music theory and keys and I IV V and chords and whatnot which I still don't master but I get the idea, it severely reduces what one ought to do to compose something enjoyable.
With that you can mathematically reduce you problem space to some extent.
In any case it's all completely moot because fundamentally the creation process is a) ingest ideas, b) digest, c) excrete ideas, which ultimately come from a mixture of a). Everything new looks like something else to some extent, and there's a fundamental reason why artists are told (or themselves tell) they're "influenced by" this or that other artist.
If we were to truly strictly enforce copyright nothing would ever get created anymore. So I don't know if copyright itself is right or wrong, but I feel copyright enforcement is truly fucked up these days (and not just in music)
As a beginner composing in my living room I'm truly scared (on top of fear of inadequacy) to push something out there I put my heart and soul into and get sued to oblivion (or at the very least have it destroyed and claimed by some entity that is not even involved in creation)
There are also a number of things that change the expression but not the melody. eg Hallelujah vs Zombie:
- have different melodies but use the same chords
- can be sliced and diced both with various rests and palm mutes and arpeggios and strumming yet still have them individually identifiable (and sometimes very close, possibly even overlapping in some sections, but that's perfectly normal and how one does a good mashup)
Even the time signature doesn't mean much, one could play Zombie on a blues shuffle and it would still be distinctively Zombie-esque.
Throw in music theory and keys and I IV V and chords and whatnot which I still don't master but I get the idea, it severely reduces what one ought to do to compose something enjoyable.
With that you can mathematically reduce you problem space to some extent.
In any case it's all completely moot because fundamentally the creation process is a) ingest ideas, b) digest, c) excrete ideas, which ultimately come from a mixture of a). Everything new looks like something else to some extent, and there's a fundamental reason why artists are told (or themselves tell) they're "influenced by" this or that other artist.
If we were to truly strictly enforce copyright nothing would ever get created anymore. So I don't know if copyright itself is right or wrong, but I feel copyright enforcement is truly fucked up these days (and not just in music)
As a beginner composing in my living room I'm truly scared (on top of fear of inadequacy) to push something out there I put my heart and soul into and get sued to oblivion (or at the very least have it destroyed and claimed by some entity that is not even involved in creation)