An Adaptive Meta-Heuristic for Music Plagiarism Detection Based on Text Similarity and Clustering

Plagiarism is a controversial and debated topic in different fields, especially in the Music one, where the commercial market generates a huge amount of money. The lack of objective metrics to decide whether a song is a plagiarism, makes music plagiarism detection a very complex task: often decisions have to be based on subjective argumentations. Automated music analysis methods that identify music similarities can be of help. In this work, we first propose two novel such methods: a text similarity-based method and a clustering-based method. Then, we show how to combine them to get an improved (hybrid) method. The result is a novel adaptive meta-heuristic for music plagiarism detection. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed methods, considered both singularly and in the combined meta-heuristic, we performed tests on a large dataset of ascertained plagiarism and non-plagiarism cases. Results show that the meta-heuristic outperforms existing methods. Finally, we deployed the meta-heuristic into a tool, accessible as a Web application, and assessed the effectiveness, usefulness, and overall user acceptance of the tool by means of a study involving 20 people, divided into two groups, one of which with access to the tool. The study consisted in having people decide which pair of songs, in a predefined set of pairs, should be considered plagiarisms and which not. The study shows that the group supported by our tool successfully identified all plagiarism cases, performing all tasks with no errors. The whole sample agreed about the usefulness of an automatic tool that provides a measure of similarity between two songs.