I’m not sure about the specific rules in regards to claiming authorship of a song, but I think you have to make the case that you combined a unique melody with a chord progression (lyrics are an added dimension.) What constitutes a unique melody probably has a certain amount of scholarly mumbo-jumbo written about it. After all, if you take any three notes from any melody, you’re bound to find that there are numerous already composed songs containing the same melodic nugget.

About 10 years ago, I started to occasionally notice how a particular song I was listening to was borrowing heavily from some other song. I remember in particular a song by the group Everclear called “Father of Mine” which, to my mind, was blatantly ripping off an old 60s song whose name I can’t remember. Currently, I hear snippets of other songs in the songs I listen to all the time. This is probably because my musical mind has “sharpened” and the library of tunes I carry around in my head has expanded.

This makes me wonder as to whether the way we copyright tunes isn’t fundamentally flawed. Are we currently merely rewarding plagiarists? Consider this scenario: a guy creates a great melodic idea — some new way of contouring notes around each other — and writes a couple songs. Then some other guy comes around, takes the general idea and writes a hit and gets millions of dollars and sleeps with supermodels. But he didn’t really create anything… he just kind of tweaked an already existing formula.

In the 60s, John Coltrane came up with the song “Giant Steps*.” It was a totally unique and instantly identifiable musical idea… it was a new “sound.” (For music nerds: it’s the concept of modulating through keys by moving major seventh chords around in major third intervals. These intervals are so wide they could be thought of as, you got it, “giant steps.”) And many people took his idea and wrote their own songs with it, myself included (it’s the tune “On Hold” on my new album.) I’m not saying that we aren’t creating something, but it’s built off Coltrane’s idea. It seems the music copyright system should really allow for the patenting of musical “concepts” not just melodies and chord progressions and lyrics. Frankly, this would be almost impossible to do so as the legal definition of a musical concept would be bound to be weighed down in vagaries. But as it is, it seems we have a system where a person could really make a musical breakthrough and get very little compensation for it, whereas some hippie douchebag can string together a bunch of cliches and become a millionaire.

* I should mention that I met Tommy Flanagan, the piano player who played on the tune. This means I’m cooler than you.

I’ve been doing a lot of work in Garage Band lately and I’m really getting a sense of how much of what makes a song sound good is in the hands of the producer. (I already understood this general point, but lately I’m tipping even more of the magic of music into the producer’s corner.) The subtleties of fading out a note, the drama of raising the overall volume at the correct moment – these are all things a producer (or mixer) does.

It strikes me as very unfair. The whole point of becoming a musician is, of course, to snort coke and drink absinthe and have sex with underaged girls. Yet the men who really make the music work – the producers – are deprived these deserved pleasures.

Where is the justice?

Here’s a brand new instrumental I played at a recent live band performance. You have to excuse the fact that the camera pans to Peter, the other guitar player, when I’m soloing. I guess people can’t believe someone could look as good as me AND solo.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to use MIDI (the musical “language” of computers) to create music that sounds as if it was played by a human being. When a computer represents music on its most basic level – just rhythm, melody, harmony and volume – it sounds unexpressive (think of the songs from 1980s video games for example.) In reality, music has many more dimensions than just those basic four. You can play an eighth note hard or soft and let it ring out in many different ways. Can you program those subtleties into computer music? I believe you can imbue computer music with human qualities and this is the first step in my plan to replace human beings with robots.

The lack of expressivity is particularly a problem in classical music which is known to speed up and slow down at the whim of the performer. Are there any rules for this tempo modulation? I’ve been reading a book entitled “Music, Language and the Brain” and it tackles this very question.

At a finer timescale, Repp found that within individual melodic phrases there was a tendency to accelerate at the beginning and slow near the end…Repp speculated that this pattern may resemble human locomotion, in other words, a musical allusion to physical movement.”
(Pages 114-115)

There’s another interesting point on what is referred to as expression in music.

Listeners can reliably identify performances of the same music as expressive, deadpan (mechanical), or exaggerated, and can identify the performer’s intended emotion on the basis of expressive features.
(Page 116)

On its face, there’s nothing really stunning about that statement. But if one could identify which properties of music correlate to which forms of expressivity (at a really granular level – not just “loud equals excited”) one could go a long ways towards creating expressive computer music.

