Will We Ever Run Out of New Music?

[sholling]

As we all know there are a finite number of combination of notes and how they can be combined. This video looks for an answer.

 

[agarwalro]

That was very interesting. I love Dubstep, and if anyone considers it music, we are never running out .

On a similar note, here is a video on the urban legend that all Jungle/Drum & Bass originated from a 6 second sample. It also talks about the copyright mess created systemically.

 

[jostenmeat]

The whole mathematical possibility of 0s and 1s on a CD, was it with a limit of 5 minutes, I mean, who really cares? I don't see the relevance to what he seems to finally get to: What and why we listen to the type of music we do. The "Commonalities" as he puts it.

I mean, does it really matter if we figure out how many possible chess games can be played within a limit of 50 moves? Or the number of short stories that can be written with less than 100,000 characters when using the Roman alphabet? Who cares . . .

Anyway the examples of commonalities that are given are, well, extremely common popular tunes that almost everybody knows. The way you get a "tune" to be known by most everybody, is to make it really simple. Composers figured this out centuries ago. It also should be easily memorable, and being very simple really helps it to be memorable. The better people can remember your tune, the more money the composer makes! Money! Commercial music! AKA Popular music!

The "nearly endless possibilities", well you can throw away who knows how many billions away simply on the premise that many of the "possible" notes will be very dissonant to the "chord" it is written over. And then if you remove whatever possibly jazzy type chords, or other more exceptional chords, "minor 7 sharp 11", "sharp 9s", "minor/major", well really what people listen to are simply triad chords. Maybe throw some "7s" in there for some blues out there. Many people don't listen to music with more harmonically complex music. It's just the way it is. I mean, we haven't even touched serial music, dodecaphonic (some can be bafflingly beautiful), and if you start talking about microtonal music, that's like taking the number of chromatic steps you see in front of you on a piano, but then adding some significant digits after the decimal point; just blow the possibilities out of the water. (Yes, there is some good microtonal music out there in the "Western European" domain, and no we haven't even touched world music in this conversation or video.)

He really should have from the get-go said "popular music from the Western European world" or something to that extent, and the name of the vid should at the very least have the word "popular" in it. Popularization usually makes things worse, the common denominator must fall. He finally mentions it near the end, ok finally. Because popularization tends to make things like crap, I am really impressed when one can remain very popular, but bring complexity to the music. I think of Stevie Wonder for instance, though it's been a very long time since I've listened to his music. The first episode I ever watched of American Idol was because I saw an ad showing that they were doing his music with him as "guest adviser" or whatever, and all but about 1.5 persons were just totally fking out of tune, it was just embarassing for how large a stage that show was. Go figure.

Is it like food? Why are some people afraid of fish, others lamb, others buffallo, others anything that is green, others that pick off tomatoes, olives, etc. What is a commonality of popular food? Hm cheese with bread, like a grilled cheese, or a cheese pizza (notwithstanding vegans and the lactose intolerant that refuse to use lactaid)? I saw a woman pick off the few tiny slices of basil from her cheese pizza the other day. Yes, we can try to solve the mathematical possiblities of recipes with only 5 different ingredients at a time, then talk about "what most people like", and I guess I'm just not sure where this is going in the end. Ok, maybe food is a bad thing to compare my thoughts to.

OK, I got a better comparison for this forum. Let's say he figures out the number of possible 5.1 speaker rigs you can create with a budget of $2500 or less. He starts freaking out over these numbers, surely including DIY scenarios and whatever, but then in the end starts talking about HTIBs and how it's so interesting how we as the masses tend towards a very specific category of small WAF friendly speakers. I guess what I'm saying is that to me there is a sort of a disconnect with what the subject is talking about in the beginning, and what it becomes at the end of the vid. You know, what's the point; why go from possibilities to small speaker HTIBs (or whatever is most popular for the subject at hand).

Hm, maybe I'll watch that Dubstep video sometime. I'm pretty sure the OP's vid was NOT addressing that type of stuff at the conclusion and/or final subject of the video. Only with what the masses are familiar with. So just talk about that, and don't waste time with all the big numbers. Sorry if that came out too rant-ish.

 

[skizzerflake]

Interesting. I don't think we will ever run out of music, because, aside from the number of permutations of notes that might exist, and the self-imposed limits that cause a lot of music to sound very similar, we seem to have a way to make the sound, lyrics, tempo or instrumentation different enough that there is always a new way to write music. We also have the ability to forget the past well enough that there will always be new possibilities or old possibilities that we have forgotten.

