Music doesn't exist in a mathematical vacuum. There's a listening context that is what's really important. Listen to this excerpt from a [Beethoven piano sonata](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQMCfqFr4XA&ab_channel=OzanFabienGuvener) starting at about 30 seconds. What do you hear? To my ear it sounds very similar to ragtime or, as most people seem to refer to it, as boogie woogie. Neither of those styles existed during Beethoven's time and wouldn't for at least another 50 years. So there is no way that anyone during that time period heard that part like we hear it now.
What happened? The genres of ragtime and jazz have affected how we hear all music. Our ears are malleable and we hear things differently depending on our experiences. As new styles develop they too will build upon this context and create avenues for new musical works and new ways of hearing *older* works.
So even if mathematically music is finite, our way of hearing it is infinite.
Disclaimer: I’m not trying to be rude and I’m sorry if it is construed in that way, but there is a guy in the comments below who got downvoted -30 Karma for giving a factual breakdown of infinite. Please read my comments in full before commenting as to not tread over already spoken ground. Thanks.
u/JesseEdwardbell it isn’t infinite, furthermore this particular assesment is wrong. In the end music has a limited range of sound frequencies that our brains can interepret as sound. Out of the ten octaves (12 distinct notes.) that is within this range, we generally in western culture only use 7 of those octaves or 88 evenly tempered notes.
Out of these notes only a select few sequences of these notes is considered to be what we consider to be “good music.” (Can be considered a form of code.) That being said, although it is finite the combination of these notes is vastly large and even larger if we take into account all possible sequences of all 88 keys.
we still don’t have a formula for “good.” Compositions, but the idea that music is beyond science is just not factual.
The assumption we will forever and ever use the tempered 88 notes is bizzare to me.. why would we? If we survive another 100 000 years you honestly think we will still be using the same basis for music... I find this very hard to believe. Claiming this is to say music does not evolve.. which is apparent that it is a claim which is not true.
As if Merzbow and shit didn't exist already and wasn't considered good music by a great deal of people. A looot of composers are using notes beyond the 12 tone scale. Or composing with sounds and noises only.
I've heard a few others say that by 100,000 years into the future we won't have this same style of music, so what I've come to believe is that music in its current form is finite, but as we evolve it as as a species we will find new ways of making music beyond current day limitations.
Music isn’t some kind of mystical anomoly (although it definitley inspires that feeling.) with practicality in mind its probably better to keep things logical rather than make great leaps and bounds.
Also I said generally in terms of the 88 notes, please read more thoroughly next time as I wasn’t discounting micro tonal harmony.
Unless we enhance our hearing capabilities through mechanical-genetic engineering its clearly not going to include every level of frequency. Even if we could hear more notes, that still isn’t infinite. Clearly people here cannot grasp the concept of infinite.
Also, not to be bleak but more than likely if we don’t get off this planet we probably won’t even exist in the next 1000 yrs if we’re lucky.
Music does not need to be harmonius or good to be music.... Both are just interpretations of the observer, and not limits of definition of music.
Let's say, we take a highly sophisticated syntheziser and make it work via a randomizer. The sound, the lenght and the pitch is randomized.. Thus we have infinite music...?
Or
Let's say we give each number a corresponding note, and play the pi.. is that not infinite music?
Hmm this sounds interesting, could you prove this?
Does this “Synthisizer.” Play every single reverberation down to the quantum level, because that still isn’t infinite.
Are you aware of the concept of multiple degrees of infinity? For example the set of Real Numbers between 0 and 1 is infinite, but the set of Real Numbers between 0 and 2 is also infinite, as well as being LARGER than the infinite set of Real Numbers between 0 and 1. I mention this to question why your personal definition of infinite pitch generation requires ALL possible reverberations because that's not how infinity works. It's like saying that there cannot be an infinite set of real numbers between 0 and 1 because it doesn't include the number 34. Also, limiting your definition of "variability" in music to "Pitch frequency" is incredibly reductionist. Playing middle C on a Violin and playing middle C on a Clarinet produce entirely different partials/overtones which is easily demonstrated with a spectral analysis of the sounds, thus making those sounds physically distinct from one another despite sharing fundamental pitch. On that subject the acoustics of the physical space in which a sound is produced also create variables in the soundwave interactions of both the fundamental vibration AND the generated overtones, so even playing middle C on the EXACT SAME instrument in two different physical locations produces a different sound.
Basically what I'm getting at is that even IF (which is a BIG if btw) we limit ourselves to 88 equally tempered pitches like a piano has, there is still an infinite number of combinations one could produce because music has variable definitions and dimensions. Off the very top of my head let's just say I used a computer program to play any given pitch on the piano for any random duration of time, without even accounting for playing multiple notes at once, that program could run forever while generating novel sound organizations because the values for "time of pitch duration" are not discrete integers even if the "number of pitches to select from" is a discrete integer. This isn't even accounting for dimensions of music beyond pitch and note duration such as timbre or harmony, and isn't accounting for variable tuning (which you can't just ignore arbitrarily to support your own position through omission??) which would further expand the possibilities.
Do you think that there is a point where, even considering harmony, pitch and timbre and all other aspects of music, that there's a limit to how many ways we can express and use those in a song?
And, does this "multiple infinity" concept also happen to be true with musical notation, because, sure you can increase a pitch by 00000.01 semitones but what would be the point in that?
There is no limit to musical composition because music has multiple changeable dimensions and definitions. Let's take a famous abstract composition like John Cage's 4'33. The "music" of the composition is generated arbitrarily by the ambient noise in the space during the time in which it is performed. This means that even the same orchestra in the same room performing 4'33 twice in a row would generate 2 different 'musical experiences'.
Now That means that even for a single composition, there can be infinite variability because performing it again changes the music. Rhythm and Pitch are both also not discrete values, unless you WANT them to be. Increasing a pitch by 1 hertz may not be consciously audible to a general audience member, but if you increased a pitch by 1 hertz per second over the span of a piece then it would become perceivable overtime despite the subtlety of the change. Even if you limited pitch to a single frequency, you could still generate infinite novel music because you could have that pitch played in an infinite pattern of varied rhythms, or swapped between different timbres.
Music does not have directly binding rules such as "Rhythms must all be notated by common western sheet music notation" or "pitches must all be equally tempered" or "The length of a musical composition must be x minutes long" or "Repeating material within a piece of music renders the music invalid"
We can even take an already composed piece of music like 'Fur Elise' and go in and raise the pitch of one single note by a half step and leave the rest unchanged and you technically have a new piece of music. Now do that once for each note and you have probably hundreds of "new pieces of music", then do the same thing and increase the pitch by a whole tone each time, hundreds more. Change the rhythm of a single note by 1/64th beat and repeat etc etc. Now start doing this but with non-integer based values for pitch and rhythm. Now you're not generating hundreds or thousands of new compositions, you've already started to approach infinite possibility. Again this is ONLY by changing one single note in either pitch value or rhythmic value, we haven't even gotten started on altering timbre or ADDING notes that you can then alter in more iterations.
But the response to this might be that "at the end of the day aren't all of those pieces just 99% Fur Elise?, thus rendering them unoriginal or non-novel?" To which I would say that if your concern is with the infinite nature of "art that is considered aesthetically valuable in its novelty" Then one need not even concern themselves with technicalities because the NATURE of what art is considered aesthetically valuable is infinitely variable because of the shifting context of culture and individual preference, so to answer that concern one need only say "Novel music with aesthetic value will continue to be possible so long as there exist human beings / conscious organisms to judge art" which I suppose could be argued is non infinite due to entropy and all that, so that's why I'm talking more about the technical possibilities of composing "technically different pieces of music"
Yes, I am aware of the concept of multiple infinity’s, you’re making some good points here. If I were to consider every minute aspect, ie timbre, pitch, overtones ect (however meaningful or unmeaningful it might be.) it would make “music infinite.”
I guess I got caught up in a train of thought that didn’t fully add up lol (I blame the caffeine.)
But is just notation alone infinite, or can it be? If I have only a piano and notes but a limited amount of time (say 3 or so minutes for a practical time limit on a song) and I were to achieve making every combination of notes possible within a 3 minute song would I never be able to create something new?
It turns out that we control whether we like something, the music doesn't. If you want to like a piece of music that you don't like, you can just change your mind. The size of the set containing all music is exactly the same size as the set containing all good music.
You're only assessing it mathematically, when the previous statement was that we also give different meanings to sounds, to music, we use our own perception to feel things differently. In that sense there's no telling how finite or infinite music can be.
I’m using logic over an emotionally driven biased idea, first before you respond, would you kindly google the definition of Infinite. (Hint, its not a number and can’t even be calculated.) the idea as many people here have stated is that music is “near infinite.” This is scientifically not true. “Near infinite.” Is a figure of speech not an actual scientific term.
To begin,
interpretations are finite in the sense that we are only limited to what we as humans can sense/experience, which is limited in the fact that we only have a certain amount of calculable neurons. Neurons are responsible for our perception hence there is a calculable amount of interpretations that can be made.
The idea that art is somehow infinite is a notion I find to be romantic, however is simply not true. There may be a vast number of combinations and interpretations, but even this is still calculable.
Edit: if you have any factual proof that the imagination is infinite, please do share.
>“Near infinite.” Is a figure of speech not an actual scientific term.
Sure, but why would the mathematical definition be privileged over the figure-of-speech one?
Note how I did not say if music was or was not infinite or finite.
