Nobody wants to hear “It depends.” We can go a little deeper.

We cannot, however, make it both straightforward and general. People react to musical similarity for different reasons. Melody and harmony matter, but listeners also respond strongly to groove, arrangement, sound design, instrumentation, and the overall feel of a track. Any of these layers can create a sense of recognition, and that recognition often becomes the claim that one song “copied” or “stole” another. This is where a forensic musicologist sometimes steps in. My work is to take that complex field of musical signals and identify which similarities are meaningful, which are coincidental, and which rise to the level that matters in a copyright or infringement analysis. Complexity becomes salience, and salience becomes evidence. Caveats in place, we can speak generally now.

What Are People Actually Hearing?

Talk about a gamut. When someone insists two songs sound alike, they may be reacting to any of a bunch of specific cues, even if they sometimes do not themselves know what it is. Much of the time, as you’d surely expected, it is the tune, and sometimes down to just a couple of notes, and trivial as it may sound. Then again, a couple of notes can be a (musicologist stuff, sorry) “motif,” and this can give it gravity. (Sometimes, but it depends. Get used to it.) Or it is the way the drums and bass sit together? Sometimes it is a texture that triggers a memory of another track.

There is no single explanation. Different elements rise to the surface depending on musical background and context, and too many other things to count.

Victor Hugo said, “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” I’ll shoehorn it in here, because music carries more layers than language can comfortably describe. Melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, timbre, groove, and production decisions all speak at once. Listeners react to that whole field of information before they can explain the parts of it. I have enjoyed sharing music with people who are, for all intents and purposes, tone-deaf, but LOVE MUSIC. It’s the farthest thing from exclusive, thankfully, if perhaps somewhat confoundingly.

This is also why similarity disputes initially get so tangled and need sorting. The human response comes from one or a plethora of elements in a multidimensional signal. Understanding those layers, and knowing which ones actually matter in a comparison, is the bridge between what listeners feel and what courts, labels, or attorneys need to understand. And it’s why the work of interpreting musical similarity remains both necessary and inevitable.

Overlapping Features Create the Sense of Sameness

It helps to think of this as overlapping musical features rather than one defining trait. Melody, harmony, groove, instrumentation, tempo, and production choices all interact. When enough of them align, the songs feel related, even if the connection is not obvious.

A simple hook can anchor the reaction in one case.
A shared rhythmic pattern or bass feel can drive it in another.
Sometimes the similarity sits in the blend of tempo and energy rather than in the notes.

Melody and Harmony Define Most Identities

It is certainly my finding that, across styles, listeners tend to treat melody, and its relationship to the chords underneath it, most commonly, as the core identity of a song. It is where most of my copying disputes happen. When the contour and rhythm of a tune track closely with another tune, listeners hear the connection quickly.

Chord progressions can do it too. They are reused constantly of course, and listeners know that on some intuitive level, else listening to new music would be unpleasantly challenging. But a similar melody over a familiar progression pushes people further toward the sense that they are hearing the same idea. And rightfully. The notes in a melody are given meaning in their context — where they sit rhythmically and dynamically, and against what harmony in a progression.

The Role of Arrangement and Production

Engineers are undersung heroes. Many listeners focus more on the surface than the structure. Drum tones, bass character, synth patches, guitar textures, vocal effects, and mix decisions shape perception strongly. Two songs with no more than some awfully well-worn progression in common can still feel suspiciously alike if the tempo, groove, and production choices occupy the same space.
A distinctive intro sound can create that effect all by itself.

Why Some Progressions Signal Identity and Others Do Not

Many similarities in music come down to material that is, as I just put it, simply well worn. In copyright, that kind of familiarity falls under scènes à faire, the elements so common to a style or genre that no one can own them. Copyright protects original expression, but not all the individual pieces that show up inside it. A four-chord loop, a standard drum pattern, a predictable bass figure, and countless similar bits appear everywhere, and listeners read them as similar even when nothing original has been copied. They feel similar, and they are similar, and they show up constantly because they recur across countless songs. That’s okay. Want to write a hit? Judicious use of familiar elements is part of the point.

