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I once had the realization that a riff from Metallica's "The Four Horseman" was the same as that from Tom Petty's "Last Dance With Mary Jane" except, as I learned several years after the realization, it is actually the riff from "Sweet Home Alabama" which was introduced in a session as a joke by the guitarist to make fun of the drummer for having narrow musical knowledge. He was correct in his assumption that the drummer wouldn't recognize it, and it was included in the final version of the song.

The story: https://youtube.com/shorts/nY6CPOtN47w?si=K_9EKvKGbgnuGKSg

The riffs: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2V6HbSkAD5g&pp=ygUgZm91ciBob3J...

What this mostly seems to demonstrate is that hip-pop is endlessly derivative. That might be a consequence of their data source:

> To build this project, we used the dataset of hundreds of thousands of songs on Genius.com accessible through their API, over 200,000 of which were “connected” in some way by sample, interpolation, cover, or remix.

Genres where sampling is openly and explicitly acknowledged are going to be massively over-represented. It would be cool build a relationship network using feature extraction on the actual audio.

when i gave a presentation on sampling for a public speaking class in college i played the amen break, then slowed it down to show it was used in Fuck Tha Police, then sped it up to show it was used in the powerpuff girls theme song

In a similar vein, I maintain a website[0] where users can submit songs that sound like other songs. Several times this has helped me figure out where I’ve heard a riff or melody before (when it’s not a direct sample, which I usually find on whosampled.com).

0: https://memalign.github.io/m/similarsongs.html

My kids and I were kind of flabbergasted after listening to the "Song Exploder" podcast's episode on the Weezer song "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" about how Rivers Cuomo writes songs.

Basically, he obscures interesting chord progressions of songs he finds by recording his own simplified version without the song's original rhythm. Then he takes his spreadsheet he made over years, of lyrical phrases he came up with that he thinks will sound good in a song, organized by number of syllables and where the accent lands. Then, finally, some time in the futuer, once he has forgotten the original song's construction, he takes out the chord progression and finds places to fit different kinds of lyrical phrases.

It blew us away to know that his lyrics have no meaning whatsoever. In fact, that particular song was the result of a conversation between two teachers he overheard at one of his children's end of year gettogether.

It is quite extraordinary, and he is quite good at it, though we have few Weezer songs in our playlist.

https://songexploder.net/weezer

This is amazing and something I personally love to do myself, and it's great to see a website that encourages engaging with culture and art in a deeper and historical level, I feel like that's something that we need more and more of nowadays.

Just wanted to let you know that I'm getting a pretty big audio pop when I scroll through the mountain king section on my phone, like my speaker is getting blown out a little, maybe some clipping or weird audio initializing going on.

Great great project, as usual by the pudding

Huh, I never put together "Inspector Gadget" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King".

Apparently the Smoke on the Water riff is Beethoven, sorta. According to Ritchie Blackmore.

"It's an interpretation of inversion, You turn it back and play it back and forth. It's actually Beethoven's 5th. So, I owe him a lot of money."

Made me think of that Silicon Valley episode with the Patent Troll.

I don't remember it exactly, but I think near the end Richard solves the situation by building a (fake?) music app that detected that the song that had made the Patent Troll rich was actually a ripoff from another song that Richard had acquired the rights to, so now Richard could technically sue the Patent Troll for all the money he had made...

If anybody has a link to that scene it would be great.

This is wonderful. I have wanted to make some version of this for years. Thank you for sharing!

Incredible project.

reminds me of a mix between ishkur's guide to EDM and whosampled... :) in Flash.

In other words, many songs use the same chord progressions despite being classified as separate genres.

What really blows my mind is not the fact that all these songs borrow from and remix one another, but the overall "problem of universals" from metaphysics. In the realm of music, how do we even identify specific characteristics that lead to properties of resemblence? How does your brain know "Oh, that's the Funky Drummer beat" when it's played on a different drum kit or at a different tempo, etc etc.

edit: Would love to see an AI driven project where you drag a slider to "mutate" a sample until it's no longer that sample but another piece of music. A "boil the frog" type thing.

This was done so well. Congrats!!!

Reminds me of one of my all-time favorites sites: https://www.whosampled.com/

This is an incredibly cool idea. I would love to see this applied to music, but also literary structure, film, etc.

Reminds me of 'Wonder Riff' by Baterz, although it's mainly about arguing with David Whiffler about how it's not actually a copy of Stevie Wonder, just slightly similar. Good fun Aussie pub-rock vibe tho I reckon it's great:

https://youtu.be/Pe5x6asEkgs?si=qTfwIva1_fRY6973

wow this is such SUCH a neat project, I never realized the music game was this incestuous (not necessarily in a bad way).

One tiny tip though, when you have the buttons in the text to play the songs, the green buttons, you don’t really know how long that’ll go on for so a playtime indicator just by having the lightgreen button fill with dark green over time from left to right, 0 at the start 100 at the end would be great.

All in all really neat!

What a cool project. I really think music is one of our greatest examples of shared heritage.

My only comment is I think this would of benefited from some interviews or commentary by actual musicians. It felt really really surface level.

Wow this is super cool!

They primarily used the genius.com API, which I didn't know existed. Anyone built any other cool projects with it?

Is there a "discovery" player that plays your own Spotify library, but shows you all related tracks by sample, interpolation, cover, etc from the Genius API that you can explore? Kind of like a wikipedia rabbithole, but for music?

Wasn’t this Pandoras original claim to fame - that they used 30 or 40 different aspects of music to categorize music and help you find what you liked?

Why is it "Shared DNA" if all rappers do is sample and totally rip-off music (Logos, artist names etc) before them?

The concept of "DNA" with music goes much deeper than some lucky nobody who sampled someone's life work so they could pollute it with lowest common denominator poetry and a Roland Drum Machine.

I submit that oogling over people who steal music by sampling is not that deep, and there's deeper methods of musical analysis than "This band sampled this beat, this means they're a natural progression of art".

Every example I skimmed over was some hiphop artist who ripped off music before them.

Other artists have some shame and just copy chord progressions, but rappers went so far to just completely steal parts of the song.

This is really cool!