 

[sholling]

I have no musical talent but I found it an interesting thought problem. But I wonder does it ever reach the point that the number of pleasant sounding unused combinations become so few it becomes nearly impossible to put original music together that sounds different enough to avoid being accused of copying prior art?

 

[agarwalro]

The whole point was to do a thought experiment. Take a nebulous idea, quantize it and then bring an absurd number into a more digestible size. The video creator never said it was a scientifically accurate or all encompassing.

There are plenty of pointless things out there. Heck, most art, theater, music and literature is pointless from someone's perspective. Someone will pay millions of dollars for a Pollock, but if my niece made something similar, it would not have made the fridge... My wife thinks my obsession with gadgets/tech/AV is pointless and I think her obsession with rearranging/redecorating our place is a waste of time and money. The point is what you make of it.

@jostenmeat,

 

[jostenmeat]

The whole point was to do a thought experiment. Take a nebulous idea, quantize it and then bring an absurd number into a more digestible size. The video creator never said it was a scientifically accurate or all encompassing.

There are plenty of pointless things out there. Heck, most art, theater, music and literature is pointless from someone's perspective. Someone will pay millions of dollars for a Pollock, but if my niece made something similar, it would not have made the fridge... My wife thinks my obsession with gadgets/tech/AV is pointless and I think her obsession with rearranging/redecorating our place is a waste of time and money. The point is what you make of it.

@jostenmeat,

Your point is moot to me. Just like arguing if clipping toenails is an art form would be moot. In regards to everything being pointless. Why bother discussing anything if that's what our discussion will revolve around? We are at an audio forum, not quite a music forum, but pretty related in the end.

Anyway, it's not the pointlessness of a topic that bothers me so much, it's how he goes about it.

First, the audio file. "All of the possible conversations you had as a 3 yr old, and even all the conversations you didn't have as a 3 yr old". So right there, we assume that every solo hummingbird fart is a work of music (and if not, why is he including it?), and even every hummingbird fart that never even happened, or just hasn't happened yet. Hm, no wonder it is not be digestible! The first three #s he throws out seem pretty digestible to me, 25 mil on itunes, 45 mil on lastfm, and 130 mil on gracenote. He blows it out of the water with the possibilities of binary code on a 5 min audio file of a cd. OK....

I realize I am probably wasting my time addressing to this post to you. But anyway to continue, I see issue with the "starting number". Then I see issue with the way he whittles down this number. I can tell you right now, no we will never run out of new music. Reasons include my refusal to place arbitrary and very severe limitations such as 4/4 meter, 5 min of length, diatonic scale, whatever.

There are other assumptions he makes out of nowhere, to help greatly reduce the indigestible size of some binary code, such as the granularity of finer divisions of the diatonic scale still sound similar to us, well, that is an assumption he sure makes freely. This is an unimportant point, maybe like the above.

It's the conclusion that really bothers me. He is defining what the human race listens to, and it irks me how he does it.

It's like saying, there are 25 millions food recipes on some internet site, then saying there are a googolplex of recipes I can fit on X amount of binary code, and this includes every recipe you made as a 3yr old, and even every recipe you didn't make as a 3 yr old.

Food Conclusion: But why is it that all of those possibilities are ignored by us as the human race? I mean, we all love hamburgers, hold the cheese and pickles, with fries and a coke. It's like all that space is wasted on us. It's as if we are simply hard wired that way.

FWIW, I am currently working on a few short pieces of music, they're all longer than 5 min, none are in common meter, and they're all easy on the ears. You realize all the waltzes you danced to at a wedding or ball aren't in common meter either. Or any flamenco tune you've ever heard in your life. Or so on. Oh but you must be hard wired to not really care about most any dance music? It's as if all that space of possibilities in music is wasted on you? Or did I get those conclusions incorrectly? Maybe I did.

 

[agarwalro]

The assumptions he makes to whittle down the number are from here, How many melodies are there in the universe?.

 

[jostenmeat]

The assumptions he makes to whittle down the number are from here, How many melodies are there in the universe?.

Why is this relevant to my post; why are you addressing this to me? What kind of illumination are you trying to provide to me? That such an enormous part of the music I listen does not fall into the realm of music that he whittles down? (I think I knew that already.) Tons of classical music, tons of jazz, tons of world music, and so forth? Shoot, there is probably even popular music that doesn't fit his criteria.

