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Zones of Distinguishability - Audible Magic

Erling Wold — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:21:22 GMT

The Two Recordings

We recently ran across an Instagram post pointing out the similarities between the chorus of Dua Lipa’s 2020 hit Break My Heart and that guitar riff in Need You Tonight by INXS back in 1987. The post, which had many ❤️s, resonated with us, since the truth is that everyone imitates, no music is created ab nihilo, all artists synthesize the bits and pieces of all the music they have ever heard and floats in their brain, and this is just normal creation. And, in this case the artists involved have reported that the whole process was congenial: Dua Lipa and her collaborators noticed the similarity, got in touch with INXS, and added Andrew Farriss and Michael Hutchence as writers before the song was released. Farriss has since said that he appreciates being a part of the billion-plus streamed track.

Anyway, it got us wondering. A good deal of what we build here exists to notice exactly this sort of thing, so we decided to see if it would

Zones of Distinguishability - Audible Magic

Erling Wold — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:47:16 GMT

Zones of Distinguishability

Artists and philosophers have always been drawn to zones of indistinguishability, i.e. the places where one thing shades into another and the boundary quietly dissolves. Music is full of them. When does a remix stop being the recording it started from and become a new work? When is a cover “the same song,” and when is it something genuinely different? Is a track that merely feels like another one a copy, or just a cousin? These are wonderful, slippery questions, and the honest answer is that music lives in the blur. There is no line painted on the ground where sameness ends and difference begins.

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Udio Partners With Audible Magic to Fingerprint AI-Generated Tracks and to Check for Infringements - Audible Magic

Andrew DeWitt — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:53:13 GMT

Music AI partners with Audible Magic - Audible Magic

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SoundCloud Expands AI Integrations With Audible Magic Partnership - Audible Magic

Andrew DeWitt — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:00:01 GMT

With the rise of generative and assistive AI music production tools, helping to foster trust between digital platforms, rights holders and creators is more important than ever. We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with SoundCloud and be part of their initiative to offer assistive AI tools to their creators. By leveraging our industry-leading ACR technology, we aim to empower creators and contribute to a robust, innovative music ecosystem.

Ensuring Content Integrity: Suno Partners with Audible Magic for User Uploads - Audible Magic

Erling Wold — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 09:00:33 GMT

Audible Magic's Broad Spectrum: detecting transformed audio - Audible Magic

Erling Wold — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 17:36:51 GMT

Speeding up…

Social media creators and DJs love to put their own spin on released recordings, and one of the simplest ways is to speed up a track. Speeding up turns a slow tune into an uptempo dance number, and faster music hits the hook or chorus more quickly. The current trend on TikTok, where all pop songs seem to exist only in their sped-up versions, has caused record labels and artists across the spectrum to release official speed ups to capitalize on this phenomenon†, from Benson Boon’s Beautiful Things, Iñigo Quintero’s Si No Estás, and Tate McRae’s Greedy, to Lizzy McAlpine’s ceilings, which achieved hit status almost entirely due to the unofficial and official sped-up version on TikTok:

Identifying cover songs, live performances, AI clones and more - Audible Magic

Andrew DeWitt — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 12:08:23 GMT

Covers and other versions

Imagine you’re at a nightclub. The DJ plays a song. You love it, but you don’t know what it is. You pull out your phone, use it to “listen” to what you’re hearing, and in a few seconds, you’re given the track title and artist of your new favorite song. We’ve all done this. No big deal, right? This form of automatic content recognition (ACR) — making a 1:1 match between recordings — is well established across consumer and business applications. These applications compare a given sound recording to a set of reference recordings and find an exact match if one exists.

But what if the song was instead being performed live in that nightclub? What if it was an impromptu cover by a different artist in a totally different style? How will you know what it is if there is no exact reference for the ACR application to compare to?

That problem — version or cover identification — is much harder than 1:1 matching between recordings. With 1:1 matching, you are comparing the exact same recording characteristics: the same instruments, the same chords, the same tune, all in the same order. But recognizing a cover or a live performance requires musical or lyrical knowledge to detect the underlying composition no matter how it is realized: maybe in a different key, at a different tempo, with different instruments and singers, or no singers at all. Maybe it has different lyrics or chords or rhythms, with the sections changed around. Maybe there is new musical material interspersed or mixed in.

The variety and sources of covers are nearly endless. Classic songs like The Beatles’s Yesterday have been covered many thousands of times over the course of decades by artists of all genres: Hip-Hop, Death Metal, Country, Opera, and more. New songs by popular artists are often covered the day they drop as a way for lesser-known artists to capitalize on the song’s rising popularity. Some covers are major commercial successes themselves, like Run DMC’s cover of Walk This Way or Dolly Parton’s recent cover of Stairway to Heaven. When it comes to social media and user-generated content (UGC), the pool expands even more. We have Puddles the Clown performing a novelty cover of the music to Stairway to Heaven with the lyrics from Gilligan’s Island, all kinds of instrumental covers of the theme to Game of Thrones, kids covering rap songs at high speed, or Doja Cat including a bit of Milkshake inside Mooo!. Today, anyone with a phone can make a video of themselves singing or playing anything and distribute it to the world.

