How originality looks like. Integrating visualization and meta-heuristics to dissect music plagiarism

Plagiarism is a debated and controversial topic in different fields. For example, in Law, where the subjectivity of the judges that have to pronounce a suspicious case usually lead to long and often unsolved cases, and in Music, where huge amounts of money are invested every year to face and try to solve suspicious cases. In this scenario, the automatic detection of music plagiarism is fundamental by representing useful support for judges during their pronouncements and an important result to avoid musicians spending more time in court than on composing music. This paper shows how the combination of visual analytics and the employment of adaptive meta-heuristics can assist domain experts in judging suspicious cases. Solutions will be presented as part of PlagiarismDetection, a cross-platform tool that leverages text-similarity algorithms, computational intelligence, optimization methods, and visualization techniques to enable new critical approaches to music plagiarism analysis.