Are there actually any popular melodies that span more than one octave?
Also, suppose I take a popular melody spanning two octaves and compress it to one (just c' to c). Will these melodies actually sound different enough to be considered independently copyrightable? My guess would be no.
> Are there actually any popular melodies that span more than one octave?
Star Spangled Banner's melody spans 3 octaves IIRC.
But more importantly, any melody with an accidental would require the 13-notes that include the 5 "sharps" or "flats" per octave.
Every country song is pretty much played in the 5th, meaning the 4th note is USUALLY played sharp. So your standard country tunes are pretty much guaranteed not to be in this set.
Jazz and Blues music has a LOT of accidentals, and they also are syncopated up the wazzoo. Even IF Jazz and Blues music were all in C-Major, I doubt they tried out their strange rhythms.
At best, 8-note, single-octave, 12-note rhythms, cover a very, very small subset of simplified classical music (Simplified Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and not the original Mozart version either: https://youtu.be/KKCsujeeu8o?t=50) and maybe some simple folk songs like "Mary had a little lamb". But for goodness sake, even "Happy Birthday to you" spans more than one octave...
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I just counted it. "Simplified Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" is 14-notes. Even this beginner song is too long to be covered by the 12-notes auto-generated by this algorithm.
So we're talking "Hot Cross Buns" level rhythms... I guess? But "Hot Cross Buns" is 17 notes long.
"Row Row Row your boat" is syncopated. I doubt its rhythm is covered. Its also 26 notes long.
Here's a better question: what song is actually covered by 8-note, single octave, 12-notes combinatorics? I'm having difficulty figuring one out. I'm picking the simplest songs I know of and they still don't seem to be covered.
Many songs have A and B parts. If we allow combining many different "melodies" to create the larger whole that covers some music in that now you only need to find 8 note, single octave combinations. I don't see why we should allow that, but if you allow it.
8 notes in a single octave pretty much limits you to melodies of someone who has been studying music only a few months. Even my penny whistles are capable of more than that after a couple months of study. (a few days if you already know music or are interested in one specific song)
The whole song or even a majority doesn't have to be covered. The Katy Perry Dark Horse lawsuit was over 8 notes repeated twice. Suits have been lost over seconds long samples.
And yes, it could sound different enough. If I invert the octaves of every alternate note it's going to be quite hard to pick out the melody as being the same, because I'd have disrupted all the scales and arpeggios that are the parts we actually recognise as forming the shape of it.
The other point the comment you're replying to is trying to make is that Western music generally has 12 tones per octave (even if they don't use them all, a lot of music uses 9 or 10 of them), and other musical systems used in various parts of the world in antiquity and in the present day may have significantly more (or less).
Anybody who limits it to 8-tone octaves and only a one-octave span and says it's every possible melody is just lying or musically ignorant. Which is surprising given who the people who did this claim to be - i.e. they're musicians.
It's likely that the article's author massively exaggerated on the "every possible melody" thing, because there are way more than you can get from 8 tones in 1 octave over 12 beats.
GP is talking about things like the chromatic scale, pentatonic scale, whole-tone scale, etc
Writing melodies with these would comprise of 12, 5, and 6 different tones per octave, respectively. Not 8.
Plus, some minor keys comprise of different sets of tones depending whether the previous tone was higher and lower, so it might not even be the same set of 8 tones within an "8-tone" scale.
Octaves are just a modulus.
Edit: there's also things like moveable 7 note "scales" and other eastern hemisphere things that don't fit western music theory as easily but I don't know them well enough.
Sort of a nit, but if it's only 8 tones, it might not include the minor iv chord. You can hear it in "Creep" in the "Your skin makes me cry" line on "cry." It's pretty common in songs.
"My Heart will go on" (Song from the Titanic movie) is a good example where no amount of transposition will work. The tension of the song comes from playing the "wrong" note. (My __heart__ will, emphasis on "Heart" is extremely tense because its an accidental: not actually in the key that its being played in).
Also, suppose I take a popular melody spanning two octaves and compress it to one (just c' to c). Will these melodies actually sound different enough to be considered independently copyrightable? My guess would be no.