Anyway, a better title than all the melodies there are in the universe would probably be something like, "all of the melodies in the universe, provided the highest and lowest note may only span one octave (just ignore that a piano has more than 7 of those), without any thought to rhythm (all notes must be of equal length), nor differences of meter, and in fact we need to limit this to 32 notes at the maximum (even though a fugal subject easily reaches that, and that in Indian music it may be triple digits, shoot even the extremely well known Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto is much longer in melody than that, oh and just nevermind that it spans at least 4 octaves just on the first page), forget orchestration, and we're only allowed to talk about the 12 tone Western scale (without talking about granularity )". Yes, ok maybe that works, let's phrase it again, "All of the melodies in the universe, oh but without accounting for any kind of rhythm, nor meter, with strict limitation of the range of one octave, only limited to the Western 12 tone chromatic scale, and oh by the way with a hard cap of 32 notes".

The Tchaik, first page, at least 4 octaves (just a 4 stringed violin, surely not a keyboard let alone orchestra), at least 32 notes for sure, but I guess we are hard wired to consider this as space we don't need, it's just something we shy away from.

Ah, but he is talking about commercial popular music. Not ALL music. He only whittles down to POP music. He should make that clear from the beginning, the video should perhaps instead be named, "What makes all pop music sound so similar to each other", I think it would be a better fitting title than "Will we run out of new music". It has hardly to do with the REAL possibilities of music; it does a pretty pizz poor job of that.

 

[agarwalro]

@jostenmeat,

You were pontificating on the numbers used and assumptions made in the video, so, I thought you could look at the source of those numbers/assumptions and try to understand why they were used.

Just like a Physics post doc will look at a newspaper article on the CERN's particle discoveries and call it inane drivel, this video's target demographic is far removed from you. I look at your 6500+ posts with 2700+ thanks received and 3000+ thanks given and then read your diatribe. I realize that this video affronted you to the core of your being. From your viewpoint, the video has egregious mistakes and panders to popular notions and in doing so has marginalized your erudition and musicianship. Well, c'est la vie, my friend, c'est la vie.

Your fine points, elucidating music theory, are lost on me. The closest I have come to musicianship is the electric guitar that I haven't touched in years. Last but not the least, you say Tchaikovsky... I think, turn up the volume and bring on the cannons .

 

[Adam]

It seems that you both agree with the conclusion that we'll never run out of new music. Just sayin'.

 

[agarwalro]

It seems that you both agree with the conclusion that we'll never run out of new music. Just sayin'.

Spoken like a true Jedi.

I just got done smoking a fat stogie with a double helping (of home pours) of scotch. I'm groovy .

 

[jostenmeat]

@jostenmeat,

You were pontificating on the numbers used and assumptions made in the video, so, I thought you could look at the source of those numbers/assumptions and try to understand why they were used.

Just like a Physics post doc will look at a newspaper article on the CERN's particle discoveries and call it inane drivel, this video's target demographic is far removed from you. I look at your 6500+ posts with 2700+ thanks received and 3000+ thanks given and then read your diatribe. I realize that this video affronted you to the core of your being. From your viewpoint, the video has egregious mistakes and panders to popular notions and in doing so has marginalized your erudition and musicianship. Well, c'est la vie, my friend, c'est la vie.

Your fine points, elucidating music theory, are lost on me. The closest I have come to musicianship is the electric guitar that I haven't touched in years. Last but not the least, you say Tchaikovsky... I think, turn up the volume and bring on the cannons .

Eh, I'm just calling it like I see it. Core of my being, I suppose it's possible, I think I get more upset almost daily by all the people swerving their cars across the lines because they're texting constantly on their phones.

Yes sorry if some of the "chords" speak is too much, yeah that's probably over a lot of heads, but I don't think the "range of an octave" or "number of notes" are too weirdly abstract.

But here is one of my main issues with how he is "addressing a certain demographic". Take any large encyclopedia of classical composers of all time. Close your eyes, and open to ANY page. Blindly, point your finger at any part of the open page. Open eyes. That composer right there is part of the "wasted space that we don't need, as that's not what WE listen to".

Now, take a jazz anthology instead, repeat the steps above, same results. I'm sure you could do the same with other musics.

I much, much prefer Bach and Mingus to Brittany Spears, and I don't apologize for it!

So if there was an equal video, but to the science world, and I dunno, say the number of possible science experiments you could run, start with a ridiculous number that could fit on a cd including the tiniest insects flying through a particle accelerator, and in conclusion imply that we all really just like 2+2 and that the work of ANY famous scientist that is named some large encyclopedia of scientists is "wasted space that we don't need, as that's not the kind of science WE do". I'm talking Newton, Einstein, Copernicus, Marie/Pierre, Niels, Watson/Crick, I mean take any encyclopedia of the great scientists of history, close your eyes, open to any page, point finger to any page, and he saying that person is wasted space we don't need. Make more sense now?