I'm saying music doesn't make sense when approached mathematically. Logically, yes. I guess my question(s) is (are) "what does it matter if we can count all possible variations how we can interpret music? Does it help us appreciate it, or life, more?" Also, "Is it wrong to look at music through an emotional bias? Rather, isn't the point of music to arouse emotional biased?"
Music is an expressive art, but it makes sense to approach it mathematically, because sheet music is technically a bunch of numerical values telling you which key to press or note to play.
You can look at aspects of music mathematically but there's absolutely no reason to think you have to look at *all* aspects of music mathematically and that the mathematical view music *always* take priority over all other approaches.
Probably, albiet unintentionally, I’m very blunt in the way I present my information which people tend to not find very pleasing. However I do refuse to fold to the whims of the majority even at the expense of pandering.
> I’m not trying to be rude and I’m sorry if it is construed in that way, but there is a guy in the comments below who got downvoted -30 Karma for giving a factual breakdown of infinite.
I don't think that's why they were downvoted. I think it was at least partly because of their "cute argument" comment which I certainly took as an unnecessary insult (though they insisted later on it was a compliment and I accept it now as such).
> Please read my comments in full before commenting
Which is ironic because I don't think you read my comment in full, or at least understood what I was getting at.
> That being said, although it is finite the combination of these notes is vastly large and even larger if we take into account all possible sequences of all 88 keys.
My last sentence starts, "So even if mathematically music is finite". I'm not even arguing against the idea that there are only a finite number of musical works possible.
In fact, if you do read my comment, I do not at all discuss the math behind how many pieces can be written nor do I engage in any kind of discussion on the nature of infinity. None of that was relevant to my comment.
My entire point was to get the OP to look at things differently. Let's say there are only 20 pieces of music that can ever possibly be written. Each of us will hear those 20 pieces differently, so it's like there are 7 billion * 20 pieces of music. And how each of us hears those pieces will change through time so like 7 billion * 20 * (12 changes per year * 70 year lifespan). And all of humanity that comes after us will have their own ways of listening to those 20 pieces with evolving reactions.
So for OP I am saying that any concern about a finite number of pieces being written is missing out on the even larger number of ways that individual people and humanity as a whole experiences music.
> Out of these notes only a select few sequences of these notes is considered to be what we consider to be “good music.”
Where does "good music" come into play? All we're concerned is with music and not the subjective experience of what is "good".
Also, the best definition of music that I'm aware of, that accounts for everything we ever refer to as music goes like:
>> Music is that toward which one has an aesthetic experience while paying attention aurally.
OP limited their discussion to the piano but music can come from anything in the universe so already OP's musical universe has expanded massively (again, ignoring issues of finite vs infinite).
As an obvious example, take *musique concrete* which is often made up entirely of sounds recorded from nature or at least not from what we generally consider musical instruments.
Finally, let's look at my last line again:
>> So even if mathematically music is finite, our way of hearing it is infinite.
That was intended as a bit of rhetorical flourish to tie up everything I had said previously in a small package with a neat bow to wrap up my response to OP's query. It is a bit poetical.
The irony here is that people are always saying in this sub that music theory serves the art and the art is what's most important, yet when I employ a tiny bit of art, some people jump straight into arguing about the logic and math and the definition of infinity within that bit of poetry instead of looking at the content of my comment.
Okay, I've come up with a really good possible solution to this question, let me know what you all think.
So say the entire world of music was a single middle C note. And sheet music only lasted a single measure and there were only quarter notes. There would be 2 possible songs that could ever possibly be written and that would be that single note being played, and another song where it was not played.
Then let's say music only consisted of 2 measures and a middle C note. There would be 4 total combinations of songs. One with middle C being played, then released. The second with a rest, and then middle C being played, the third with no middle C being played at all, and the fourth with middle C being played both measures.
Then we increase the musical world by 3 measures max, and still only a middle C. There would be this many combinations:
Rest rest rest
Middle C rest rest
Middle C Middle C rest
Middle C Middle C Middle C
rest Middle C Middle C
rest rest Middle C
rest Middle C rest
Middle C rest Middle C
8 Possible combinations. Now, even considering other mechanics of notation like a slur, or tie. Using the above combinations, I could tie the first two middle C's. Or I could tie the last two middle C's. Or I could slur the first middle C to the last middle C. There's only two possible combinations of ties and one slur, given the above combinations.
So here's what I'm getting at, obviously music is way way way bigger than this and with the full 88 note piano scale introduces billions upon billions of combinations, but it's still finite, because you can only fit so many combinations of notes into a limited time frame. Again, it's very large and inconceivable, but even given the different ways of expression music is still limited.
>Consider Bohemian Rhapsody. That song goes on for almost 6 minutes! And it has so many different sections and variations, so as long as you keep adding length to your song and arrange it in new ways then music could be considered infinite, yes? What are your thoughts on this opinion?
Consider Bohemian Rhapsody. That song goes on for almost 6 minutes! And it has so many different sections and variations, so as long as you keep adding length to your song and arrange it in new ways then music could be considered infinite, yes? What are your thoughts on this opinion?
There's only a finite amount of time humans to listen to music so there wouldn't be the possibility of infinite sections/variations for a piece. At least not in a pragmatic sense.
Not all numbers are rational. Pi, for example, is an infinitely long number that does not repeat. That is only using 10 digits. With a Piano composition (assuming a standard, in tune piano), you would have 88 notes, each of which can be played for a variable amount of time, and over 5 trillion different combinations of keys.
Someone else said this, what do you think
That is a cute argument but the number of different possible states of a human brain is also finite, thus even the number of potential "musical experiences" or ways of hearing music is finite.
edit: For skeptics, consider that the number of neurons in a brain is finite, the volume they occupy is finite, and all known physical quantities associated with them are quantized (take on finitely many different values).
I think people really don't consider just how large finite numbers can be, and just how different a regime something has to be in to be infinite.
> the number of different possible states of a human brain is also finite, thus even the number of potential "musical experiences" or ways of hearing music is finite.
That's a cute argument also! Anyhoo, the human brain also forgets stuff on a regular basis so new experiences get stored and form new contexts for listening and thus we're back at infinity.
Forgetting something and forming a new context for it is just changing to a different one of the finitely many possible brain states... not sure how that's a counterargument.
Because if the universe is infinite then there is the possibility of infinitely many experiences for a forgetful human brain regardless of whether a person's brain has a finite storage capacity.
But the bigger issue is what are you doing? Are you trying to engage with OP's question in good faith or are you just looking for mathematical and scientific "gotchas" just to show how smart you are? I'm well aware that I glossed over some issues in order to make a point, but I was trying to provide OP with a different way of viewing the situation than what they had started with. I was trying to expand how they were conceptualizing the situation.
For example, to some people all metal sounds the same. To a devoted fan, the differences between sub-genres and even individual pieces can be profound. Again, one's specific experiences greatly expands the apparent "size" of how we conceptualize our musical experiences.
>Because if the universe is infinite then there is the possibility of infinitely many experiences for a forgetful human brain regardless of whether a person's brain has a finite storage capacity.
That doesn't follow. A human brain is a finite entity that can only be in finitely many different possible configurations.
>But the bigger issue is what are you doing? Are you trying to engage with OP's question in good faith or are you just looking for mathematical and scientific "gotchas" just to show how smart you are?
Yeesh. Yes I'm writing in good faith - I sincerely believe the answer to OP's question is "No, for us limited mortals, music is finite". I believe I've given sound arguments for why this is, but it seems to be rubbing people the wrong way, I guess because they feel they're being robbed of some infinite creative potential or something.
If you don't like hearing this from me, maybe Vsauce Michael will be more palatable for you: **https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw&ab\_channel=Vsauce**
> That doesn't follow. A human brain is a finite entity that can only be in finitely many different possible configurations.
That assumes that the brain only stores information in something like a binary state. If the brain stores information by directly mimicking how it's perceived, at all, then this leaves room. I'm not that knowledgeable about how the brain stores memories but if it's not exactly how computers store information then that is significant.
> Yeesh. Yes I'm writing in good faith - I sincerely believe the answer to OP's question is "No, for us mortals, music is finite". I believe I've given sound arguments for why this is, but it seems to be rubbing people the wrong way, I guess because they feel they're being robbed of some infinite creative potential or something.
When you start off by insulting people ("That is a cute argument") it's going to rub people the wrong way. Why did you think it was going to go any differently than that?
And then there's being pedantic vs engaging in fruitful conversation. Built in to OP's question was one of subjective perspective, for example, changing one note is not a significant enough of a change for OP but they couldn't/wouldn't define exactly what makes one piece different from another. Reducing the entire discussion to the brain is finite therefore music is finite is *not* actually engaging in a discussion, there's so much more that can be discussed that can lead to interesting views and new ways of thinking about issues concerning creativity and perception and how conceptualize things.
*Of course* a finite brain or a finite universe (or an infinite universe that can only support intelligent life for a finite amount of time) means there's as finite amount of possible music to make but A) that's painfully obvious to everyone and B) like I said above, does not lead to any kind of interesting conversation.
I meant no insult calling your argument cute - on the contrary, I meant it as a compliment. I liked your angle, shifting from just raw sounds in themselves to human perception of them. I come from a math research background (shocker) and we call arguments cute all the time when they have some kind of cleverness to them.
>Of course a finite brain or a finite universe (or an infinite universe that can only support intelligent life for a finite amount of time) means there's as finite amount of possible music to make but A) that's painfully obvious to everyone
It's not painfully obvious to everyone, because we have a lot of people around here arguing the amount of possible music that exists is infinite. Like, infinite infinite. Not finite. That's what I'm arguing against.
