You can make a reasonable guess, make the song, become famous, and then if someone else’s song is similar enough they will attempt to sue you, at which point you change the song by a couple of notes and you’re golden.

Other than that… (shrug)

Nope, studying music and digging into music history is second nature for me. I just don’t worry about that stuff.

Hm, if you’re speaking in a casual way I guess you can Shazam it?

http://www.shazam.com/

I have this app on my phone for when I’m listening to oldies stations and can’t figure out the artist.

@AshlynM You should team up with a sound engineer and develop an app that focuses on detecting melodies and certain portions of a song where it would then search the data base! Call it like, Melody Nova because it’s always cool to use “space” references :P

Try Musipedia. It allows you to search its database and the internet for a piece of music using a variety of tools. The downside it that its database, while growing, is still pretty small.

The app my daughter uses is SoundHound. Just sing the notes into the phone, and it tells you the name of the tune.

@filmfann Right, but the problem with those apps is that new songs are created almost every day. Are they constantly updating their app? Sometimes it may not recognize a song.

@auhsojsa You should somehow be able to input your melody into the app or play the app and let it listen to your song and then it searches for results to see if that melody already exists. The problem I have with writing songs, complete with lyrics and melody, is that I have no idea whether or not that song already exists and people are so sensitive over copyright issues.

There are a bunch of websites where you can hum a melody and it’ll identify it for you. This website has five of them!