Hello all.
I’ve got one of those great philosophical questions for you all.
Will there, one day, be a time when no more original music can be made?
Let me explain.
First of all there are a finite amount of notes on a music scale.
There are also a finite amount of musical instruments.
Each instrument has a finite amount of notes it can play.
There is also a finite amount of ways to play those notes.
With all of this I ask you, will there ever be a day when humanity as a whole will have to sit back and say “well, that’s it. We’ve created all of the music we can create. What now?”
Hold on a sec. Don’t believe it will happen? Than think of this. There is allready a genre of music dedicated to the taking of an older piece of music and using it as the basis of their music.
In other words, we are allready copying ourselves.
So is it possible that one day we will run our of music to create?
From a mathematical point of view the number of permutations and combinations of notes and scales is mind-boggling. I don’t think it will happen anytime in this millennium.
It isn’t just the notes — i.e., the melodies. It’s also the harmonies. And the rhythms. Music is composed of all three. Even if you could argue that all three are finite (and I believe you would have a problem arguing that about rhythm), the number of combinations is still sufficiently large enough to outlast the universe, let alone humanity.
I had also asked this very question a couple of years ago…I believe it was my very first Q on Straight Dope, actually.
I also asked the question of a David Clampitt, assistant professor at Yale whose specialty is mathematics in music. Says Mr. Clampitt:
I still don’t know what it means really, but I’ll be it’s a great explanation!
It was my thought to have a supercomputer write all possible songs (based upon some as-yet undetermined criteria), copyright them all, and become the ultimate master of all that is musical. All artists will have to come to me to license my music. And I’ll tell ya what, I won’t be licensing any of my music to Jessica Simpson, nosiree.
I think the important part of this question is not really how many precise different combinations of tones/rhythms/durations can be put together (clearly, an infinite number), but how many qualitatively different ‘songs’ are there? If I go to sing Bon Jovi at karaoke, the karaoke CD is playing Dead or Alive, even though it is far from an exact replica of Bon Jovi’s recording (different vocals, for one). And, for that matter, when Bon Jovi performs Dead or Alive it’s different than the recording, but is still the same song.
Likewise, I’m sure that musicians will be selling variations on the almost genre-defining I V IV rock progression for years and years to come, but I’m not sure they’ll be making new music (for non-musicians, the I V IV progression can be heard in many tunes, The Who’s Baba O’Riley being perhaps the most ‘current’ given its use in commercials lately).
Actually, something just occurred to me that I should’ve caught last night. Yeah, any given work is of finite length, but there’s no (theoretical) maximum length. So we’re dealing with the set of all finite works of arbitrary length, and that set is infinite.
You can’t stop the music, nobody can stop the music.
Take the cold from snow, tell the trees, don’t grow,
tell the wind, don’t blow, 'cause it’s easier.
No, you can’t stop the music, nobody can stop the music.
Take the spark from love, make the rain fall up
'cause that’s easier to do.
Music’s ability to evoke emotions is a very non-linear process. Seemingly small changes can change the music very dramatically. The fountainhead of this isn’t physical, but… well, if I knew where it came from, I’d tap into it, and I’d be famous.
One good example is how the pioneers of bebop (Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, et al) took chord progressions from old pop songs and fashioned strikingly original works by playing their crazy solos over them.
E.g., Parker’s “Donna Lee” is based on the chords to “Back Home in Indiana”.
You can sometimes see the process at work, where they haven’t quite created a new song: Parker’s version of “Embraceable You” (on the “All-Star Sextet” album) is pretty much unrecognizable – they could’ve called it a new song, but opted to still call it “Embraceable You”.
A much different example is Kurt Cobain, who combined the dynamics of metal and punk with better, catchier melodies. The result is clearly derivative, but very different from its roots.
Parker himself said something germane in an interview, in reply to someone suggesting that bebop was “it”, the end of the creative road, the perfect music. He adamantly disagreed – IIRC, he said something about music having to keep changing, permanently.
(Also, based on the two examples I’ve given, the secret is to get hooked on heroin and die young).
Surely though there’s some upper bound in practice. A piece of music that required 150 years to play would be effectively un-hearable — completely beyond the reach of human experience. Even ones shorter than that might be disqualified. Personally, I’d reject any “song” lasting longer than, oh, say a day or two, but then I might be the impatient sort. That, and I’d fall asleep.
Under any reasonable constraint, the set of possible songs would again be finite, though still impractically huge — huge enough that there might not be enough matter in the solar system to record them all, or enough shelf space on Earth to house them all.
I’d agree, but there are still some limits, in both time and pitch and instrumentation, beyond which humans won’t be able to tell the difference. If the 12-tone western scale doesn’t have the resolution, consider a 24-tone scale. Or 48. And if 16th notes aren’t snappy enough for you, consider 32nd notes, or 128th. Sooner or later you’ll reach the limit of what humans can distinguish.
However much music we have left to discover, I have to tell you that all the new stuff sounds the same to me. I think we’re already nearing the End.
If you define each piece of music as the sounds that can be recorded on one standard audio CD (and you may or may not agree here), there is definitely a finite limit to the permutations involved. As a series of ones and zeroes, each “Album” can be substituted with a freakishly long binary number (something like 5,872,025,600 bits long). I don’t remember how to calculate binary permutations, but there is a finite limit of permutations, most of which differ from each other by an amount indiscernable to the human ear.