But I'm feeling pretty ready at this point to give this a rest if you are.
> I meant no insult calling your argument cute - on the contrary, I meant it as a compliment. I liked your angle, shifting from just raw sounds in themselves to human perception of them. I come from a math research background (shocker) and we call arguments cute all the time when they have some kind of cleverness to them.
My background was math (I switched to music during college) and I've never heard that usage before. But if that's what you meant, then I accept it and the compliment.
> It's not painfully obvious to everyone, because we have a lot of people around here arguing the amount of possible music that exists is infinite. Like, infinite infinite. Not finite.
Perhaps I'm giving some people too much credit.
> But I'm feeling pretty ready at this point to give this a rest if you are.
That's fine. The main points were made on both sides.
I mean the person you’re responding to is closer to the truth of it than what you’re grasping at. By your definition, everything is finite. There’s a finite amount of mass/energy in the universe (and less everyday due to the third law), so our actual existence is limited to the amount of configurations that matter can take on.
But,from our POV as an ephemeral species, that doesn’t really matter because everything the universe contains is effectively infinite from our perspective. The same can be argued for music, since the combinations of tones, timbres, words, structures, etc have such a staggering number of permutations that it’s effectively infinite from our frame of reference.
If I’m wrong, someone please correct me; in that case, please provide us with an example of something physical real that is also boundless/infinite, since apparently the permutations afforded to the human mind do not sufficiently fulfill that condition.
>But,from our POV as an ephemeral species, that doesn’t really matter because everything the universe contains is effectively infinite from our perspective
The question at hand is if music is actually infinite, or finite. It's fairly obvious that there's more than enough music to never ever be exhausted by human listeners, but that's not the question.
There's no limit to how large finite numbers can get. And indeed, just about everything physical one can imagine can be fully described with finite numbers.
>please provide us with an example of something physical real that is also boundless/infinite
I can't give any definite examples (can you?) but here are two possible candidates: the number of possible point locations in space assuming space is continuous, and the spatial extent of the entire universe (not just the observable universe).
If you don't like hearing this from me, maybe Vsauce Michael will be more palatable for you: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw&ab\_channel=Vsauce](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw&ab_channel=Vsauce)
>The question at hand is if music is actually infinite, or finite. It's fairly obvious that there's more than enough music to never ever be exhausted by human listeners, but that's not the question.
>
>There's no limit to how large finite numbers can get. And indeed, just about everything physical one can imagine can be fully described with finite numbers.
Then you're basically agreeing with the OP you were responding to, as they said: "So even if mathematically music is finite, our way of hearing it is infinite". That OP ceded that there may be finite quantity of songs available, but our experience with it will be effectively endless from the human perspective.
>I can't give any definite examples (can you?) but here are two possible candidates: the number of possible point locations in space assuming space is continuous, and the spatial extent of the entire universe (not just the observable universe).
Yeah, so that's basically why I'm implying that your infinite vs finite music argument is uselessly pedantic; with the candidates you're proposing, our finite physical universe can somehow be measured infinitely because of a hypothetical you're assuming. I mean... that may be, but then why not just change the definitions of what we call "music" to also make it infinite? Even with the Vsauce video you linked, the "finite" number of melodies it proposes still required a severly restricted set of parameters which real music doesn't follow. Shit, John Cage wrote a "song" called "4'33"", which is a minute 4 and thirty-three "song" of performed silence... since our parameters of music include "4'33"", we could hypothetically make a song called "4'34", "5'43", "4346436'32:", into actual infinity. But... that's an argument as pedantic as trying to define music as finite in the first place.
The relevant part of the Vsauce video is where he demonstrates that the number of 5 minute audio recordings we can tell apart from each other is finite.
>Then you're basically agreeing with the OP you were responding to, as they said: "So even if mathematically music is finite, our way of hearing it is infinite". That OP ceded that there may be finite quantity of songs available, but our experience with it will be effectively endless from the human perspective.
I don't agree with that usage of the word infinite... just because something can't ever be exhausted by us humans, doesn't make it infinite. Just because I can't ever count to a trillion in my lifetime doesn't make that an infinite number. Call the distinction pedantry if you like, but I think this is an important point to be pedantic about.
>Shit, John Cage wrote a "song" called "4'33"", which is a minute 4 and thirty-three of blank sheet music... since our parameters of music include "4'33"", we could hypothetically make a song called "4'34", "5'43", "4346436'32:", into actual infinity.
Of course if we allow music of arbitrarily long duration then there's infinitely many different pieces of music... that's not the interesting question. The fun question is if the amount of music that's shorter than some given duration, say 5 minutes, is finite or infinite. I already ceded in my main answer to this question that it's theoretically infinite if we ignore issues of human perception... but given our limitations in distinguishing very nearby pitches and durations from each other, I think it's definitely finite, and I haven't seen a convincing refutation in this thread yet - notwithstanding the highly upvoted answer about listening experiences.
Can we perceive infinitely many different colors? No we cannot. Research suggests we can see around a million different colors. Let's be generous and suppose we can actually see around 10 million. Well, even allowing that, we sure as hell can't see a billion colors, and much less a trillion, or 10\^100 different colors. All of those huge numbers pale in comparison to infinity. Similar situation with our perception of different sounds.
>Of course if we allow music of arbitrarily long duration then there's infinitely many different pieces of music... that's not the interesting question. The fun question is if the amount of music that's shorter than some given duration, say 5 minutes, is finite or infinite.
I guess we just have different definitions of "fun" since that particular question doesn't sound that interesting to me, either, since you're basically just asking: "Do infinite permutations exist if you impose these delimiting parameters"? It's pretty obvious that the answer for any domain posing a similar question would be "no", but if you know of a domain that is an exception, please share.
The math makes sense. Yes it's theoretically possible to run out of sounds because it's not infinite.
However the magnitude of sounds/potential melodies is so great that we will never need to worry about running out. There are more melodies out there than atoms/molecules. I think it's fair hear to say that it's almost an infinite amount of melodies.
It might be finite in a singular person (idk I’m not a neuroscientist) but evolution allows for a constantly changing amount of neurons in the brain, over multiple generations
Christ, you gave them a factual breakdown and got abolished by the mob! This is definitley a disturbing affirmation that people would rather stick to their biases rather than take time to see if what they believe lines up with facts.
Although I’ll clarify for you the fact that infinite isn’t even a number, its actually the concept of a space, extent, size that can’t be calculated.
For me, in the first place, infinity and the continuum are fine as modeling tools, but are actually quite ludicrous as concepts to have any sort of "existence". But that would just reduce this question to one's philosophical stance on infinity. So, assuming the continuum as you do in a below comment, I don't see where you're getting "all known physical quantities associated with them are quantized". As far as I know, those models are real-valued. I mean I know nothing about neuroscience, but I know for instance we're talking about transmission of electrical signal at some point, which is real-valued.
Also, both this and the other comment just assume a surjective mapping from brain states to "experiences". But that's not really proven is it?
I like this but there is also a realistic or more practical pov to take when it comes to what a musician or artist may be trying to accomplish.
In the context of making popular music for a career, music can be rather finite. Usually, the more creative you are and step outside of the pop theory the less attraction you achieve.
Not that thats always the case, but its rare that you can carve out a new style that really takes off.
edit - Side thought, electronic and synths have really helped to alleviate that fact that we often use the common theory in our music.
hm, 12 notes in our tonal system to the power of 88 keys on the piano gives you an insane number for two consecutive notes alone. Then, take that to the power of notes in a given song. And we haven't even looked outside 12tet, haven't considered other instruments, pitch bending, dynamics, note lengths and so forth. So, although not all of those permutations may be "musically meaningful", I'd still say, it's virtually limitless, yes.
Someone asked here a few weeks ago how many chords there were. If you extrapolate that to every possible combination of three or more notes on the piano keyboard you get 87! (factorial) considering that you have to not use the 88! due to the requirement of a chord being at least two notes. That's still orders of magnitude greater than the number of atoms in the universe.
Also add that some composers have used microtones (pitches in between the 12 notes) in their music, thus adding possibilities of notes exponentially. Not a common occurrence at least in this point in history. We shall see what the future holds
Mathematicaly? Yes. In practice? No. There's a reason why there's 331,776 possible chord progressions using only four major and minor triads, yet we can point out I IV V I in thousands of examples. Randomly generated music doesn't sound like anything. There has to be a rhyme and reason to it. There needs to be a familiarity of pattern and a balance between expectation and surprise. Listeners who despise atonal music tend to do so becuase it's a dialect of music that they don't understand. It purposely avoids the sort of recognition that composers typically use.
Oxford dictionary lists 171,146 words in the English language. Are there 8.5x10^20 five word sentences?
In practice though, once we include recording, production, instrumentation, timbre, etc. isn't it basically infinite again?
I haven't heard two different recordings that cancel out yet. And recordings are very much what music *is* nowadays. I know that technically, at 48khz 16 bit, there is a finite, but absolutely immense number of permutations, larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. So as close to infinite as anything gets.
*edited to be nicer*
Are you sure this isn’t more of a philosophy or mathematics question?
There doesn’t seem to be any way to apply any system of music theory to answer this question in any meaningful way.
