kizolk
Indecisive 
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Oct 2, 2024 19:17:43 GMT
I like finding resemblances between people. Maybe you do too. You can post photos of any two (or more) people who look alike, whether they're famous or not: it's really just about exposing nature's laziness in fashioning faces. You're allowed to cherry-pick the photos: the people in question might not look alike in all circumstances, but maybe from an angle, with the right lighting... I thought about posting this in the games forum because it could be fun to find an even better lookalike than the OP did and post the photo. Feel free to. edit: anything that looks, sounds or otherwise feel alike is fair game. Think of it as a resemblance thread. I'll start with the latest case I noticed. Of course, if more photos were to be posted in the thread, a pattern might emerge: two people who look the exact same to someone might look like an apple and an orange to another. Joshua Dallas, an actor I know from the forgettable yet rather pleasurable TV series "The Manifest":  Victor Belmondo, son of legendary French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo:  |
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Oct 2, 2024 19:19:43 GMT
I'm not as bad as callaina , but I'm crap at recognising anyone, in real life or from photos. Everyone looks alike to me. |
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Oct 2, 2024 19:22:09 GMT
That's unfortunate :/
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Oct 2, 2024 19:29:21 GMT
I think I'm rather good at faces, but rather bad at names. Maybe it means I'm not that good at faces actually, because if you could record and recall someone's face very precisely, the uniqueness of it would make the name stick a little better since it's a pretty convenient label for a face. At least it'd be nice if it worked that way.
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Post by Pacifica on Oct 2, 2024 20:03:23 GMT
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Oct 5, 2024 19:40:25 GMT
Lawrence Krauss, physicist:  William Fichtner, actor:  |
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Oct 17, 2024 16:36:56 GMT
Thread title changed to reflect this exciting new development: songs that sound alike can go here as well. I was watching a video on YouTube, and the song that was playing in the background caught my attention. I Shazam'd it (you know, that app that uses your phone's mic and tells you the name of the song it's hearing), and went and listened to the full song. It's pretty good, which is surprising for a royalty-free/stock song. But what struck me were the similarities between it and two other songs. The following videos are timestamped. The verses: sound like "No One Knows" by Queens of the Stone Age: and the chorus: sounds like "As" by Stevie Wonder:
The fact that it's royalty-free may explain these similarities: if you can't afford using a Stevie Wonder or a QotSA song in your video or podcast, you might be tempted to use a royalty-free song that sounds like it instead. But maybe I'm being unfair to Wellmess, and they didn't intend to copy those songs.
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Oct 17, 2024 17:17:06 GMT
Lots of potential fun here.
Let's start with 'Angie' & 'Hotel California'.
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Oct 17, 2024 17:40:24 GMT
Lots of potential fun here. Let's start with 'Angie' & 'Hotel California'. Very good one; I hadn't noticed! |
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Oct 17, 2024 18:10:49 GMT
It doesn't jump out at you, but then you wonder how you missed it.
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Oct 17, 2024 19:12:35 GMT
This one is interesting. 'Nature Boy', probably best known in the Nat King Cole version.
The composer, a very strange person known as eden ahbez, was sued byHerman Yablokoff, the composer of an obscure Yiddish song, for plagiarism. He paid out. For years I couldn't find it, but it's on YouTube now. Obviously, it can't be proven that he didn't come up with the idea separately, but I feel pretty sure he must have heard it, and unconsciously recreated it. (From 2.07 onwards.)
What might have been a defence was that Yablokoff himself nicked it from Dvořák. Again, I suspect unconsciously, or Yablokoff wouldn't have sued. And yes, there are always those who say that there are a limited number of notes, and melodies will repeat. Well, yes, but.
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Oct 17, 2024 19:33:55 GMT
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Oct 18, 2024 4:09:00 GMT
Obviously, it can't be proven that he came up with the idea separately, but I feel pretty sure he must have heard it, and unconsciously recreated it. I think I've said it elsewhere, but there's a song I composed whose chorus I kept tweaking because it didn't sound quite right. I finally settled on a chord progression, only to realize some time later that it was almost exactly the same as that of a song by one of my favorite bands, unlike the chord progression I had started with. There are different degress of consciousness on the inspiration-plagiarism spectrum. |
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Oct 18, 2024 17:02:51 GMT
Ooh, but I have another one that I've just recently discovered actually! In another one of those coincidences, I saw a news segment about Brel's Amsterdam two days ago, not long after we'd mentioned it here. It was the anniversary of the first time he sang it in a concert (which is all he's ever done, since the song never got recorded in a studio). A pianist was being interviewed and he gave his analysis of the song. I can't recall the exact wording, but he said something like "you just take that simple medieval motif..." and played something. I immediately recognized it and wondered how come I'd never noticed it: it's Greensleeves!
Maybe it's a well-known fact, but it wasn't by me. And sure enough, in the first paragraph of its Wiki article, it says: "Musically, it takes its base melody line from the melody of the English folk song Greensleeves."
There's another reason why that news segment was welcome. When I re-listened to it around the time we discussed Brel, I thought the fact that it was about Amsterdam was a little weird. There are no cultural references to the city or country, and although some people see Amsterdam as a place of debauchery because of cannabis and the red light district, well, it's a very tidy city. I didn't hang out around its port, and I get that his song may not be about modern times or meant as a faithful representation of what goes on in that city, but still, I thought making it about Amsterdam was a little random.
It turns out he was really writing about the port of the Belgian city of Zeebruges, but later decided to use Amsterdam instead because it sounded better. I don't know Zeebruges, but at least I feel better about my discomfort with his evocation of Amsterdam.
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Oct 18, 2024 17:12:16 GMT
Should we give "soundalikes" its own thread? I liked the idea of a general resemblance thread because looking for similarities between things is a distinct activity, but the inspiration/plagiarism angle sets those discussions apart.
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