Clearance analysis, which sits squarely in the musicologist’s job, is about separating the protectable from the unprotectable and deciding not only what is legal, but when an observable similarity creates unnecessary or untenable risk. A great deal of that decision making depends on the shared vocabulary that every genre leans on.

Subconscious Echoes Happen – that’s often too.

Conscious ones too! From a forensic standpoint, it depends on the degree and particulars of the echo. Writers land on ideas that resemble earlier songs both with and without realizing it, and the resemblance may or may not snap into focus only after someone names the reference. Before that, it enjoys something like familiarity rather than a clear connection. Copyright does not protect ideas, and there is a reason for that. The point is not to clamp down on creativity but to promote it. The law protects original expression, not the raw ideas that everyone draws from, and music would stall out fast if it worked any other way.

Who’s listening?

It’s just true. Musicians listen differently. They may be quick to focus on things like the underlying mechanics: contour, harmonic behavior, and voice-leading. I don’t just listen. The notes and most harmonic choices are quantified in real time. That’s enjoyment to me. I’ve been watching an old show called The Newsroom lately and I never skip over the opening credits because I’m happy taking apart Thomas Newman’s theme. The less happy, less interested person beside me has to endure my air drumming the time signatures, and I’m not being a musicologist. I’m just enjoying it. Knowing where beat 1 is enhances my enjoyment of the groove.

Casual listeners may react more to groove, feel, instrumentation, and genre signals. As a result, musicians may hear two songs as cousins while listeners hear them as unrelated. And sometimes the reverse is true.

So??

Copyright law has language for this. The extrinsic test is the part we can examine in a disciplined way: all the stuff we’ve mentioned — contour, intervals, harmonic function, rhythms, and the other structural pieces that can be mapped and compared. The intrinsic test lives on the listener’s side, the total impression. Juries lean heavily on that because it is accessible in a way musical structure is less so.

My job is not, contrary to appearances, to argue that juries are wrong. It is to give them the clearest possible understanding of the material facts before they reach their opinions. Intrinsic responses are real, but they can also be misleading, and the law itself recognizes that by requiring both tests. My work sits somewhat in the middle. I explain what is actually present in the music, where the similarities live, where they do not, and how much weight those similarities reasonably carry.

I listen to music the way a musician does. I can’t not. I do not claim that analysis cancels perception. It does not. And I do not pretend to be the final word on what a jury will feel. Musicologists should be careful about that. The point is not to replace the jury’s instinct but to inform it, to limit the risk that their instinct is driven by features that the law does not protect. That is the balance. It’s the work.

Songs Sound Alike.

There is not one cause. In one case, it is the melody. In another, it is production, instrumentation, groove, or tempo. The sense of similarity comes from the specific overlap that stands out to the listener in that moment.

That complexity is why the debate never really ends. Music carries many layers, and different listeners weigh them differently. The law tries to account for that with its two tests, and for all the criticism those tests attract, I think copyright itself is one of our better ideas. It gives creators room to take risks, and it draws boundaries that keep the whole system honest. It is a noble framework, even now, when thoughtful people argue that copyright may be obsolete or should disappear entirely in an age of AI. For now at least, I disagree. We need it more, not less.

More complexity; a jury may lean toward feel, and sometimes that is fair, but sometimes it is not, and the distinction matters. My work sits in the middle of all that noise. I map what is actually present in the music, where the similarities matter, where they do not, and why some echoes are harmless while others might not be. Listeners bring instinct, which is useful, but instinct alone cannot tell you whether a similarity is meaningful.

This is also why musicologists are central in modern music disputes. As music becomes more layered, more referential, and increasingly shaped by AI, the question of similarity is harder to answer by instinct alone. Someone still has to take the full stack of musical signals and sort out what’s structural, what’s ornamental, and what actually matters under copyright. That interpretive bridge — between what people feel and what the law protects — is the practical core of my work.

Different types of listeners listen differently. Similarity is heard for all sorts of reasons. It’s not so much a question of rightly or wrongly observed. At the risk of being too philosophical sounding, we might acknowledge a simple truism: if it’s observed, it’s there. So, I help separate the too familiar from the merely familiar; the familiar from the protectable.