In the 2024 Spring Festival Gala, the special name of Hailai Amu is well-known to audiences across the country, but the excessive amount of attention has also made Hailai Amu fall into controversy: the suspicion of plagiarism in composition. There are plagiarized articles on Hailai Amu's composition circulating on the Internet. Among them, the works that are mainly accused of plagiarism are:
- "Fifty Years Later" was accused of plagiarism: He Jie's "You Must Be Happy";
- "Dream Building Intelligence" was accused of plagiarism: Huang Jiaju's "Far Look";
- "Children of the West Building" was accused of plagiarism: Zheng Yuan's "How Long Will You Love Me";
So, if we look at Hailai Amu from the perspective of professional composition and the market, what will we think of Hailai Amu's accusation of plagiarism? The answer is: Hailai Amu did not plagiarize. It can only be said that Hailai Amu's composition is too simple, and the melody he uses has already been written by his predecessors, but he still insists on using the melody that has been written, which causes the melody to crash. Since he has gained the attention of the crash melody, he will bear the public opinion of being accused of plagiarism.
Hailai Amu himself does not shy away from his own creation is a non-professional training class, in the interview before the Spring Festival Gala, Hailai Amu bluntly said: He is a crash compose learned in the training class of the newspaper, and there are only two chords in a song. This is actually very frank, so the main reason why Hailai Amu was accused of plagiarism is the judgment of two professional perspectives and public perspectives:
1: Does a beginner composer have the right to compose a melody crash, and what is the difference between a melody crash and a malicious plagiarism composition?
2: One sentence or a few sentences are similar, can you judge the plagiarism of the composition of the whole song?
The answer to these two questions is actually very clear: beginner composers naturally have the right to compose melody crashes, because music is an art, and art is naturally a public resource, since He Jie can use the melody of "You Must Be Happy", then why can't Hailai Amu? Why can't you? Everyone can use the melody of "You Must Be Happy" or Huang Jiaju's "Distant Hope". Because: in front of music, everyone is equal. Music cannot be a monopoly product.
Then the question that arises is: is the final presentation of the melody maliciously plagiarized, or is it an unconscious crash that the hero sees? This question mainly leads the public to think that plagiarism, in the legal sense and in actual business, will directly ignore this soft plagiarism and only focus on the actual commercial interests of the song. The answer to the question of whether or not to plagiarize is an unanswered. Because: malicious plagiarism is defined as too much similarity, then there is a worst-case scenario:
The composer took malicious plagiarism as the starting point, and after getting the composition of the plagiarized work, he modified it to make the whole composition a work of secondary creation, and it could not meet the definition of plagiarism in the legal sense. But once it goes to justice, then the composer will defend himself: I wrote it myself, but the hero sees something the same, and the unconscious causes the melody to be similar. This argument is reasonable and cannot be rebutted. So actually, plagiarism of music is very difficult to determine.
In other words, music, as an art that everyone has the right to enjoy and create, cannot interfere excessively with the creative space of the creator, which provides this kind of composition phenomenon of Hailai Amu: basically the popular songs have the same melody that has been put into the market. This means that Hailai Amu's repertoire will not be unpleasant, and it will have a high audience in the sinking market. In this way, Hailai Amu's composition model has become the following market employment options:
1: Take the melody that is more similar to the once popular song as the template, and complete the information gap in the counterpart market that is not a big singer. For example, He Jie's "You Must Be Happy" belongs to pop music, and the audience is the post-90s. Hailai Amu's "Fifty Years Later" belongs to a kind of sinking popular music, and the audience is the post-60s, post-70s, and even post-80s, and it is far from the professionalism of music.
2: Hailai Amu's repertoire pays more attention to the lyrics and the story behind it, rather than the composition and music itself. This is also why Hailai Amu's music is biased towards sinking popular music, because he does not pursue the uniqueness of the musical attributes, but focuses on a fire that is not unpleasant, but similar to the direction of the crash, and lacks some details in the composition to complete the personalized label. In this way, his audience is not actually a professional music practitioner, but a parent generation who prefers to listen to stories, or an audience whose education level is not above the university.