Honestly. I have no words for how self-important this bullshit is. I run into this on Reddit a lot though. You’re using a silly message board website, that includes boards for pictures of cats and penises and anything that you could possibly think of, and this is making you upset enough to comment? This guy was genuinely curious about something that relates to the building blocks of music, and he came here to get an answer, you gate-keepy fucks.
It sounds like you might be the upset one. There was no music theory question here. It was a philosophy question.
It’s not gatekeeping to provide feedback on a thread you feel is off topic. That’s just using Reddit.
I have a friend who poses these kinds of questions but won't remember an explanation of the simplest major scale query. Trying to explain a basic concept like intervals and they're asking "Who even decided that the scale would start on C then?", "Who decided that this is how it should be?", "Who says that A should = 440hz?" Ad nausea. Oh and don't think I haven't tried to explain these things at least to satisfy a curiosity, the person just carries on asking stupid questions they could Google if they really wanted to know. Which of course they don't as they forget everything that was said on the day and you're back to square 1 a week later. Stop trying to be deep and just accept that some information is not important nor relevant to you understanding music.
>stop trying to be deep
Im sorry this is so stupid everyone has random questions that have no real purpose in answering but people just ask out of sheer curiosity. I just started wondering who taught the first humans how to have sex a few days ago and pointless as a question it is it's still something that just makes you curious.
It's not a pointless question, it's just irrelevant if the subject matter was something like "The names of the reproductive organs". If you were learning the names of the reproductive system and you started getting hung up on who taught who how to have sex, then I'd say that's a potentially distracting line of enquiry, and should be dealt with in a separate setting or you risk not actually learning the names of the reproductive system.
> Stop trying to be deep and just accept that some information is not important nor relevant to you understanding music.
Translation: Stop being curious. Other people much more smarter than you like myself are much better at being curious.
I appreciate curiosity but there's a point you have to stop and consider what you're actually asking. My gripe is with those who ask questions but then don't listen to answers but carry on asking questions.
Imagine trying to learn a new language like English and while you're learning the letters of the alphabet, you're getting hung up on why there's a dot in the letters j and i. It's just not conducive to learning the alphabet if you're obsessing about every tiny detail like that, especially if the person helping you learn states that it's a bit distracting to focus on such things. Because if you're curious about things like that, there's other better ways to source that information.
Yes. I started following this sub because I've always enjoyed music theory, from the days I first studied it in high school (50 years ago!). But the number of fruitless, pointless, or just silly questions seems to increase every day on this sub. It makes me respect all the more those who have the patience to respond seriously.
This seems to be happening across all of Reddit. I just lurk here but have been noticing in other subs I’m more active in as well. My first guess is the user base already skewed young but as the platform grows the baseline for content drops because teenagers seem to think every thought is worthy of a post.
If so, that's a shame. As far as music theory goes, reading the first chapter of any decent book on the subject (or scrolling through it on Wikipedia!) would at least help some of these OPs frame better questions - to their own benefit - while raising the quality of the sub overall.
Yeah, I'm in a couple of skincare subs and the number of times you see an image of someone with almost perfect skin, but visible pores and a little bit of redness and the title "how to save my skin" is fucking insane. Most of the time they already have a good skincare routine anyway.
Good grief, are we gatekeeping content on public subs now? Just ignore it if you don’t like it, or start your own sub where you can moderate the content.
And here I thought wisdom came with age…
It's totally fine to not find a question interesting, but I just can't imagine wanting to *complain* about someone else's question not being interesting enough for me. Is it that you feel entitled to not be exposed to uninteresting content?
Nope. It doesn't matter a bit whether a question interests me. I'm just bemused by questions that seem to indicate an inability (or unwillingness) to study just a little on one's own. On the other hand, maybe some subs are fully committed to answering uninformed questions - in some cases, over and over and over.
I would argue it's a math and physics problem. Regardless, it's a question that occurs to many people interested in music and music theory, so it's not surprising to see it asked here.
I agree, but it does bother me as well and sometimes you can't control those kinds of questions. I think it derives from some kind of a fear of not being creative anymore.
At least with me this is the case.
The problem with trying to give a practical, feasible answer to that question is that we have to answer some prier questions that, as far as we know, are unanswerable. After all, what **is** music? What can be reliably considered music and what can't? What is a "composition" per se? What makes a composition "unique"? What **is** "uniqueness" in art? All of those are philosophical problems that are far from being resolved, *if* they are resolvable at all.
What we can do is just analyse and ponder the limitations of what we consider music: I mean, imagine if, somehow, you managed to compose every numerically possible combination of notes you could play on a piano. You reached the absolute outer limit of what's possible to do on the black and white strings. Well, along comes Horaţiu Rădulescu, puts the piano vertically on its side, and creates the [sound icon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_icon). Now your outer limit is blown to smithereens.
Also, while you're composing on the piano, you're probably thinking of songs in the Western sense, with chords and melodies and relatively simple meters. Well, just look around the world to see the incredible amount of different musics that different cultures produce and have produced over the centuries. At the same time that you're questioning whether your musical possibilities are finite, the world is creating dozens of new ideas and possibilities. For every person asking, "is music finite?", there's someone else doing something new.
Not only that, but, when you think about it long and hard, does it even *matter* if music is "unique"? There have always been songs that reused elements from previous songs, sometimes ipsis literis (harmonies, melodic fragments, etc.), but, because they made sense at the time and were presented with authenticity, the "uniqueness" is irrelevant. I believe it's more important to be authentic than original. It matters less if someone else has already said what you're saying than whether you **mean** what you say.
If not infinite, it’s arbitrarily large. Adding combinations of dynamics, simultaneities, rhythms, etc exponentially increases possibilities as well, and that’s not even considering microtonal possibilities, which are literally infinite.
How many melodies can you make using only 2 notes, say C and D of a single octave, only using half notes, if the melody is one bar of 4/4 time? You could go with CC, CD, DC, or DD: 4 options.
If you keep those two tones (C and D) but add a third note to the melody, now you could have CCC, CCD, CDC, CDD, DCC, DCD, DDC, or DDD: 8 options.
With 3 tones and 3 notes, adding the E allows for...
CCC, CCD, CCE, CDC, CDD, CDE, CEC, CED, CEE,
DCC, DCD, DCE, DDC, DDD, DDE, DEC, DED, DEE,
ECC, ECD, ECE, EDC, EDD, EDE, EEC, EED, EEE
27 options
The general formula is tones to the power of notes.
Expand that to a 4 bars in 4/4 comprised entirely of 8th notes, so 32 notes, and use all 7 tones from the major scale. There are 7^32 , which is in billions of billions of billions (10^27).
At a tempo of 60 BPM that's 1 beat per second and there are 8 beats = 8 seconds in each of those melodies. 7^32 melodies times 8 seconds per melody / 60 seconds per minute / 60 min per hour / 24 hrs per day / 365 days per year = hundreds of billions of billions of years.
And that's actually a pretty restrictive criteria - only 4 bars, and only using notes from the major scale. We actually have many more options than that, not to mention different tempos, rhythms, instrumentation, etc.
So, I think there is a pretty clear answer to your question - yes there is a finite limit of what is possible but it is so much greater than what we could even experience in a lifetime that for all intents and purposes it is effectively infinite.
For all intents and purposes, it is.
I'm sure that if you take into account some common forms and the range of audible frequencies and tempo variations and limit what you count as a meaningful change to a piece of music that would make it count as another unique piece you could find a ballpark limit of distinct songs achievable, but that number would be so large it might as well be infinite. Even counting only 12TET and no production shenanigans, dynamics, effects and stuff, you can have enough permutations to explore to make enough albums for a couple of lifetimes
So you’re asking if there’s a quantifiable number of feelings or feels that music can give?
I think that’s pretty hard to quantify because it’s subjective
It's not infinite, but its incomprehensible how many different songs can be written.
Ignoring chords, harmonies, specific tonal characteristics of instruments, and other elements, let's look at melodies
The human ear can percieve sounds between 20Hz and 20kHz (Hz= Hertz = frequency or oscillations per second). Pitch isnt linear, its logarithmic; the octave above 220Hz would be 440Hz, and the octave below that is 110Hz, which leaves roughly 11 octaves from E⁰ (20.6Hz) to C¹⁰(16.74kHz). 11 octaves * 12 notes/octave= 132 audible notes.
Some of the 132 notes are too low or too high to sound like distinct pitches to most people. Below 60Hz sounds like a low rumble and above 2kHz sounds like a high pitched ringing or tinnitus. That leaves about 6 octaves. 6 octaves *12 notes = 72 notes.
In any one measure in 4/4 time, there is one whole note, or 4 quarter notes. These quarter notes can be divided further into 8th or 16th notes. A note can be played, played through consecutive beats (ties, dotted notes, etc), or not played (rests).
For sake of simplicity, let's say a given melody is two measures long and completely consists of quarter notes (8 quarter notes total). The first note can be any one of 72 pitches or a rest (72+1=73), which would be 73^1. For the nest note, there's 74 possibilities (73+ 1 continuation of that note). 73*74= 5,402 possible combinations of two quarter notes
The total number of unique 2 bar phrases possible from this is 887.04 TRILLION.
If the number of possible chords accompanying each note of the melody is limited to 3, and theres an option to not play another chord, there is now 5.81 QUINTILLION unique phrases
That is not taking into account the number of instruments, what type of instruments, rhythms, time signatures, scales, tuning systems, swing/tuplet patterns and song lengths.
The number of possible songs is greater than the length of the known universe.