I counted the octaves incorrectly in the Tchaik work, I think there are only 3 on the first page, which still blows away the "all melodies of the universe premise". One of America's greatest jazzmen, Charlie Parker (Clint Eastwood did a moive about him), has a bunch of stuff that doesn't fit that premise. This here is one of his most very famous tunes, probably most famous. Way past 32 notes, and it does break an octave range as well. This is not some obscure work, again it's probably the very most famous of all his great output.

You say electric guitar? I don't own a single album by any of these guys, but I was thinking about some of the virtuoustic ones that are named here sometimes, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and what not. This is one of the first google image hits I got looking up Vai. Never heard it, but it's way past 32 notes, it's way past an octave, even if the maker of the video would have already called this wasted space solely on the fact that it's not based on common meter (edit: note how it says 3/4 at the beginning, not 4/4 or "C").

 

[shadyJ]

A lot of what that guy was talking about is information theory more than music, he mostly only used music to discuss mathematical ideas. His discussion about common melodies and rhythms that people are drawn to has computational implications because it could mean that in the near future a computer could write a well-received song using a relatively simple algorithm. Any notion of "soul" in music is mere pretense, and we are all really just dumb robots running through the genetic program of instinct.

 

[MDS]

The whole point was to do a thought experiment. Take a nebulous idea, quantize it and then bring an absurd number into a more digestible size.

Anyway, a better title than all the melodies there are in the universe would probably be something like, "all of the melodies in the universe, provided the highest and lowest note may only span one octave (just ignore that a piano has more than 7 of those), without any thought to rhythm (all notes must be of equal length), nor differences of meter, and in fact we need to limit this to 32 notes at the maximum (even though a fugal subject easily reaches that, and that in Indian music it may be triple digits, shoot even the extremely well known Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto is much longer in melody than that, oh and just nevermind that it spans at least 4 octaves just on the first page), forget orchestration, and we're only allowed to talk about the 12 tone Western scale (without talking about granularity )". Yes, ok maybe that works, let's phrase it again, "All of the melodies in the universe, oh but without accounting for any kind of rhythm, nor meter, with strict limitation of the range of one octave, only limited to the Western 12 tone chromatic scale, and oh by the way with a hard cap of 32 notes". :

If you try to visualize (or even calculate) the number of possibilities given every possible variation as Jostenmeat mentions then the answer to the question 'Will we ever run out of new music' is most definitley NO.

But, the way agarwalro summed it up is what I got out of the video. Even if you narrow the problem space considerably by imposing a lot of restrictions the number of possibilities is still enormous...but then why do we continue to see (hear) 'new' music that very closely mimics what has come before?

I thought it was pretty interesting in the video where he played that 'dance' type song and then went right into 'Cecelia' by Simon and Garfunkel and it didn't miss a beat...like it was the same song with different lyrics.

Given that the possible number of combinations is enormous regardless of whether you narrow the range by imposing restrictions or take into account every possibility as Jostenmeat does, why do human beings reinvent the wheel (musically) time and time again?

 

[jostenmeat]

If you try to visualize (or even calculate) the number of possibilities given every possible variation as Jostenmeat mentions then the answer to the question 'Will we ever run out of new music' is most definitley NO.

But, the way agarwalro summed it up is what I got out of the video. Even if you narrow the problem space considerably by imposing a lot of restrictions the number of possibilities is still enormous...but then why do we continue to see (hear) 'new' music that very closely mimics what has come before?

I thought it was pretty interesting in the video where he played that 'dance' type song and then went right into 'Cecelia' by Simon and Garfunkel and it didn't miss a beat...like it was the same song with different lyrics.

Given that the possible number of combinations is enormous regardless of whether you narrow the range by imposing restrictions or take into account every possibility as Jostenmeat does, why do human beings reinvent the wheel (musically) time and time again?

I think the answer to all of your questions is easy, and is two-fold: 1) They are simply ripping each other off. 2) The subject IMO is more about popular music, and how it sounds similar, and I mentioned that I think this is what the title should have been, as it does a better job of that than talking about musical possibilities. IOW, I do NOT think we are constantly reinventing the wheel. But I think POP music writers might!

