Will we ever run out of new music?

From experience, we know that when mathematics and music are mixed in the same sentence, it's because we're about to receive one of those brain-slapping doses of wisdom. In the video by Michael from Vsauce (a YouTube channel dedicated to general science outreach), you can see a compilation of information and analysis about whether we will ever run out of original music. Taking certain definitions into account, the YouTuber asks whether, with so much music in the world, we might have already exhausted our creativity, and whether the infinity of imagination has to clash with the finiteness of technical resources.

As if it were an existential question for every generation that has taken root on Earth since the dawn of civilization, the finiteness of music is recurring and troubling. The automatic transport to places of comfort, relaxation, or excitement that new and original songs generate wants to be preserved, and thus many generations, believing they are witnessing a musical decline, have asked themselves whether we will ever run out of new and original music.

Will we ever run out of new music?

The question, which you've surely asked yourself at some point in a similar sense when hearing “new” songs and slapping your forehead, is whether we are living through the end of originality in music, and that's why a famous YouTuber has decided to compile some mathematical estimates about the number of possible songs. With him, we ask ourselves, Will we ever run out of new music?

The question arises from at least two premises that are in plain sight (or hearing). The first indicates that there is a finite number of tones that our ears can perceive. The other, less factually, indicates that it only takes a few notes in common for two songs to sound alike, so we tend to identify songs through patterns. All of this together reinforces the idea that we are running out of original music, and from there arise various questions and various ways of understanding what can be done with what composes music.

First, we have to ask how much music currently exists on our planet, and to answer that we must understand that not every random, accidental sound is interpreted as music by humans (well, there are some fans who…). Furthermore, not all sound is perceived by humans; the highest frequency our ears can perceive is 20kHz, and the maximum dynamic range reaches 130 dB before our ears start bleeding from pain.

In this way, the number of possible “songs” is considerably reduced. But obviously we have to keep shrinking the number, so it's worth saying that the number of melodies reproducible during a given time is also finite, because the human ear can only distinguish 200 notes per octave, at a rate of 50 octaves per second. With this we already begin to see the limitations of musical structure in terms of the capacity of its receiver and main provider of meaning and significance. But there's more.

The possible melodies, within digital music, can be converted to bits to make calculating their finiteness easier. For example, each song has a certain number of bits, and these can contain two types of information: ones and zeros. To understand the concept, let's take a CD of music sampled at 44.1kHz, which for every 5 minutes of stored music will use an amount of bits equivalent to 211,000,000. As we said that bits can be in two states, one or zero, the possibilities of organizing those ones and zeros will be 2 raised to the 211,000,000 power.

As said in the video, that number represents the maximum number of possibilities for each of the 5-minute songs that exist and will exist. It's finite, but we're talking about a number composed of 63 million digits. If we consider that the known Universe is made up of an amount of hydrogen atoms represented by a number of 80 digits, imagine then how much possible music exists.

Once the finite but vastly unreachable limitation of what a song can contain is addressed, now arises the question of how many original songs can be written. A study carried out by Everything2 indicated that the total number of melodies that can be written in one octave containing all the intervals into which we can divide it in a measure is approximately 123,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. As we create new ways to shrink the number, such as when we only consider songs written with the 8 conventional notes over 12 intervals, the possibilities are considerably reduced to 78 billion possibilities, which is a more manageable number for our minds.

The different definition of melody is the owner of these extensive and unmanageable results, but nevertheless finite. So, is there a finite number of possible melodies? Yes. Will we run out of new music? No, because the quantity is unmanageable by humans. However, what makes so many songs sound alike? That also has an explanation.

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