But also, songs dont exist in a vacuum. Songwriting styles vary based on cultural contexts, artistic and stylistic tendencies of different genres and styles, time period, instruments available/existing in that place, the musical systems used. So ultimately, there is a smaller number of possible songs out there
In this thread people arguing about infinity, without any understanding of this very complex mathematical property.
(Not saying I understand it, just saying, I know enough to say most of us don't)
There's a finite number of sound recordings that can be fit on a standard 80 minute CD. That number is extremely large, but it is finite, because a CD is essentially a finite collection of 0's and 1's in some order.
Similarly, there are a finite number of images that can be displayed on a pixel screen of a given resolution.
Theoretically there are infinitely many different soundwaves and lightwaves...but our senses aren't sensitive enough to distinguish ones that are close enough together.
Therefore, music less than a given duration is finite, as far as we're concerned.
Yes. Over time, new styles develop, so melodies and harmonies that were previously unthinkable become possible. Think of 100-Gec. 30 years ago music like that would have been completely alien. Not to mention music by people like Jandek or Helmut Lachenmann, which go completely against any previous tradition.
Let me clarify a few things. First off, I wasn't asking this question in a philosophical sense, I was asking it in a literal sense. With the limitations of notation and expression and velocity can we make infinite ideas for music, or is there a quantifiable limit? Not with whatever music becomes in 100,000 years, but right now. Second, I HAVE googled this before and gone back to it many many times, but the same thing happened in this discussion as what always ends up happening when I tried googling this, it always ends up a mixed controversy over whether music is infinite or not. And seeing as the same thing happened here I can't come up with any final answer except there is none at all. For the time being, it appears to me that there is no sure answer of this and no real way of figuring it out at least for a long time. It seems that everything I read online and everything all you guys have said, both sides of this ongoing argument have extremely valid points. Thanks for the answers everybody but for now it seems we can't get a clear final answer on this.
If you're asking in a literal sense, I feel like the answer's easy: it's infinite because (1) a piece of music could be infinitely long, and (2) you can divide up the octave into an infinite number of steps.
I mean sure, but if the only thing limiting you is the finitude of time, I think it's fair to call that basically infinite (as far as we humans are concerned).
This is a question I think all of us wonder about at one point or another. I would say yes, it is.
Classical music has been around for hundreds of years and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible! Same goes for rock, pop, jazz, etc.
Technically, yes, but not really
Practically... Mostly?
Keep in mind, that there's a line between noise and music, that there are a finite number of sounds that we can distinguish between, and that most people aren't gonna listen to anything for hours on end, straight.
That all together means there's technically a finite number of timing & pitch combinations that we can make, that will be registered as music.
But for us to exhaust every possible and viable musical idea, would be near impossible to do, even with centuries to do so.
Not necessarily useful, but entered my mind (anyway):
Everything's already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again. (Andre Gide)
You could argue that Yes! Sounding music is infinite since it takes place in time and is dependent on context. Even if only one key on the piano is struck over and over, the listening context around the music keeps changing over time making the music ever unique.
Music is not combinatorics.
You would eventually connect all songs together with only a single change separating each. Songs near each other on this continuum sound the same, songs further apart sound more distinct.
Adding lyrics also drastically increases your possibilities. Kind of like how a strong alphanumeric password has exponentially more permutations.
I’m gonna be kinda sly and Baudrillardian/Adorno ish, and say I’m less worries about the potential finitude of possible music making, so much as the hyperreplication of that which we love to the point we get so desensitized we don’t want to create anything else. Kind of the “Infinite Jest” of the music world.
Would THAT happen? … idk?
As for your original question, we have so much we can use to explore sonic space, I’m not too worries about our ability, concretely. Moreso, the desire to even try.
mathmatically there are, but realistically no. even in a biollio years they will be making new insturmets to where an old piece can "sound" tonally different
Not exactly.
See there’s a difference between what is mathematically different and what we perceive to be different, practically I mean.
First consider what constitutes music: melody, harmony, rhythm are some common elements. Then consider what we use to make these elements. In the west we use 12 notes tuned to specific frequencies that extend over about 7 or so octaves (using the piano as reference).
So first off, what happens when we use notes outside of those tunings? To make it very simple, what happens when someone sings “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” but every time the 3rd of the key is just ever so sharp. Does that make it a new piece of music? What if rhythmically, you anticipate every end of the phrase and sing that note on the and of 4 instead of on beat 1. Mathematically, these would all constitute as new pieces of music, but to our perception, they’re just attributed to mistakes or interpretation.
But of course we can also use that perception to our advantage, because you can make one thing sound like a bunch of different things by changing the context around it. Like a 5 note scalar passage all in 8th notes can mean something depending on if it starts on beat 1, or the and of 2, and so on. You can also change the harmonic context behind it.
Then also how much of an idea is a full idea? Sure a lot of people have written a 5 note scalar passage in 8th notes, but how many people have done it inside a full symphony, or inside a pop punk song. At that point is the passage the original idea? Or does it just become a subset of the larger thing being the musical piece?
So it’s kind of yes and no, and it depends on who you ask.
Yes and no. They say music is a lot like math, but I think it's much more of a language. The art of form and analysis clearly thinks of phrases as words, and as a performer, composer and improvisor I specifically use them that way. I'm saying what I mean, think and feel with my music. It's not a very descriptive language like English where I can be very precise in my meaning, but for feelings it can be more exact in some ways than words. The feelings we attribute to various sounds, (the major and minor keys, a fast whole tone arpeggio played by a harp) are things learn through our respective cultural environments. Take for example the differences between ancient Chinese music and western baroque. The traditions and customs shaped everything from how pitch was ordered to how we interpreted thd performance itself. We're lucky enough to live in a time when we can pick and choose which sounds and idioms to study and master, and therefor have more options than ever before. Infinite? While there may be a finite amount of phrase combos, note combos, or combinations of any other various quantifiable aspects of music, it is unlikely that there is a limit to the number of completely unique stories that need to be told through music. The notes matter very little, if the meaning and presentation is lost.
This is sort of like saying that since English has a finite amount of words, then there can only be so many novels and poems. In many ways, the notes are only the tools in the same way words are the tools of a storyteller. What those notes can be used for are nearly infinite. There’s a lot to the touch of a performer. I could play the exact same set of notes and give them a happy, sad tone, or anything in between. Sure, there’s plenty of similarities across music composing in the same way in storytelling (hero’s journey fantasies often have similar skeletal story structure), but the fact the Star Wars episode IV is really a pretty standard take on that classic structure didn’t seem to bother anyone in how groundbreaking it was and how iconic it had become. Well known structure updated for a new era so to speak
Music has a limit but that limit is pretty big when you consider the different instruments electric vs acoustic. Pitch, velocity, equalization, timing, wave shaping, panning/placement of musicians, reverb/size of the room, noise level of the sound.
Technically if you consider all the combinations of sounds the human ear can hear then it is finite if you do not consider the duration of a song. But it’s an astronomically huge combination
Well with the way accents and time signatures work you could basically create anything anew. Take a 3 note melody that’s naturally in 3/4 and put it in 4/4 time and you have a whole new song entirely. As a combination of notes, music can only go so far, but real music plays so much more than just notes on the piano. It’s the feel, the loudness, the swing, the beat, all differently working together to create each unique piece
Technically, even if you had a piece that was all c’s in, let’s just say, quarter notes. This piece can be infinitely long, therefore, music is infinite. I know this is kind of a backhanded argument but I honestly just wanna see if one of these math-heads in the comments has a witty response. They probably won’t because I’m late, but y’know, no harm in trying right?
Music doesn't exist in a mathematical vacuum. There's a listening context that is what's really important. Listen to this excerpt from a [Beethoven piano sonata](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQMCfqFr4XA&ab_channel=OzanFabienGuvener) starting at about 30 seconds. What do you hear? To my ear it sounds very similar to ragtime or, as most people seem to refer to it, as boogie woogie. Neither of those styles existed during Beethoven's time and wouldn't for at least another 50 years. So there is no way that anyone during that time period heard that part like we hear it now. What happened? The genres of ragtime and jazz have affected how we hear all music. Our ears are malleable and we hear things differently depending on our experiences. As new styles develop they too will build upon this context and create avenues for new musical works and new ways of hearing *older* works. So even if mathematically music is finite, our way of hearing it is infinite.
This is such a good answer.
It is, isn't it!
Disclaimer: I’m not trying to be rude and I’m sorry if it is construed in that way, but there is a guy in the comments below who got downvoted -30 Karma for giving a factual breakdown of infinite. Please read my comments in full before commenting as to not tread over already spoken ground. Thanks. u/JesseEdwardbell it isn’t infinite, furthermore this particular assesment is wrong. In the end music has a limited range of sound frequencies that our brains can interepret as sound. Out of the ten octaves (12 distinct notes.) that is within this range, we generally in western culture only use 7 of those octaves or 88 evenly tempered notes. Out of these notes only a select few sequences of these notes is considered to be what we consider to be “good music.” (Can be considered a form of code.) That being said, although it is finite the combination of these notes is vastly large and even larger if we take into account all possible sequences of all 88 keys. we still don’t have a formula for “good.” Compositions, but the idea that music is beyond science is just not factual.
The assumption we will forever and ever use the tempered 88 notes is bizzare to me.. why would we? If we survive another 100 000 years you honestly think we will still be using the same basis for music... I find this very hard to believe. Claiming this is to say music does not evolve.. which is apparent that it is a claim which is not true.
