Have you ever penned down a tune, then stopped for a moment and asked yourself: “Does this tune sound like something else that’s already out there?”
I once read that Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the tune of “Yesterday” in his head (it was just the tune at that point, no lyrics), and he went around frantically asking anyone he knew if they’d heard that tune before.
Y’know, the worst thing (to me) is to play an original song for someone, and then have that person say “Hey, this sounds exactly like so-and-so song…”
And then you think for awhile and go “Oh yah, how come I didn’t realise this earlier! Back to the drawing board…”
Hate it when that happens.
So there are many times when I’m writing a new song, and I’m dying to know if my melody sounds like another song out there that has already been written.
Cos we all listen to lots of music every day, and sometimes we subconsciously have certain tunes swimming about in our heads. And when we write songs, we unknowingly get “inspired” by these melodies that are lurking somewhere in the back recesses of our minds.
Another point which Firdaus once brought up is that “there are already billions of songs written, so definitely some will sound similar to what you’ve composed”.
Very true.
Don’t you wish there was some kind of website whereby we could input a particular original tune, and then it would go search and tell us if there are any songs out there which resemble our tune? That would be cool, don’t you think?
You see, for lyrics there is no such problem, cos all we have to do is type out the exact lyrics in Google, and then we’ll immediately know if there are any other similar lyrics like this out there.
But for melody, it’s not the case.
I suppose such a website is not feasible. There’s just no way it can be done, when it comes to matching similar tunes.
So for now, we’ll just have to do it the “ask every single one of our friends” way, a la Paul McCartney.
