Unfortunate Sonic Coincidences Ongoing History of New Music

Here are a couple of musical terms you may have heard of…



Earworm: that’s when a clip of a song keeps running through your head on a loop over and over and over again.


Mondegreen: a misheard lyric…a great example is in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”…he sings “’scuse me while i kiss the sky”…some people hear that as “’scuse me while i kiss this guy”…there are lots of mondegreens in popular music…


I propose we need a third term…it’s that opinion that overcomes us when we believe one song sounds almost exactly like another…

I know you know what i mean…you hear a new song and a brief sense of déjà vu fills your head as your brain tries to correlate its musical database with what you’re hearing…and when all the processing is completely, you might think (a) “hey! Someone ripped off [artist x]!”…or (b) “someone’s gonna get sued!”…

But you know something?...it’s not that simple…far, far from it…welcome to the murky world of unfortunate sonic coincidences…
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