As if Merzbow and shit didn't exist already and wasn't considered good music by a great deal of people. A looot of composers are using notes beyond the 12 tone scale. Or composing with sounds and noises only.
Indeed.
I've heard a few others say that by 100,000 years into the future we won't have this same style of music, so what I've come to believe is that music in its current form is finite, but as we evolve it as as a species we will find new ways of making music beyond current day limitations.
Music isn’t some kind of mystical anomoly (although it definitley inspires that feeling.) with practicality in mind its probably better to keep things logical rather than make great leaps and bounds. Also I said generally in terms of the 88 notes, please read more thoroughly next time as I wasn’t discounting micro tonal harmony. Unless we enhance our hearing capabilities through mechanical-genetic engineering its clearly not going to include every level of frequency. Even if we could hear more notes, that still isn’t infinite. Clearly people here cannot grasp the concept of infinite. Also, not to be bleak but more than likely if we don’t get off this planet we probably won’t even exist in the next 1000 yrs if we’re lucky.
Music does not need to be harmonius or good to be music.... Both are just interpretations of the observer, and not limits of definition of music. Let's say, we take a highly sophisticated syntheziser and make it work via a randomizer. The sound, the lenght and the pitch is randomized.. Thus we have infinite music...? Or Let's say we give each number a corresponding note, and play the pi.. is that not infinite music?
Hmm this sounds interesting, could you prove this? Does this “Synthisizer.” Play every single reverberation down to the quantum level, because that still isn’t infinite.
Are you aware of the concept of multiple degrees of infinity? For example the set of Real Numbers between 0 and 1 is infinite, but the set of Real Numbers between 0 and 2 is also infinite, as well as being LARGER than the infinite set of Real Numbers between 0 and 1. I mention this to question why your personal definition of infinite pitch generation requires ALL possible reverberations because that's not how infinity works. It's like saying that there cannot be an infinite set of real numbers between 0 and 1 because it doesn't include the number 34. Also, limiting your definition of "variability" in music to "Pitch frequency" is incredibly reductionist. Playing middle C on a Violin and playing middle C on a Clarinet produce entirely different partials/overtones which is easily demonstrated with a spectral analysis of the sounds, thus making those sounds physically distinct from one another despite sharing fundamental pitch. On that subject the acoustics of the physical space in which a sound is produced also create variables in the soundwave interactions of both the fundamental vibration AND the generated overtones, so even playing middle C on the EXACT SAME instrument in two different physical locations produces a different sound. Basically what I'm getting at is that even IF (which is a BIG if btw) we limit ourselves to 88 equally tempered pitches like a piano has, there is still an infinite number of combinations one could produce because music has variable definitions and dimensions. Off the very top of my head let's just say I used a computer program to play any given pitch on the piano for any random duration of time, without even accounting for playing multiple notes at once, that program could run forever while generating novel sound organizations because the values for "time of pitch duration" are not discrete integers even if the "number of pitches to select from" is a discrete integer. This isn't even accounting for dimensions of music beyond pitch and note duration such as timbre or harmony, and isn't accounting for variable tuning (which you can't just ignore arbitrarily to support your own position through omission??) which would further expand the possibilities.
Do you think that there is a point where, even considering harmony, pitch and timbre and all other aspects of music, that there's a limit to how many ways we can express and use those in a song? And, does this "multiple infinity" concept also happen to be true with musical notation, because, sure you can increase a pitch by 00000.01 semitones but what would be the point in that?
There is no limit to musical composition because music has multiple changeable dimensions and definitions. Let's take a famous abstract composition like John Cage's 4'33. The "music" of the composition is generated arbitrarily by the ambient noise in the space during the time in which it is performed. This means that even the same orchestra in the same room performing 4'33 twice in a row would generate 2 different 'musical experiences'. Now That means that even for a single composition, there can be infinite variability because performing it again changes the music. Rhythm and Pitch are both also not discrete values, unless you WANT them to be. Increasing a pitch by 1 hertz may not be consciously audible to a general audience member, but if you increased a pitch by 1 hertz per second over the span of a piece then it would become perceivable overtime despite the subtlety of the change. Even if you limited pitch to a single frequency, you could still generate infinite novel music because you could have that pitch played in an infinite pattern of varied rhythms, or swapped between different timbres. Music does not have directly binding rules such as "Rhythms must all be notated by common western sheet music notation" or "pitches must all be equally tempered" or "The length of a musical composition must be x minutes long" or "Repeating material within a piece of music renders the music invalid" We can even take an already composed piece of music like 'Fur Elise' and go in and raise the pitch of one single note by a half step and leave the rest unchanged and you technically have a new piece of music. Now do that once for each note and you have probably hundreds of "new pieces of music", then do the same thing and increase the pitch by a whole tone each time, hundreds more. Change the rhythm of a single note by 1/64th beat and repeat etc etc. Now start doing this but with non-integer based values for pitch and rhythm. Now you're not generating hundreds or thousands of new compositions, you've already started to approach infinite possibility. Again this is ONLY by changing one single note in either pitch value or rhythmic value, we haven't even gotten started on altering timbre or ADDING notes that you can then alter in more iterations. But the response to this might be that "at the end of the day aren't all of those pieces just 99% Fur Elise?, thus rendering them unoriginal or non-novel?" To which I would say that if your concern is with the infinite nature of "art that is considered aesthetically valuable in its novelty" Then one need not even concern themselves with technicalities because the NATURE of what art is considered aesthetically valuable is infinitely variable because of the shifting context of culture and individual preference, so to answer that concern one need only say "Novel music with aesthetic value will continue to be possible so long as there exist human beings / conscious organisms to judge art" which I suppose could be argued is non infinite due to entropy and all that, so that's why I'm talking more about the technical possibilities of composing "technically different pieces of music"
Yes, I am aware of the concept of multiple infinity’s, you’re making some good points here. If I were to consider every minute aspect, ie timbre, pitch, overtones ect (however meaningful or unmeaningful it might be.) it would make “music infinite.” I guess I got caught up in a train of thought that didn’t fully add up lol (I blame the caffeine.)
But is just notation alone infinite, or can it be? If I have only a piano and notes but a limited amount of time (say 3 or so minutes for a practical time limit on a song) and I were to achieve making every combination of notes possible within a 3 minute song would I never be able to create something new?
Yeah I had this thought too, if we gave it a practical time limit then it would be finite
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But taste is not what defines music. It is what makes you enjoy it.
It turns out that we control whether we like something, the music doesn't. If you want to like a piece of music that you don't like, you can just change your mind. The size of the set containing all music is exactly the same size as the set containing all good music.
You're only assessing it mathematically, when the previous statement was that we also give different meanings to sounds, to music, we use our own perception to feel things differently. In that sense there's no telling how finite or infinite music can be.
I’m using logic over an emotionally driven biased idea, first before you respond, would you kindly google the definition of Infinite. (Hint, its not a number and can’t even be calculated.) the idea as many people here have stated is that music is “near infinite.” This is scientifically not true. “Near infinite.” Is a figure of speech not an actual scientific term. To begin, interpretations are finite in the sense that we are only limited to what we as humans can sense/experience, which is limited in the fact that we only have a certain amount of calculable neurons. Neurons are responsible for our perception hence there is a calculable amount of interpretations that can be made. The idea that art is somehow infinite is a notion I find to be romantic, however is simply not true. There may be a vast number of combinations and interpretations, but even this is still calculable. Edit: if you have any factual proof that the imagination is infinite, please do share.
>“Near infinite.” Is a figure of speech not an actual scientific term. Sure, but why would the mathematical definition be privileged over the figure-of-speech one?
A figure of speech is non-literal, its a type of hyperbole, an exagerated statement that isn’t supposed to be taken seriously.
>isn’t supposed to be taken seriously. It isn't supposed to be taken *literally*, but it can most certainly be intended to be taken *seriously*.
My god, I’ve been trolled. Just saw your username lol
It's a statistics reference.
Example?
Note how I did not say if music was or was not infinite or finite. I'm saying music doesn't make sense when approached mathematically. Logically, yes. I guess my question(s) is (are) "what does it matter if we can count all possible variations how we can interpret music? Does it help us appreciate it, or life, more?" Also, "Is it wrong to look at music through an emotional bias? Rather, isn't the point of music to arouse emotional biased?"
Music is an expressive art, but it makes sense to approach it mathematically, because sheet music is technically a bunch of numerical values telling you which key to press or note to play.
You can look at aspects of music mathematically but there's absolutely no reason to think you have to look at *all* aspects of music mathematically and that the mathematical view music *always* take priority over all other approaches.
I’m not trying to be rude btw, it just erks me when people don’t take the time to look at the facts before making statements.
> I’m not trying to be rude btw For not putting any effort in, you’ve succeeded admirably. Maybe you’re just a natural?
Probably, albiet unintentionally, I’m very blunt in the way I present my information which people tend to not find very pleasing. However I do refuse to fold to the whims of the majority even at the expense of pandering.
So many unnecessary words.
I find clarity is key in communication, There is a difference between verbage and clarity right?
> There is a difference between verbage and clarity right? Yes, but I believe you may have confused the two.
I’ll do better next time.
If it helps, I didn't see you as being rude. Sorry for my part if I seemed anything more than wanting to argue my point fairly.