Why do I care? As I’ve mentioned, music is a close to worthless commodity now. So the whole process of paying musicians to come into a recording studio (which I am also paying for) to produce a valueless product is not that appealing. If I could use a computer to replace those musicians I could save a lot of money. This hints at the notion that musicians will become a dying breed, like horseshoe makers, and will wander the streets begging for alms. I will simply laugh at them and sleep with their wives who will gladly debase themselves with anyone willing to toss aside a loaf of bread.

What’s this? Why it’s yet another keyboard instrumental song I’ve recently composed. This one has kind of a DEVO flavor.
Star Surfer Rides to Planet Rasta by Wil Forbis

I’ve been on something of a compositional jag lately, at the expense of doing things like getting my taxes done. Here’s a new piece – my first serious experiment with string orchestration – steeped in the influence of Vivaldi. It’s actually the first section of a larger work built on the concept that I’ll switch to a slower, sadder (and not composed) section and then return to some version of this first part.
D maj orchestral introduction by Wil Forbis

Here’s a new instrumental soundtrack type tune I just finished. I imagine it as the background music in a robot strip club of the future. Aliens and humans might gather and scream, “Show us your robo-titties you whore!” or “Shake that metal ass in my face!” I would never do such things of course, but I’m sad to report misogyny will be alive and well in the future.
Sexy Robots by Wil Forbis

I continue to be oddly fascinated by the implosion of the “John Carter” film. (Is it possible that this is the most significant event in the so far unfolded history of mankind? Possibly. Quite possibly. Very possibly.) This article has a bit more details, blaming the director’s hubris for a lousy marketing campaign.

Stanton (who also nixed all mentions of his Pixar work in the teaser for fear that people would think this film was for little kids) was working from the belief that John Carter was still as universally iconic a figure to people as Dracula, Luke Skywalker, or Tarzan. “It was my Harry Potter,” he said during an interview at Google last week that was streamed live on YouTube. “All I ever wanted when I read that book was to believe it.” He believed that audiences would gasp in delight at John Carter’s very appearance in much the same way that a Batman teaser might only need to flash the Bat Signal. As such, he felt that the very first John Carter trailer needed only to intrigue, not explicate. “To him, it was the most important sci-fi movie of all time,” recounts one Disney marketing insider present for the pitched battles. “He could see no idea in which someone didn’t know who John Carter of Mars was. But it’s not Frankenstein; it’s not Sherlock Holmes. Nobody cares. People don’t say, ‘I know what I’ll be for Halloween! I’ll be John Carter!’”

I recall, when I first saw a poster advertising the movie’s (then months away) arrival, I thought, “As in John Carter from the old pulp novels and Marvel Comic series? They’re really plundering the depths of pop culture if they’re making a movie about that.” (Those were my exact words.) It’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s not a moron that nobody knows who John Carter is. But I suppose it’s no surprise that morons are being allowed to direct films in Hollywood. I’ve long realized that my superior intellectual pedigree has inhibited my success.

The article also point to an additional reason the movie flopped. The Carter books were so influential that many of it’s elements seem too familiar.

Because the Barsoom books were so influential to cinema’s greatest sci-fi auteurs, just about everything in it had already been plundered and reused by other hits. And as a result, the more that was revealed of John Carter, the more derivative it looked, even if its source had originated these ideas. Look at what George Lucas took from Burroughs for his Star Wars movies alone: In his movies, the Sith are evil Jedis; in the world of John Carter, the Sith are evil insects. Star Wars had Princess Leia; John Carter has Princess Dejah. Leia’s infamous bikini in Return of the Jedi? Worn by Princess Dejah first. That flying skiff she’s standing on next to Jabba the Hutt? Carter again. Even those banthas in the Star Wars were culled from the John Carter books, which are populated with similar-looking beasts of burden called banths. Looking beyond Lucas, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry famously pillaged the books, as did James Cameron, who in numerous interviews called Avatar “almost an Edgar Rice Burroughs kind of adventure.”

“Every great scene in the book has been reaped,” explains Don Murphy, the producer of movies like Transformers and Real Steel, who’d tried to bring John Carter to the big screen almost a decade ago, but abandoned the effort. “It’s all been done before, so you actually have to find a way to make and market it in a way that’s actually less faithful to the original material.”