The perception of similarity in court cases of melodic plagiarism and a review of measures of melodic similarity

This study examines the perception of melodic similarity applied to cases of melodic plagiarism under a review of similarity measures. An implicit memory task was designed to test the extent of the participants’ confusabilityof two similar melodies. The participants were able to distinguish between such melodies involved in cases with and without actual copyright infringement. Many of the applied measures of similarity relate very well to the results of the implicit memory task and the court case decisions, such as a Tversky feature-based measure (r = 0.514) and a weighted Edit Distance (r =0.515) for the psychological data and certain Earth mover’s distance measures for the court decisions (AUC of .84).