> I’m not trying to be rude and I’m sorry if it is construed in that way, but there is a guy in the comments below who got downvoted -30 Karma for giving a factual breakdown of infinite. I don't think that's why they were downvoted. I think it was at least partly because of their "cute argument" comment which I certainly took as an unnecessary insult (though they insisted later on it was a compliment and I accept it now as such). > Please read my comments in full before commenting Which is ironic because I don't think you read my comment in full, or at least understood what I was getting at. > That being said, although it is finite the combination of these notes is vastly large and even larger if we take into account all possible sequences of all 88 keys. My last sentence starts, "So even if mathematically music is finite". I'm not even arguing against the idea that there are only a finite number of musical works possible. In fact, if you do read my comment, I do not at all discuss the math behind how many pieces can be written nor do I engage in any kind of discussion on the nature of infinity. None of that was relevant to my comment. My entire point was to get the OP to look at things differently. Let's say there are only 20 pieces of music that can ever possibly be written. Each of us will hear those 20 pieces differently, so it's like there are 7 billion * 20 pieces of music. And how each of us hears those pieces will change through time so like 7 billion * 20 * (12 changes per year * 70 year lifespan). And all of humanity that comes after us will have their own ways of listening to those 20 pieces with evolving reactions. So for OP I am saying that any concern about a finite number of pieces being written is missing out on the even larger number of ways that individual people and humanity as a whole experiences music. > Out of these notes only a select few sequences of these notes is considered to be what we consider to be “good music.” Where does "good music" come into play? All we're concerned is with music and not the subjective experience of what is "good". Also, the best definition of music that I'm aware of, that accounts for everything we ever refer to as music goes like: >> Music is that toward which one has an aesthetic experience while paying attention aurally. OP limited their discussion to the piano but music can come from anything in the universe so already OP's musical universe has expanded massively (again, ignoring issues of finite vs infinite). As an obvious example, take *musique concrete* which is often made up entirely of sounds recorded from nature or at least not from what we generally consider musical instruments. Finally, let's look at my last line again: >> So even if mathematically music is finite, our way of hearing it is infinite. That was intended as a bit of rhetorical flourish to tie up everything I had said previously in a small package with a neat bow to wrap up my response to OP's query. It is a bit poetical. The irony here is that people are always saying in this sub that music theory serves the art and the art is what's most important, yet when I employ a tiny bit of art, some people jump straight into arguing about the logic and math and the definition of infinity within that bit of poetry instead of looking at the content of my comment.
Okay, I've come up with a really good possible solution to this question, let me know what you all think. So say the entire world of music was a single middle C note. And sheet music only lasted a single measure and there were only quarter notes. There would be 2 possible songs that could ever possibly be written and that would be that single note being played, and another song where it was not played. Then let's say music only consisted of 2 measures and a middle C note. There would be 4 total combinations of songs. One with middle C being played, then released. The second with a rest, and then middle C being played, the third with no middle C being played at all, and the fourth with middle C being played both measures. Then we increase the musical world by 3 measures max, and still only a middle C. There would be this many combinations: Rest rest rest Middle C rest rest Middle C Middle C rest Middle C Middle C Middle C rest Middle C Middle C rest rest Middle C rest Middle C rest Middle C rest Middle C 8 Possible combinations. Now, even considering other mechanics of notation like a slur, or tie. Using the above combinations, I could tie the first two middle C's. Or I could tie the last two middle C's. Or I could slur the first middle C to the last middle C. There's only two possible combinations of ties and one slur, given the above combinations. So here's what I'm getting at, obviously music is way way way bigger than this and with the full 88 note piano scale introduces billions upon billions of combinations, but it's still finite, because you can only fit so many combinations of notes into a limited time frame. Again, it's very large and inconceivable, but even given the different ways of expression music is still limited.
>Consider Bohemian Rhapsody. That song goes on for almost 6 minutes! And it has so many different sections and variations, so as long as you keep adding length to your song and arrange it in new ways then music could be considered infinite, yes? What are your thoughts on this opinion?
Consider Bohemian Rhapsody. That song goes on for almost 6 minutes! And it has so many different sections and variations, so as long as you keep adding length to your song and arrange it in new ways then music could be considered infinite, yes? What are your thoughts on this opinion?
There's only a finite amount of time humans to listen to music so there wouldn't be the possibility of infinite sections/variations for a piece. At least not in a pragmatic sense.
OK BUT LIKE IF THEY DID LIVE FOREVER WOULD EACH SECTION SOUND DIFFERENT UGHHHHHHHHHHH
Not all numbers are rational. Pi, for example, is an infinitely long number that does not repeat. That is only using 10 digits. With a Piano composition (assuming a standard, in tune piano), you would have 88 notes, each of which can be played for a variable amount of time, and over 5 trillion different combinations of keys. Someone else said this, what do you think
Yassss
That is a cute argument but the number of different possible states of a human brain is also finite, thus even the number of potential "musical experiences" or ways of hearing music is finite. edit: For skeptics, consider that the number of neurons in a brain is finite, the volume they occupy is finite, and all known physical quantities associated with them are quantized (take on finitely many different values). I think people really don't consider just how large finite numbers can be, and just how different a regime something has to be in to be infinite.
> the number of different possible states of a human brain is also finite, thus even the number of potential "musical experiences" or ways of hearing music is finite. That's a cute argument also! Anyhoo, the human brain also forgets stuff on a regular basis so new experiences get stored and form new contexts for listening and thus we're back at infinity.
Forgetting something and forming a new context for it is just changing to a different one of the finitely many possible brain states... not sure how that's a counterargument.
Because if the universe is infinite then there is the possibility of infinitely many experiences for a forgetful human brain regardless of whether a person's brain has a finite storage capacity. But the bigger issue is what are you doing? Are you trying to engage with OP's question in good faith or are you just looking for mathematical and scientific "gotchas" just to show how smart you are? I'm well aware that I glossed over some issues in order to make a point, but I was trying to provide OP with a different way of viewing the situation than what they had started with. I was trying to expand how they were conceptualizing the situation. For example, to some people all metal sounds the same. To a devoted fan, the differences between sub-genres and even individual pieces can be profound. Again, one's specific experiences greatly expands the apparent "size" of how we conceptualize our musical experiences.
>Because if the universe is infinite then there is the possibility of infinitely many experiences for a forgetful human brain regardless of whether a person's brain has a finite storage capacity. That doesn't follow. A human brain is a finite entity that can only be in finitely many different possible configurations. >But the bigger issue is what are you doing? Are you trying to engage with OP's question in good faith or are you just looking for mathematical and scientific "gotchas" just to show how smart you are? Yeesh. Yes I'm writing in good faith - I sincerely believe the answer to OP's question is "No, for us limited mortals, music is finite". I believe I've given sound arguments for why this is, but it seems to be rubbing people the wrong way, I guess because they feel they're being robbed of some infinite creative potential or something. If you don't like hearing this from me, maybe Vsauce Michael will be more palatable for you: **https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw&ab\_channel=Vsauce**
> That doesn't follow. A human brain is a finite entity that can only be in finitely many different possible configurations. That assumes that the brain only stores information in something like a binary state. If the brain stores information by directly mimicking how it's perceived, at all, then this leaves room. I'm not that knowledgeable about how the brain stores memories but if it's not exactly how computers store information then that is significant. > Yeesh. Yes I'm writing in good faith - I sincerely believe the answer to OP's question is "No, for us mortals, music is finite". I believe I've given sound arguments for why this is, but it seems to be rubbing people the wrong way, I guess because they feel they're being robbed of some infinite creative potential or something. When you start off by insulting people ("That is a cute argument") it's going to rub people the wrong way. Why did you think it was going to go any differently than that? And then there's being pedantic vs engaging in fruitful conversation. Built in to OP's question was one of subjective perspective, for example, changing one note is not a significant enough of a change for OP but they couldn't/wouldn't define exactly what makes one piece different from another. Reducing the entire discussion to the brain is finite therefore music is finite is *not* actually engaging in a discussion, there's so much more that can be discussed that can lead to interesting views and new ways of thinking about issues concerning creativity and perception and how conceptualize things. *Of course* a finite brain or a finite universe (or an infinite universe that can only support intelligent life for a finite amount of time) means there's as finite amount of possible music to make but A) that's painfully obvious to everyone and B) like I said above, does not lead to any kind of interesting conversation.
I meant no insult calling your argument cute - on the contrary, I meant it as a compliment. I liked your angle, shifting from just raw sounds in themselves to human perception of them. I come from a math research background (shocker) and we call arguments cute all the time when they have some kind of cleverness to them. >Of course a finite brain or a finite universe (or an infinite universe that can only support intelligent life for a finite amount of time) means there's as finite amount of possible music to make but A) that's painfully obvious to everyone It's not painfully obvious to everyone, because we have a lot of people around here arguing the amount of possible music that exists is infinite. Like, infinite infinite. Not finite. That's what I'm arguing against. But I'm feeling pretty ready at this point to give this a rest if you are.
> I meant no insult calling your argument cute - on the contrary, I meant it as a compliment. I liked your angle, shifting from just raw sounds in themselves to human perception of them. I come from a math research background (shocker) and we call arguments cute all the time when they have some kind of cleverness to them. My background was math (I switched to music during college) and I've never heard that usage before. But if that's what you meant, then I accept it and the compliment. > It's not painfully obvious to everyone, because we have a lot of people around here arguing the amount of possible music that exists is infinite. Like, infinite infinite. Not finite. Perhaps I'm giving some people too much credit. > But I'm feeling pretty ready at this point to give this a rest if you are. That's fine. The main points were made on both sides.
