Will We Ever Run Out of New Music?

Sean

Found this really interesting. We've touched on a few of the points mentioned in the video in a couple of threads.

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Bob-Dubery

I found him unconvincing. He's chucking big numbers around, but it's not real world stuff. EG 100 songwriters writing a melody per second will write down all possible melodies in "just" 248 years. Trouble is they don't take a second to conceive a "melody" (whatever that is) let alone to write it down in some useful form.

For any given human being the answer is no, you will never run out of new music, not if you don't want to. There are whole musical worlds waiting to be discovered. There are genres, traditional styles that most of us will never hear. I went to a flamenco show in Madrid recently. I thought knew broadly what Flamenco is. Well... this show wasn't much like that at all. For a start it was nearly all improvised - indeed there were no "pieces" or "numbers" as such, just one thing seguing into another, and a "thing" could be 30 seconds long or a few minutes (notice my neat use of jargon? Impressive huh?). Ka-ching! My musical world just got bigger.

But there's so much that I will never get around to listening to, that I won't even know exists. At least I've seen a live Zydeco show. There's more music in this world already than any one person can listen to, even if they try real hard. And we all have things that, for whatever reason, we like to hear multiple times even though nothing will have changed since the last time we played that recording.

Chuck in words as well. I like words. "Songs" have words and melody, and good songwriters have good lyrics which can give you much to ponder.

I'm not worried.

deefstes

Wow, I thought it was a fascinating video. It's exactly the sort of thing that floats my boat.

I think his chucking around of big number actually proved exactly what you're saying Bob. Only after he had simplified his thought experiment by a few levels through narrowing down the criteria for a melody significantly, did he arrive at the statement that a 100 songwriters could exhaust all possible "melodies" in 248 if they each wrote one every second.

But my favourite quote of the video and the one I think sums up the concept brilliantly, came towards the end of the video:
"Even though, mathematically speaking, there are so many possible unique melodies that we can safely say there will always be room for new music, we don't seem to be wired to care."

Sean

deefstes wrote But my favourite quote of the video and the one I think sums up the concept brilliantly, came towards the end of the video:
"Even though, mathematically speaking, there are so many possible unique melodies that we can safely say there will always be room for new music, we don't seem to be wired to care."

Yes, I found this really interesting as well. When he speaks of different musical "meters" and that most music falls into what is termed "common meter", it seems to explain why "pop" music is "popular".
So it seems (to me at least), and generally speaking, we're all naturally drawn to music that falls into this category, but I suppose at varying degrees. How one would explore these other "meters" though is beyond me.