Month: September 22, 2011

All Art is Theft: Theory of a Deadman vs Our Lady Peace

I listen to a lot of music. A lot of disparate music. And sometimes I come across similarities that I never would have expected. Then I get excited–a rare occurrence for me–and go hunting the interwebs to find out what the deal is. Some jackass with a blog out there must have noticed this as well, right? Nope. I’m almost always let down, left dejected and isolated. So I thought, “I could be that jackass with a blog!”

In the spirit of the idea, I’m stealing a tag that I linked to in another post about stealing music and art and all that jazz. This strikes me as an idea hard to argue with. Of course art is theft. Artists aren’t reinventing the wheel every time they create something; there’s always a certain amount of borrowing going on. With that in mind, I’ll say that I generally think accusations of musical plagiarism are ridiculous. What I’d really like to accomplish here is to have some random internet music nerd e-mail me with: “Hey I noticed that too! Yeah it probably means nothin’.” It’s the small things that count.

This is one that I’ve heard a bagillion times but only picked up on recently:

Yeah, that’s a terrible song. BUT, the guitar intro is markedly similar to the beginning of Our Lady Peace’s Superman’s Dead:

Both song start with a solo guitar strumming Bbm-Db-Ab, with the Our Lady Peace song adding a B to the end of the progression instead of sitting on the Ab for two bars. Both are in 4/4. The strum pattern for both is essentially the same. Even the beats per minute for both tunes is similar: ~84 for Theory of a Deadman and ~92 for Our Lady Peace. Both of these bands have even tuned their instruments down a half-step.

Of course, none of this is super-amazing. Theory of a Deadman may actually be familiar with Our Lady Peace but they could have just as easily picked up this stuff from any rock band from 1990 onward. It’s just a slight variation to a ii-V-I progression–probably the most used progression in western music ever–that replaces the V chord with a IV chord. Although, Our Lady Peace throws in that B which is not super-common. I can’t even explain where that comes from or why it works, theoretically, off the top of my head. It might be the IV/IV/IV, which doesn’t seem likely, or they’re simply modulating to F# when they play the Bbm and B–even though they never play the I chord in F#. This seems more likely as the song doesn’t have a clear tonal center to me; it seems fairly modal. Maybe that’s why I actually like this song also. They’re spicing it up a bit, throwing subtle curveballs and whatnot.

In any case, all the elements mentioned are pretty common in rock music. I think the thing that made my ears perk up a bit was the fact that they all came together at once.

If anyone has suggestions, feel free to send ’em my way. I’d love to do these quick song analyses on a regular basis.

Don’t speak to me in that tone and/or melody.

Leos Janacek was the early 20th century version of Charles Spearin–check out The Happiness Project if you’re not familiar with it already–according to Jonathan Secora Pearl in his article titled Eavesdropping with a Master: Leos Janacek and the Music of Speech. Janacek apparently transcribed the speech of those around him into regular music notation. I did not know this, despite him being one of my favorite composers. I also didn’t expect to come across this information on Language Log, a linguistics blog.

Mark Liberman’s take on it seems to be that Janacek was simply fooling himself into thinking that speech contains discrete pitches as opposed to continuous slides, citing pitch-tracking software and Joshua Steele–whose 1775 essay related to the subject is awesomely available in full on Google Books. My hope is that he wasn’t naive but was simply trying to create a rough approximation of what he heard in speech. Afterall, Janacek was no scientist–notwithstanding his work in ethnomusicology. And music notation is only an approximation of actual music just as writing is an approximation of spoken language, if I’m not mistaken.

In any case, I’ll be reading through Steele’s essay and Pearl’s article as this seems to be combining all my favorite things. I’m anxious to find out just how much these transcriptions affected Janacek’s music as I’ve thought about incorporating this sort of thing into my own music–and I certainly have a large enough database of speech recordings to get started with.

I’m in your classrooms, stealing your musics.

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Last week I recorded everyone in my composition class playing melodies they composed. I can now rock the music world with the mostly amateur sounds I have officially stolen.

Of course, whatever I produce from my recordings is going to be freely available so I’m pretty sure it will fall under fair use terms but there’s reason to believe that this classification isn’t always obvious–some awesome person tagged Jay Maisel’s building over this by the way. Luckily, it’s pretty unlikely that any college students are going to recognize a heavily modified version of an exercise they did years prior and then feel the need to sue me over it.

This does seem to fall into an odd category. I know I’m allowed to record what happens in a classroom as private conversation, legally, does not occur there, but how does this work when we’re talking about performances in a classroom? Hell, what about performances in general? I admit, I haven’t looked into this, but maybe I should.

In fact, if I were doing this right, I would have consulted a lawyer right from the beginning. It seems ridiculous to do so, though, so I didn’t. Eat that penal system! I suppose I’ll just have to wait until someone goes all Sita Sings the Blues on me.

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