How to Know if My Melodies are Original (Copyright fears)

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GrahamJan 26, 2025

Hey Riley

How can I check that my melody is truly original?

Is there any software that is able to listen to my tracks and highlight any similarities to existing music? I've heard of apps such as Shazam and Midomi, but with these you either hum your melody into your phone or play it on piano. Sounds a bit hiss or miss to me.

Many thanks!

Replies (3)

GratuiTousStaffJan 27, 2025

Hey Graham!

In short, there's really no way to know if your melody was already created!

This is also the main reason there are many lawsuits regarding artists suing due to copyright & sounding similar.

All you can really do is just do your own thing as much as possible 👍

Apps like Shazam are very helpful to find the name of a song you don't know.. let's say you are out and hear the song, you can use Shazam to find the song's name.

However, I think how these apps work is by trying to match the song's frequency content to what's already in their database.. In other words, it takes into account the drums, melodies, vocals.. essentially EVERYTHING in that song, which makes its frequency footprint unique to any other song.

So using an app like this to see if a single instrument's melody is already taken will not work here.

What's even trickier is that music only has 12 notes.. so when it comes to chords & chord progressions, there will always be some type of overlap of your music to others..

It really comes down to wise sound selection of instruments and the musical rhythms of how you've placed your sounds which will make your stuff unique!

In short, just make music your own way!

Hope you've been well 🙂

JirehFeb 23, 2025

What a coincidence! I was about to ask the same question and thankfully find that someone has already asked it before me. Thanks for the explanation, Riley. I'd figured that there's really no 100% sure way of finding out if someone has already made music similar to yours.

Best thing we can do is to be creative and try to make our music really different by incorporating many different types of sound.

GratuiTousStaffFeb 23, 2025

Yes, that's exactly right!

If you are intentionally trying to copy someone, then you'll know in your heart you're in the wrong.

Something interesting I was thinking about.. I wonder how well similar apps to Shazam would be able to find songs if we were to pitch them up or down a couple keys..

I assume the unique finger print of the song's audio frequency waveform is in their database which matches the song..

At the end of the day.. with the amount of sounds, and how unique each sound is, it's actually really hard to create a song that sound similar, but not uncommon.

(For an example.. try and clap into a microphone and record it multiple times.. you'll probably never be able to make it sound the same twice.. the same goes if you record vocals twice.. that's why stacking vocals sounds so powerful because of the frequency differences which creates a thickening sound!)