Ever Composed...

[BrandonSBCA]

I don't compose music, but I've been told by other people that some of my work (Music videos, other random videos) that I copied their style.

 

[BrandonSBCA]

Yeah I know lol also another example would be the stories I write, people come to me telling me I actually STOLE their stories and put my name on it. I always tell them to fuck off that I created this long ago. Believe me Gery a lot of the music you create might sound like another piece of music, but as long as you're creating it with your own musical mind then it shouldn't matter if you are copying or stealing someone else's music style.

 

[trawler69]

I don't compose music but in many things I do I draw inspiration from others and it is reflected in the results. Plagurism I regard as direct copying with no personal input. As long as I am happy that I have put my interpretation into the result, I am happy. If I were a composer and you copied my style but added your interpretation, I would feel proud that you liked it enough to do that.

 

[Hawkman]

The closest I've come to that is a section. I've never composed a complete song and wondered if I had stolen it. But sometimes a two- or four-bar passage sounds suspiciously familiar, so I change it.

But I probably write simple stuff (just some songs) compared to you.

 

[star-warrior]

I can't read or write musics if my life depended on it, but it seems I'm sometime making up tunes all the time. I guess I annoy a lot of folk with my incessant whistling, as I can whistle a tune inhaling and exhaling...

 

[upyrkilt469]

I had to compose a choral composition for my music teaching certificate. It was the opening of a Mass and a friend had his church choir perform. It sounded pretty good with full church organ. Never did anything else.

 

[JakeBequette]

I don't think I can write music, I've tried, it doesn't work. Once I was playing around on my Piano, just playing randomness, and I found something that sounded good and I SWORE I had heard it before but couldn't figure out where. A couple of weeks later my little brother told me to download the song Existentialism on Prom Night, and the intro to it sounded EXACTLY like what I had been playing, oops. ​

 

[Jeimuzu]

It happens all the time, don't worry about it. I've written a fair few songs, and yet one could be apparently compared to a CKY song, despite being completely different in almost every way, because of the timing and deadening of a couple of notes in it.

Even Nirvana thought they'd ripped off the Pixies when they wrote Teen Spirit.

It's odd, though, because the comparisons tend to transcend genres. Most of my stuff is acoustic epic stuff, while the comparison I mentioned in the first paragraph... well, it's CKY; stoner rock. Another is rather peaceful, the sort of floaty song you should hear deep in forests and has drawn comparisons with metallica, because it's played on similar frets to One, Fade to Black, Sanitarium, and Battery... Yes, all of them - Metallica base their acoustics generally on A2 and D4. All of those songs use those frets as the main basis.

There was one song I scrapped because it sounded too much like a punk band from london, and then I was playing it randomly one day, and the song happened to be on - and was nothing like it. So odd. I wrote a song out of that, and called it Whirlpool I love my song titles, they're all sea-based at the moment. The CKY one (I don't think it's like it, but my mate does) is called Poseidon, and I've got Struggling to Breathe, Seahorse, and Deep Beneath the Ocean.

I don't think I can write music, I've tried, it doesn't work. Once I was playing around on my Piano, just playing randomness, and I found something that sounded good and I SWORE I had heard it before but couldn't figure out where. A couple of weeks later my little brother told me to download the song Existentialism on Prom Night, and the intro to it sounded EXACTLY like what I had been playing, oops. ​

It'll come, with any luck. I started off playing other stuff, then eventually wrote little bits... eventually I managed to compile them. They still sound a little disjointed, and it can take months per song, which doesn't help, but hey. Basically, I'm too much of a perfectionist to do it the easy way.

 

[Riverrick]

I had a music teacher who once told me that all of this music is out there in the universe somewhere and that we are sort of just channelling pieces of it into our world when we compose. So in that sense its impossible not to end up with a few similar measures of music once in a while. Its too bad that it would matter to anyone.

 

[operafan]

I don't compose music, but I do some professional writing. I also do a lot of professional reading, and I am concerned that at some point I will not realize that the writing I've been doing is someone else's thinking.

The Internet makes it so much easier for verification, see: Doris Kearns Goodwin or Stephen Ambrose.

Very embarrassing.

 

[RenaissanceMan]

...a piece of music that you REALLY like and enjoy playing and then get all worried and think. "I MUST have plagerized that from somewhere."?

That's exactly why I gave up composing before I even really started. I found it impossible not to plagiarize and still be happy with the result (and I'm the kind of guy who needs to be happy with his results to get anywhere).

You have to get ideas from somewhere, and there's only so much you can do with a bunch of notes and still make it sound like anything you (with the influences you have) would want and especially like to hear.

I just play other people's music...that way I can really enjoy playing it and hearing it and only have to get worried if the composer isn't turning in his grave in the meantime.

This is the feeling philosophy students undoubtly get ALL the time. Anything they write, good or bad, they will probably get this feeling (at least I do). On the one hand, writing a philosophical essay makes you think you're thinking for yourself, and it's your thinking alone...and yet thousands of others have come up with the same ideas in hundreds of languages.