Let me throw out some other points as they come to me (besides number of notes, or octave range for instance), some I may have touched upon, some maybe I haven't, that all point to greater complexity in (Western European) music; stuff that just blows past the "restrictions". Some are more salient than others, and they may be posed more as questions.

1. Has anyone ever, ever heard two improvisations that sounded exactly alike? You're allowed to use the same musician too! I probably have some jazz cds are around, with some "B sides", and the improv is never the same, even if they all begin with the same chart.

2. Did you know that you could give two composers the exact same melody, and when they write parts for it, even when using the same "writing language", such as common practice period writing (the stuff you learn in 1st semester harmony/part-writing), you can get totally different music! (Pop music doesn't really use "counterpoint", which is one of the greatest, and IMO the greatest, feature of our Western European music, and instead they play a simply chord vertically, and repeat that same simple chord over and over again.) Yes, so say the composers are given the same melody for the soprano line, but the alto/tenor/bass might all be playing different notes during the entire passage. Now, give them freedom of "writing language" as well to boot, and then the treatment becomes even more dramatically different. The "melody" is on top, but instead we can use any of the SATB lines; give one of those being exactly the same to two composers, and the end results can come out very differently.

3. Then the video's bit about 4 chords. This is another reason why "all popular music sounds the same". They all sit on the same chord for many bars at a time. The chords that are of the most possibly simplistic type you can possibly choose out of all the chords we would be allowed to choose, even using writing languages that are hundreds of years old. The guy whose work is the foundation for any first year part-writing book you'll pick up from the shelves (Bach) has a much more intense "harmonic rhythm". (He didn't think of it as chords, which is thinking vertically; we do that to make it simpler for ourselves; he thought horizontally.) Whereas a pop musician needs many bars for one chord, a composer like Bach would need many chords just for one bar! These "chords" can be sooooooo way more complex too! A beginner slowly learning a work of his, trudging along reading notes "vertically" playing them all the same time, will undoubtedly exclaim, "that can't be right, this has GOT to be a typo", because of the extremely savory dissonances that are had. And this guy is the original gangsta!

4. The paragraph above is more about harmonic treatment of the same idea ("reinventing the wheel" doesn't do justice IMO), but there are other ways you can treat, slice and dice, fry and bake, salt and pepper (or in musico-terms, augmentation, diminution, harmonic treatment, part writing, textural, registers, you name it). That video's bit about Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, that is an old English lullaby, you know for kids, easy to remember, help them learn the alphabet, maybe it's for Baa Baa Black Sheep to help count sheep to go to sleep, I have no idea. But this is what Mozart can do with it!

5. Also in the video, another EXTREMELY limiting restriction is the use of melodies strictly from an 8 note scale. Did you know the greatest composers you've ever heard of from the LAST century were normally using 12 note scales? Like Stravinsky, Schoenberg, etc? Now, depending on the work you pick, undoubtedly some people here might have hard time calling it music. But it's not because it uses 12 note scales to derive their "melody". Heck you can be forced to use ALL 12 of them for your material, and still have very beautiful music that IMO is still easy on the ears. The below is an example of such, I really enjoy this work.

 

[jostenmeat]

A lot of what that guy was talking about is information theory more than music, he mostly only used music to discuss mathematical ideas. His discussion about common melodies and rhythms that people are drawn to has computational implications because it could mean that in the near future a computer could write a well-received song using a relatively simple algorithm. Any notion of "soul" in music is mere pretense, and we are all really just dumb robots running through the genetic program of instinct.

There is no doubt in my mind that the easiest type of music to write for is pop music. What would help a computer or robot sound like other pop music is that we are already using computers for that music. You know, the drummers for the band don't even get to play drums for the recording! Well, at least the one former drummer I talked with, whose stuff was played on the pop stations across the US. I asked him what it was like to record their most well known album, and he said he didn't even get to! LOL. Click tracks I guess.

The story above points to compression in every way you can think of, with pop music.

1. Dynamic compression is the compression of volume, reign in the extremes.

2. Melodic compression by way of auto-tune. Inflections and color are very important to musical expression, I don't care if you define that as "soul" or not, or as "being musical" or what have you.

3. Rhytmic compression by using click tracks/computer/whatevers. No allowance for rubato, which is absolutely essential to musical expression, at least for the music that I enjoy (which spans centuries). Now, rubato is a give and take system, but even in a much more simplistic sense, a repeated sense without push/pull, you couldn't even have a drummer sitting "behind the beat" for example. Heck, you don't even need the drummer anymore!

Welcome to the world of pop music.