Can humans continue making unique music indefinitely? By music I mean of any genre, with or without vocals. Minor variations in a large body of musical composition does not count as “unique”. By unique I mean “never heard before.”
In Indian/Hindu classical music theory, there are seven basic “swaras” or notes that are said to lead to an infinitude of melodies, creatively assembled out of those seven basic notes.
My question is, can this creativity persist forever, given the current rate at which both humans and machines churn out “music” on an industrial scale? Or will we, at some point, begin to have to repeat earlier compositions, having effectively hit the limits of creativity and/or the ability of musical notes - the building blocks - to be rearranged in unique ways any further?
BTW, I know squat about music, except I enjoy some works.
I think this XKCD “What If”, while not directly addressing the question, probably gives a good concept by which to reason out the answer: Twitter
Since we don’t have to worry about the music making grammatical sense or conveying any meaning, there’s actually less to filter out; only groupings of notes that are so ear-hurtingly offensive to all humans that nobody considers them music would have to be filtered out. Furthermore, there’s no limit to the size of the music. A 5-note jingle and a twenty-hour orchestral performance are both valid in your question.
All of this, in turn, suggests that the total amount of possible music is so large as to be impossible to actually generate by humans in any foreseeable or imaginable period of time.
Certainly, for popular music. There’s just so many things you can do with half a dozen chords. Most of that music has already been written and recorded. When I used to play guitar, I had about five songs that all used the same chord progressions, so I would sing a verse of one of the songs, then switch to another, etc.
Jazz or classical, on the other hand, where chord progressions are not so repetitive, will both continue to produce new music for many lifetimes to come. Just look at the variety and sheer numbers of things that JS Bach wrote, and you will see that complex music could support much moer music than has already been written or performed. From the little jazz that I have sampled, I believe much the same is true for it as well.
And that’s just Western music. China, Japan, and India have different tunings and intervals than Western music, so there also should be large bodies of work possible there.