Shared DNA in Music | Hacker News Reader

Shared DNA in Music

pudding.cool

251 pointsksampath0261 comments

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...

Funny you mention "Mary Jane's Last Dance". The Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Dani California" overlaps with that (the chord progression is the same and rhythm style is pretty close too).

This is surprisingly common with Metallica for some reason. Could just be that they have so many tracks that statistically there's bound to be some overlaps.

Another example is "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiIc0HuJ78Q

Whose intro sounds the same as "Rainbow Warrior" by Bleak House, released 5-6 years earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zowid7KAmnM

I've showed a few people this and I'm surprised that so many people don't notice that it's sweet home alabama. I am from Georgia though and that song used to be an anthem. lol

Like a game of telephone but with guitar riffs

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

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.

It's also not helped that some of the early hip hop musicians have themselves become highly sought after session musicians and producers, that have in turn seeded certain sounds all over the musical map; several members of the Sugarhill rap label (most notably Keith leblanc and Doug Wimbish) have literally over 1000 credits, including NIN's debut, Public Enemy, P-Funk, and Jeff Beck, so much like how Jeff Porcaro of Toto created a certain drum sound endemic to the 80s, such patterns are going to be exacerbated by use of much of the same limited musician/production pool.

Hip hop is no more derivative than the blues or funk, but they are definitely more sample-friendly.

The same applies to risk-adverse, high profit genres and/or producer heavy ones like pop country. Obviously zeitgeist and even conventions and music theory play a role.

Sir Mashalot had a few videos a while ago.

https://youtu.be/FY8SwIvxj8o

The Blues Traveler trolling with the song Hook using the melody from Pachelbel's Canon with lyrics explicitly calling this out wasn't noticed by almost anyone.

https://youtu.be/pdz5kCaCRFM

Obviously Pop heavily samples too, E.G. Tom Tom Club Genius of Love being used by Mariah Carey's Fantasy, but it goes beyond sampling.

The Rolling Stones pulling from artists like Fred McDowell and Led Zeppelin settled copyright suits on Lemon Song, Whole Lotta Love, Bring it on Home and Dazed and Confused etc...

The invention of the Fairlight Sampler may have lead to groups like the Pet Shop Boys sampling dozens of other works, but as the Stones and Led Zeppelin show it wasn't unique.

Well I guess the Pet Shop Boys were inspired by Grandmaster Flash, and if you listen to the original recording of West End Girls you can hear James Brown samples...not sure if that counts as "hip-hop" in that case or not.

https://youtu.be/PKB2bYYYTYw

As a bad guitar player, I can understand why even Rock and Roll pretty much grew out of artists copying R&B/Gospel artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but inspiration vs copying is a fuzzy line.

But basically the tooling changed, not the methods which have complex and intertwined causes, motivations, and effects.

I wonder whether a possible audio similarities analyzer would be capable of detecting influences described by the creators themselves. For example, in a podcast, Tal Bachman said that making his most famous hit "She's So High" started when he heard the chorus of "If It Makes You Happy" by Sheryl Crow in a supermarket. After that revelation I now can not unhear it and the choruses of those songs are connected in my brain. But the connection is not that obvious.

There's also https://www.whosampled.com/

I wonder, do you find Outkast's ATLiens album to be derivative? Especially "Elevators" and "Wheels of Steel". I certainly don't know enough music to answer that question definitively, if anyone does.

Even though some of the lyrics have certainly not aged well, I do like its minimal aesthetic, and I was in Decatur, GA at the time, and it sure beat the crap Diddy and Mase were putting out at the time.

Side note: WCLK Clark Atlanta University radio station was the absolute best radio station I've ever heard, where I found my favorite music of all-time: AfroCuban jazz. Their Hip Hop and Jazz programs were fantastic. That's also where I learned of the magical spoken word intro version of Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World".

"No one's musical education is complete."

> Side note: WCLK Clark Atlanta University radio station was the absolute best radio station I've ever heard, where I found my favorite music of all-time: AfroCuban jazz. Their Hip Hop and Jazz programs were fantastic.

You’ll probably like WEFUNK, a hip hop/soul/funk weekly program that has been streaming since the late 90s, with ad-free streams and downloads, livestreams, RSS feeds etc while being listener-supported. They even have some basic apps for your devices.

https://www.wefunkradio.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEFUNK_Radio

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

Thanks for teaching me about this! I listened to it and immediately thought I recognized it from Jamie XX's Oh my Gosh. In the event I was wrong, it samples Lyn Collins -- another classic sample I believe, certainly in hip hop. But I'm sure I'll hear it pop up in lots of places now, always nice to learn a piece of history.

https://www.whosampled.com/sample/343380/Jamie-xx-Gosh-Lyn-C...

This is my favorite video on the Amen break from about 20 years ago that explains the history and more of the context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

The presenter chose different songs, but the concept is the same.

I got curious and tried searching for it, ended up finding out they actually sample James Brown's "Funky Drummer". Very interesting either way. Thanks!

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

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.

I actually think what your asking for exists, I cant remember the name but I think Aphex Twin was involved?

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

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.

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?

The secret to Pandora is to never give thumbs up but religiously thumbs down anything you don't like. Then it's constantly searching for new things you like related to the original theme!

But also, yes that was the original thought process.

100%. I bought into the "thumbs up what you like and get more of it" when I signed up for Pandora, and that quickly led to getting the same thumbs up songs over and over...

