Cryptomnesia (Subconscious Plagiarism) - How Do You Deal With It?

[glennarN]

Hi all,

 

I'm a guy from Sweden who decided to pick up songwriting a couple of years ago. After writing some songs that I was really happy with, I eventually started thinking about trying to get into the business somehow. Sweden hosts a number of great educational programmes for songwriters that are directly connected to the industry and I've been very excited about the possibility of actually making it there. That was until I've slowly discovered that a lot of my better songs contain elements or entire motifs that have been ripped from songs that I've heard but never ever had in my conscious mind while writing them. Typically it is from songs that I haven't listened to in years, but they keep coming up anyway. 

 

Typically, all my songs start to develop from discovering some small fragment of melody or a little motif that inspires me to write a complete melody or song. It's as if when I find that certain melody fragment or motif, my mind automatically associates it with something else and it just keeps going from there. The scary thing is that it seems that I'm guided by familiarity (or by hearing stuff that I personally like in my own writing) since a lot of stuff has ended up similar to something else. 

 

I find all of this really depressing and it is starting to feel like there is no reason for me trust my intuition and that my inspiration is a bad thing. I do not condone plagiarism in any way, frankly, I am disgusted whenever I discover these things and it ruins my day completely.

 

Has any of you guys struggled with this before? I'm wondering if I need to simply change my mindset, maybe not being so goal/result oriented because that seems to be getting myself into trouble, but that also sounds very un-natural to me since I want to write stuff that I can enjoy myself and that I personally think is really good.

 

I might be making a complete fool out of myself for making a post like this, but any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated...

 

/Michael

 

[Guest]

When I was 11 years old, I went to school one day singing a little ditty to myself. Even though I hadn't ever considered songwriting, I had written my first song. I loved it! I would sing it walking to school, walking back home... I'd sing it all the time! How I loved my new little song.

 

About three or four days later... I heard my song on the radio! "Hey! That's my song! How did they get my song?!?!" Well... The explanation eventually became apparent. You see, I used a clock/radio to rise every morning and that song ---being very popular--- would be played every morning around the same time I would wake up. I had absorbed the melody in my sleep! The song? Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, by some guys you might've heard of; The Beatles.

 

 

I write 'em good, don't I?

Edited July 7, 2013 by Skylark

[glennarN]

@tunesmith: Thanks for your post. The stuff I would consider have been "ripped off" from others are not carbon copies. It is usually a matter of finding out that certain small passages (maybe a bar at most) is similar to something else. Sometimes the phrasing/rhythm of a melody may be identical to something else while the pitches of the notes (relative to the scale) themselves have changed and/or sung over different chords. In one extreme case however, I wrote a chorus that was ripped almost verbatim from another song that I'm not entirely sure that I had heard before. I did not recognise the original when I first heard it, but chances are it might have been something that I've heard only once while not really being focused at the music itself (at work or maybe in some social situation... who knows). The brain is obviously dumb as shit

 

As for your advice of not listening to my favorites... well that's really good advice but the problem seems to be that my writing is mostly similar to stuff from my old favorites or something else that I'm not listening to actively. I'm very able to recognise similarities to stuff that I'm currently listening to and that stuff tends to be rejected almost immediately, though I might roll with it if it is more subtle. I'm not typically genre-bound either, most of my stuff right now is just chords + melody + lyrics so it could really go either way. Listening to more genres however... yeah that sounds like a good idea, I tend to mostly listen to melodic pop/rock/hard rock so new sources might be nice.

 

@Skylark: Funny story, the subconscious sure seems to play some tricks on us

 

Are you perhaps a member of The Offspring?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR6A-Bk9eZQ

 

I sure wonder how they got away with that one...

[Rudi]

It is a constant and on-going problem.

Usually I am aware of the similarity and can steer the progress of the new song away from any obvious link.

 

Sometimes I get caught out like you.

 

For my present song, I use a common chord pattern used in lots of very different song. I kept obsessing about certain songs that I didn’t even particularly like. What was going on? You guessed it, I had subliminally picked up on songs with the same chord progression I was using.

Most of the time no one would ever guess where the inspiration came from or where the structure was replicated. We have to be so careful.

 

I often reflect on the legal tangle George Harrison got caught up in with ‘My Sweet Lord’. I’m sure he quite innocently wrote the song unaware of any similarity to another song. But there was and he went through the courts because of it.

[studiobee]

I do this a lot with melodies.  I once took a TV/film composing course.  I had to write a game show theme.  When I submitted it, my tutor told me I had totally ripped off a very well known TV theme.  I had never watched the show, and had never heard the music (to my knowledge), but when I searched the theme on YouTube, sure enough, it was an almost note perfect copy. I did the same with a commercial assignment. Strange, the subconscious.  I don't worry about this stuff (my stuff ain't really going anywhere!), but I don't think its a bad idea to let SoundHound have a listen and see if it can pick out a known song from my compositions when doing something commercially.

[Guest]

Mornin', 'bee!

 

Learning about SoundHound through your post will probably be the best thing that happens to me all day! THANKS!