3: The market for Chinese music is huge, don't ignore the vast demand of the sinking market. As an entertainment product, music becomes more and more specialized, and the higher the threshold becomes. On the contrary, this more popular entertainment and storytelling market is also very large.
Taken together, Hailai Amu's composition is suspected of plagiarism and frequent crashes, which ensures that the song is not difficult to listen to and can be listened to by anyone, but it is difficult to meet the professional depth of composition and personal charm when it is listened to, and the music content is used as the expression of the music story. For example, the same was true of "The Shepherd of Kekexili" back then, but Mom and Dad especially liked to listen to it.
So in terms of the actual creation of the composition, why does Hailai Amu frequently crash cars? The answer is: routines into composition-Hailai Amu's use of routines and chords is too simple.
The reason for the crash of Hailai Amu's composition - the disadvantages of routines and compositions, there is too little thought to write a song, and the professionalism is weak
Hailai Amu has one thing very good: he himself has publicly expressed it more than once - he is a composition training class for newspapers, and his accelerated composition thinking is based on routine chords and basic instruments, piano major third chords. This means that, in fact, limited by education, Hailai Amu himself really thinks that composition is like this, and he can feel the beauty of music from the three chords and routine chords. This is also what I said above: no one should be deprived of the right to compose.
We can reasonably guess from the perspective of "Xunzi's human nature is evil": it may be a secondary creation of plagiarism, but we can't confirm that this malice is the truth. Because there is a possibility that composers really think that routine chords and third chords are all the beauty of the musical world, and they enjoy the beauty of music with routine chords, and at the same time have a wide audience resonance. Therefore, you can't think that Hailai Amu is maliciously plagiarized because of the melody crash caused by the habit of using routine chords. Everyone has the right to enjoy the creation of music, but people have the upper limit of cognition. However, Hailai Amu's music education is obviously a limited training class of quick logic.
Okay, let's explain in detail based on the complete composition of the whole body, there are three reasons why Hailai Amu is so easy to crash:
- 1: The proportion of routine chords is too large.
- 2: The personal label of the composer is too little optimized;
- 3: The limited vocal range of singing skills leads to similarity.
Routine chords, this thing is easy to understand: the empiricist statistics of the human public on music find that everyone prefers to listen to fixed chord combinations, three or five fixed chord arrangements, and it is easier to gain the love of the public. These three or five fixed chords are: "Canon", "1645", and "4536251", as well as their variant chord composition. This is obviously not a problem of the composer, but our own problem, all human beings cannot reject these three routine chords when they have a blank sheet of paper and no musical aesthetics, then this belongs to genetic selection.
Then Hailai Amu obviously regards: these three types of routine chords as the whole of composition, taking Jay Chou as an example, Hailai Amu's composition lacks the following steps:
- There is a lack of a seventh chord to replace the basic third chord with a musical color personalization that is easier to complete. The seventh chord versus the third chord will cognitively produce the following problems: the recognition of the third note transposition of the chord, the recognition of the fifth note transposition, as well as the chord proxy function, chord tension, and functional problems. In other words, the seventh chord versus the third chord is: know why it is versus not know the difference that cannot be innovated.
- Lack of high-level tonal thinking in composition, including but not limited to: major and minor keys, transpositions, parallel relationship keys, and ethnic keys.
The personal label of the composer belongs to the thinking of the level of musical style, and pays more attention to the syncopation of rhythm and the selection of instrument timbre. But obviously, whether it is Hailai Amu or "The Shepherd of Kekexili", their music is a fixed musical style and accompaniment thinking, and the overall bias is towards Adagio, a large number of quarter notes and half notes, and eight notes are few. The higher the time value of the note, the less rhythm, the lower the space for syncopation, and the lower the threshold for singing.
The final vocal range, this is obvious, Hailai Amu's singing performance is: an octave + third to about fifth, the music written in this vocal area is consistent with other predecessors and juniors, the same vocal area, the same vocal range plus the same melody will naturally lead to more conflicting similarities.
To sum up, Hailai Amu's plagiarism suspicion is only a suspicion, which is actually a manifestation of professionalism in essence, and the cognitive ability of music composition cannot support his originality and is uniquely recognizable. I hope that in the future, Hailai Amu can continue to study composition and create better composition works.