If you run a digital media business, how will you identify when versions of copyrighted songs are uploaded to your platform?

Audible Magic’s technology

This new type of ACR can be accomplished by Audible Magic’s Version ID, and we have recently been granted two fundamental patents for our technology: one that uses melody, harmony, sound and structure (US 11,294,954 B2 Music cover identification for search, compliance, and licensing) and one that uses lyrics and phonemes (US 11,816,151 B2 Music cover identification with lyrics for search, compliance, and licensing).

With Version ID, there is no simple audio feature like our MFCCs or Shazam’s spectral peaks that are used for 1:1 matching of sound recordings. Instead, we need to look at deep aspects of the sound that are invariant to differences in master recordings, but that are also specific enough to say yes, this is a version of that tune, and to be able to say that with high accuracy. This is why we have two patents, one that considers all aspects of the musical sound, and one that looks at the lyrics and underlying phonemes. Both are implemented in Audible Magic’s Version ID using a variety of AI and expert-system techniques. Combining them into a single, powerful ACR product allows us to identify a wide range of covers and versions. Let’s listen to a few examples of what Version ID can recognize.

An AI clone of Radiohead’s Creep

Recently we’ve seen a flood of AI cloned-voice covers out in the wild, where a creator uses a model of a well-known artist’s voice to create a version of another artist’s song.  Sometimes these appear with very different music accompaniment, usually in the cloned artist’s style. This version of Creep is a good example of that, where Radiohead’s guitar-oriented-rock original has been transmuted to a somewhat lounge-y version for the Frank Sinatra clone to croon over. Even though the music seems quite different on first hearing, the chords, melody, structure, and lyrics are the same, and our Version ID picks up all to successfully identify this as a version of Radiohead’s Creep.

A parody of Like a Virgin

Like most parody versions, the words in this example are completely altered: Hey, like a surgeon / Cuttin’ for the very first time. But Weird Al wants the music to be recognized, so besides his voice singing in a slightly different key, the chords, melody, instrumentals and structure are the same. This allows our music-based Version ID to match the track as a version of Madonna’s Like a Virgin.

A live version of the same

Sometimes live versions, even by the original artist, are very different from the original. An artist might do this to keep an audience surprised, to keep up with changes in tastes and styles, or just to have fun.  Sometimes the lyrics will be changed a little to make comments about things like current affairs or politics, but enough of the original will usually be there for us to identify it.  In this case, the accompaniment of the Madonna performance has definitely been updated as compared to the original recording, and there is an entire stadium of fans singing along to the chorus. Yet the chords, melody, structure, and lyrics can all be used by Version ID to connect this back to the original recording of Madonna’s Like a Virgin.

An acoustic cover of Tupac’s Keep Ya Head Up

Tupac’s anthem to black womanhood and the death of Latasha Harlins is covered here by Chicagoan Melody Angel.  The musical accompaniment is completely different, with solo guitar chording under a bluesy melody compared to Tupac’s almost entirely spoken rendition over a strong beat.  There is nothing here that can be detected by a version ID system that uses musical features – no common beat, chords, or melody. But the lyrics are the same, and that is how we match it.

We talked about interpolations, like how Doja Cat uses a bit of Milkshake in her track Mooo! We see that here too, where we can easily pick up in the lyrics – and a bit in the melody – how the song’s chorus is based on The Five Stairsteps’ O-o-h Child.  Version ID will report timing information for any matches it find, so in this case it will be clear that the interpolation is only the chorus.

A piano cover of Beyoncé’s Halo

Many cover versions have no lyrics at all, either because the original composition was an instrumental to begin with (think TV or film theme music), or because the cover artist wanted to highlight their arrangement or their instrument.  Piano covers are very common, as in this multi-platinum-viewed version of Beyoncé’s Halo for piano solo by J. M. Quintana Cámara. Here our Version ID relies on the fact that the chords and melody and structure are the same in the two, even though the instrumental and musical character couldn’t be more different.

For more than 20 years, Audible Magic has innovated B2B solutions in content identification (both music and TV/Film), music catalog fulfillment, and rights administration. Audible Magic powers billions of monthly transactions to serve customers all around the world. Its music identification services are used to help reduce the number of DMCA takedown notices and administer licenses for user generated content (UGC). Version ID is the latest piece of this suite of capabilities, based on patented technologies that have been developed over the last ten years.  We would love to hear about your use case and to work together to help solve your problems. Contact us to learn more.

– Erling Wold, Chief Scientist and Technologist

How to integrate Audible Magic with Amazon IVS to identify copyrighted content - Audible Magic

Andrew DeWitt — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 17:44:40 GMT

This blog was co-authored with Amazon AWS and was originally published on the AWS for M&E Blog on January 25th, 2024. The original blog can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/how-to-integrate-audible-magic-with-amazon-ivs-to-identify-copyrighted-content/