Check your melodies for...."influence"

I recently came across this website while perusing stumbleupon:

http://www.musipedia.org/flash_piano.html

It's a database that let's you input notes of a melody, and then search based on those notes. Almost all of their library as far as I can tell is classical, so that's what your melody will be searching through. But I think it's useful, because it seems whenever I come up with a melody that I really like, I get this sinking feeling that I might have unknowingly taken it from something I've heard before. I've input a melody I'm working on currently that sounds VERY Mozartian, and I was worried I might find something similar. While obviously not exhaustive, I didn't find any matches in their search which kept my hopes up.

They also have a java version, as well as a tool that lets you whistle into your mic, but I haven't tried either of those.

Great tool. I use it all the time.

Who cares if your melody has influences? It's very hard for you to unknowingly mimick a melody in its entirety!

After composing my stuff I've heard a bit of Zimmer's Tortuga in my string quartet, six notes of Liar Liar's soundtrack in my operetta, and other stuff I didn't notice had been there.

I think you can't create without some influence, so what's the problem?

this is really cool, thanks for the link

Who cares if your melody has influences? It's very hard for you to unknowingly mimick a melody in its entirety!

After composing my stuff I've heard a bit of Zimmer's Tortuga in my string quartet, six notes of Liar Liar's soundtrack in my operetta, and other stuff I didn't notice had been there.

I think you can't create without some influence, so what's the problem?

I put "influence" in quotations (like that) meaning in case you accidentally copy a melody completely. I've done it a few times, but it doesn't happen often. Also it's just a cool resource.

It's not that clever though: it failed to spot a motif that is the subject of a Bach fugue, and a theme I used which was very similar to the chorale in the 2nd movement of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra.

Well I assume it's not exhaustive. Perhaps there's a way to add to it's library. If not, they should work on a way to allow users to link to other preexistent works.

Yeah, I've tested it by purposely entering existing melodies, and it didn't catch everything. But it has saved my donkey a couple of times, keeping me from wasting time on an idea I'd inadvertently plagiarised.

I fed it three tone rows and each time it came up with some rather amusing works it claimed influenced the row. This is a nice idea.

seems like no more than a curiosity.

It looks like it has potential to be useful. I feel like composers with more "contemporary" harmonic languages will be less likely to need something like this, however. Probably the simplest solution to avoiding writing melodies that sound too much like Mozart would be to... well, not compose like Mozart! ;) And even so, according to Stravinsky: "Good composers borrow, great composers steal."

VERY cool site! Thanks a lot! Only complaint is that some of the javascript examples fail to launch.

Just as a lark, I decided to try this.

This is me(pay attention to the first three measures only.):

http://soundcloud.com/skyy38/ras-al-ghul

My results on musipedia:

http://www.musipedia.org/result.html?sourceid=flash&tx_mpsearch_pi1[submit_button]=Search&tx_mpsearch_pi1[pc]=hum+00-92-100%2F2488-99-100%2F3741-97-100%2F4765-99-100%2F7356-97-100%2F8329-99-100%2F10768-100-100%2F11981-97-100%2F14256-96-100%2F16127-93-100%2F17112-92-100&coll=m&rvp=0.5&filtertext=&onlymatchfrom=0&ofs=0

I think I'm safe!

:)