The View from the Spaghetti Factory

Although my days of listening wide-eyed to Joe Satriani are long gone (I haven’t really enjoyed anything he’s done since 1995) I was still pretty surprised to see his name appear on the BBC website. Satch vs Coldplay in plagiarism case? Being hopelessly curious about this sort of thing, I decided to put my ears on and investigate properly.

Putting aside issues of instrumentation (string samples plus vocals on the Coldplay; acoustic and electric guitars on Satch’s tune) and subjective genre labels, the first main barrier is the tonality. So let’s transpose one of the songs, so we can analyse them both in parallel.

“Viva La Vida” is in Ab and uses the good old I-vi-IV-V progression, except it starts halfway, giving IV-V-I-vi…

Db5 – Eb7 (no 3rd) – Ab – Fm

“If I Could Fly” is in G lydian, and has two chord progressions…

Verse: Gmaj9 – F#m7 – Gmaj9 – F#m7 B(add11)

Chorus: Em – A – D – Bm

Now, simply transposing the Coldplay down a semitone from Ab to G won’t work, as G major and G lydian are not the same thing. G lydian contains the same notes as D major, so we’ll transpose the Coldplay by a tritone to D major. That gives this chord progression (simplifying the chord names to just majors and minors)…

G – A – D – Bm

… which instantly gives us a fairly close match with Satch’s chorus. I say “fairly close”, but it’s only the G/Em difference, and those chords are of course the relative major/minor of each other. It’s still just a fairly generic chord sequence, though, so we’re not exactly in litigious territory yet. How about the melody?

[click the image to see a larger version]

The first bar-and-a-half is identical! But that’s not exactly a unique melody… sit on the 9th (or maj7 in Coldplay’s case) and then resolve to the next chord via the note above? Pretty standard stuff. But then the rhythm is exactly the same, so could that be enough (for legal purposes) to signify intent?

There’s a similarity in the way both tunes use alternating D and E notes over the D chord, but the rhythms are a little different and the second target note is different (Chris Martin pushes up to the F#). Also, the notes over the Bm chord are completely different.

So, in summary… I have no idea! It doesn’t seem enough to me, what with the different first chord, and the fact that only the first bar of melody is truly identical, but I’m no lawyer.