Fortunately with Pandora you could create a new station that wasn't aware of the thumbs so it was able to work around, but it took me a while to figure that out and stop thumbing up

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."

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.

Music cuts across time, geography, and culture in a way very few things do. Even when artists are worlds apart, they end up building on the same rhythms, motifs, or emotions

Nah, we'd rather remove the human from the loop and stroke our egos with technical achievements.

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 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?

We used it to allow pepole to include song lyrics in their letters sent to loved ones. Unfortunately it was a constant source of breakage in the app and we eventually removed it when they pushed a very breaking change and there wasn't any availability to rewrite that part of the app.

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

https://tvtropes.org/

I'd like to see a tvtropes for rhetorical tricks. That way every time a politician dished out a creative lie it could be mapped to a curated pile of historical references for the last time that lie was told and we can see how it worked for the lied-to the last time it came around.

WARNING WARNING

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

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!

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.

Great great project, as usual by the pudding

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

This was done so well. Congrats!!!

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

This is really cool!

Incredible project.

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

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.

Some sampling might be lazy, but there's plenty of impressive producers which take the art to the next level. Some suggestions you can sample: DJ Shadow, J Dilla, Madlib, The Avalanches, Statik Selektah. And as a bonus, an artist definitely not hip hop which makes beautiful use of sampling is Jens Lekman.

I will be charitable even though you called rap "lowest common denominator" poetry.

If you are genuinely interested, I suggest you look into the history of hip hop. IMO, the point of early hip hop was not to create sophisticated music, but to connect people by using sounds they were already familiar with. More important was the message and vocal delivery of the MC.

I use the Roland 505ii looper, and do massive 'samples' - whole verses etc, great for song analysis, practice etc. If I could incorporate something into a hit song, I'd happily pay the royalties to the 'samplee'. I rather suspect the early days of sampling/ hip hop etc, it was the "how do we get paid...they're ripping us off" panic that created issues. Now, the money-flow has been standardised, and sped up, there are considerably less problems. Oh, my favourite example of extreme sampling - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJYeSpyRpRA&list=PLXa6-G1Tk7...

May I add some awesome producers: Sounwave, DJ Dahi, The Alchemist, Kanye West, DJ Premier, 9th Wonder

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

Mozart ripped of Händel. For example parts from his famous Reqiuem are a rip of of Händels Messiah. And a lot of classical Composers (ex. Beethoven) ripped of from their "godfather": J.S Bach. Altough they did not call it rip of, but learning.

Exactly. The attitude is just so totally ignorant. Otherwise, just consider practically all equal temperament western music a ripoff of J.S Bach.

Of course, someone who knows nothing about music like this wouldn't know that.

The irony is that it could be argued hip hop is one of the few western pop musical art forms that isn't a complete J.S Bach ripoff.

I'm always weirded out by such "domain-specific knowledgey" statements like this.

I just don't get how someone simultaneously e.g. knows what a Roland Drum Machine is, but also manages to stay wildly ignorant about an entire genre of established music to make such a sweeping statement.

I agree that rap/hiphop artists are often guilty of just gracelessly slapping a beat over some one else's hook or chorus and it really does come off as lazy and disrespectful. This is especially true when the sample is of something that is (or was) already popular and easily recognizable.

That said, samples can be used in a lot of creative ways and even some very straightforward ones while still creating something unique/transformative. I still think it's a good thing that artists can use samples in their work since it does expand what's possible and I can always just ignore the low effort garbage.

Your cutoff is somewhat arbitrary.

Whatever artist you think is legitimate never did anything fully original either. The only original musician may have been the first caveman to hit two logs together.

There's a great video essay series known as "Everything is a Remix" by Kirby Ferguson [1] if you have an hour to spare. Ferguson uses the trends of music sampling as a base for how artists draw inspiration from others. The controversy of sampling has been used across genres, include around minute 9 Ferguson points out that Led Zepplin were considered ripoffs for their appropriation of Jake Holmes. Axis of Awesome also has a "chord progression song" [2] that makes fun of how similar many pop songs are.

The video draws a nice parallel to how so much in our world serves as "inspiration" for our own works, but acknowledges the controversy around using a single source as "too much inspiration". Especially as we move into whatever copyright arguments are getting made toward AI right now, I think it serves as a nice outline on why this is such a complicated matter.

[1] https://www.everythingisaremix.info/everything-is-a-remix-20...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

this is a weirdly anti art view of music as a whole, do you just not enjoy organized sound?

The very first rap/hip-hop song, Rapper's Delight is itself ... inspired by previous a song or two.

But that's ok, since they absolutely added improvements.

The 'haha! ha!' from Genesis's 'Mama' is quite literally taken out of 'The Message' by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (the first rap hit song): I just think it's neat Genesis were listening to that. They don't seem like they'd be listening to rap and yet it's well documented in their own words that they'd not only heard it, but were that into it that they kept sticking that riff in 'Mama' and it stuck.

I'm glad you mentioned Genesis because they're the subject of one of my favorite samples. OutKast's famous track "SpottieOttieDopaliscious" contains a sample from Genesis's "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight" and upon learning this, I just thought it was so cool that OutKast listened to Peter-Gabriel-era Genesis when Genesis was very much a progressive rock band rather than the pop powerhouse most know them as today.

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