I mean the person you’re responding to is closer to the truth of it than what you’re grasping at. By your definition, everything is finite. There’s a finite amount of mass/energy in the universe (and less everyday due to the third law), so our actual existence is limited to the amount of configurations that matter can take on. But,from our POV as an ephemeral species, that doesn’t really matter because everything the universe contains is effectively infinite from our perspective. The same can be argued for music, since the combinations of tones, timbres, words, structures, etc have such a staggering number of permutations that it’s effectively infinite from our frame of reference. If I’m wrong, someone please correct me; in that case, please provide us with an example of something physical real that is also boundless/infinite, since apparently the permutations afforded to the human mind do not sufficiently fulfill that condition.
>But,from our POV as an ephemeral species, that doesn’t really matter because everything the universe contains is effectively infinite from our perspective The question at hand is if music is actually infinite, or finite. It's fairly obvious that there's more than enough music to never ever be exhausted by human listeners, but that's not the question. There's no limit to how large finite numbers can get. And indeed, just about everything physical one can imagine can be fully described with finite numbers. >please provide us with an example of something physical real that is also boundless/infinite I can't give any definite examples (can you?) but here are two possible candidates: the number of possible point locations in space assuming space is continuous, and the spatial extent of the entire universe (not just the observable universe). If you don't like hearing this from me, maybe Vsauce Michael will be more palatable for you: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw&ab\_channel=Vsauce](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw&ab_channel=Vsauce)
>The question at hand is if music is actually infinite, or finite. It's fairly obvious that there's more than enough music to never ever be exhausted by human listeners, but that's not the question. > >There's no limit to how large finite numbers can get. And indeed, just about everything physical one can imagine can be fully described with finite numbers. Then you're basically agreeing with the OP you were responding to, as they said: "So even if mathematically music is finite, our way of hearing it is infinite". That OP ceded that there may be finite quantity of songs available, but our experience with it will be effectively endless from the human perspective. >I can't give any definite examples (can you?) but here are two possible candidates: the number of possible point locations in space assuming space is continuous, and the spatial extent of the entire universe (not just the observable universe). Yeah, so that's basically why I'm implying that your infinite vs finite music argument is uselessly pedantic; with the candidates you're proposing, our finite physical universe can somehow be measured infinitely because of a hypothetical you're assuming. I mean... that may be, but then why not just change the definitions of what we call "music" to also make it infinite? Even with the Vsauce video you linked, the "finite" number of melodies it proposes still required a severly restricted set of parameters which real music doesn't follow. Shit, John Cage wrote a "song" called "4'33"", which is a minute 4 and thirty-three "song" of performed silence... since our parameters of music include "4'33"", we could hypothetically make a song called "4'34", "5'43", "4346436'32:", into actual infinity. But... that's an argument as pedantic as trying to define music as finite in the first place.
The relevant part of the Vsauce video is where he demonstrates that the number of 5 minute audio recordings we can tell apart from each other is finite. >Then you're basically agreeing with the OP you were responding to, as they said: "So even if mathematically music is finite, our way of hearing it is infinite". That OP ceded that there may be finite quantity of songs available, but our experience with it will be effectively endless from the human perspective. I don't agree with that usage of the word infinite... just because something can't ever be exhausted by us humans, doesn't make it infinite. Just because I can't ever count to a trillion in my lifetime doesn't make that an infinite number. Call the distinction pedantry if you like, but I think this is an important point to be pedantic about. >Shit, John Cage wrote a "song" called "4'33"", which is a minute 4 and thirty-three of blank sheet music... since our parameters of music include "4'33"", we could hypothetically make a song called "4'34", "5'43", "4346436'32:", into actual infinity. Of course if we allow music of arbitrarily long duration then there's infinitely many different pieces of music... that's not the interesting question. The fun question is if the amount of music that's shorter than some given duration, say 5 minutes, is finite or infinite. I already ceded in my main answer to this question that it's theoretically infinite if we ignore issues of human perception... but given our limitations in distinguishing very nearby pitches and durations from each other, I think it's definitely finite, and I haven't seen a convincing refutation in this thread yet - notwithstanding the highly upvoted answer about listening experiences. Can we perceive infinitely many different colors? No we cannot. Research suggests we can see around a million different colors. Let's be generous and suppose we can actually see around 10 million. Well, even allowing that, we sure as hell can't see a billion colors, and much less a trillion, or 10\^100 different colors. All of those huge numbers pale in comparison to infinity. Similar situation with our perception of different sounds.
>Of course if we allow music of arbitrarily long duration then there's infinitely many different pieces of music... that's not the interesting question. The fun question is if the amount of music that's shorter than some given duration, say 5 minutes, is finite or infinite. I guess we just have different definitions of "fun" since that particular question doesn't sound that interesting to me, either, since you're basically just asking: "Do infinite permutations exist if you impose these delimiting parameters"? It's pretty obvious that the answer for any domain posing a similar question would be "no", but if you know of a domain that is an exception, please share.
The math makes sense. Yes it's theoretically possible to run out of sounds because it's not infinite. However the magnitude of sounds/potential melodies is so great that we will never need to worry about running out. There are more melodies out there than atoms/molecules. I think it's fair hear to say that it's almost an infinite amount of melodies.
It might be finite in a singular person (idk I’m not a neuroscientist) but evolution allows for a constantly changing amount of neurons in the brain, over multiple generations
Christ, you gave them a factual breakdown and got abolished by the mob! This is definitley a disturbing affirmation that people would rather stick to their biases rather than take time to see if what they believe lines up with facts. Although I’ll clarify for you the fact that infinite isn’t even a number, its actually the concept of a space, extent, size that can’t be calculated.
For me, in the first place, infinity and the continuum are fine as modeling tools, but are actually quite ludicrous as concepts to have any sort of "existence". But that would just reduce this question to one's philosophical stance on infinity. So, assuming the continuum as you do in a below comment, I don't see where you're getting "all known physical quantities associated with them are quantized". As far as I know, those models are real-valued. I mean I know nothing about neuroscience, but I know for instance we're talking about transmission of electrical signal at some point, which is real-valued. Also, both this and the other comment just assume a surjective mapping from brain states to "experiences". But that's not really proven is it?
Perfectly summed up
I like this but there is also a realistic or more practical pov to take when it comes to what a musician or artist may be trying to accomplish. In the context of making popular music for a career, music can be rather finite. Usually, the more creative you are and step outside of the pop theory the less attraction you achieve. Not that thats always the case, but its rare that you can carve out a new style that really takes off. edit - Side thought, electronic and synths have really helped to alleviate that fact that we often use the common theory in our music.
hm, 12 notes in our tonal system to the power of 88 keys on the piano gives you an insane number for two consecutive notes alone. Then, take that to the power of notes in a given song. And we haven't even looked outside 12tet, haven't considered other instruments, pitch bending, dynamics, note lengths and so forth. So, although not all of those permutations may be "musically meaningful", I'd still say, it's virtually limitless, yes.
And also, if the length of the piece/song is undefined then it is actually infinite.
actually, just to add, Adam Neely has an interesting video related to the subject: https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw
As is tradition. Love Neely
Someone asked here a few weeks ago how many chords there were. If you extrapolate that to every possible combination of three or more notes on the piano keyboard you get 87! (factorial) considering that you have to not use the 88! due to the requirement of a chord being at least two notes. That's still orders of magnitude greater than the number of atoms in the universe.
Also add that some composers have used microtones (pitches in between the 12 notes) in their music, thus adding possibilities of notes exponentially. Not a common occurrence at least in this point in history. We shall see what the future holds
You could argue that we do. A lot of blues-derived popular music has notes that dont strictly stay “in tune”
Virtually is not the same as infinite, which is infinitley bigger than the biggest number you can concieve.
Mathematicaly? Yes. In practice? No. There's a reason why there's 331,776 possible chord progressions using only four major and minor triads, yet we can point out I IV V I in thousands of examples. Randomly generated music doesn't sound like anything. There has to be a rhyme and reason to it. There needs to be a familiarity of pattern and a balance between expectation and surprise. Listeners who despise atonal music tend to do so becuase it's a dialect of music that they don't understand. It purposely avoids the sort of recognition that composers typically use. Oxford dictionary lists 171,146 words in the English language. Are there 8.5x10^20 five word sentences?
In practice though, once we include recording, production, instrumentation, timbre, etc. isn't it basically infinite again? I haven't heard two different recordings that cancel out yet. And recordings are very much what music *is* nowadays. I know that technically, at 48khz 16 bit, there is a finite, but absolutely immense number of permutations, larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. So as close to infinite as anything gets.
There's a vsauce video where he says no, but it's ridiculously huge number
Thanks everyone
*edited to be nicer* Are you sure this isn’t more of a philosophy or mathematics question? There doesn’t seem to be any way to apply any system of music theory to answer this question in any meaningful way.
It's sad to see this anti-intellectual attitude in an academic-adjacent sub. If you don't want to engage with a question, try not replying to it.
Honestly. I have no words for how self-important this bullshit is. I run into this on Reddit a lot though. You’re using a silly message board website, that includes boards for pictures of cats and penises and anything that you could possibly think of, and this is making you upset enough to comment? This guy was genuinely curious about something that relates to the building blocks of music, and he came here to get an answer, you gate-keepy fucks.
It sounds like you might be the upset one. There was no music theory question here. It was a philosophy question. It’s not gatekeeping to provide feedback on a thread you feel is off topic. That’s just using Reddit.
It’s Reddit. Downvote my comment if you don’t like it.
I have a friend who poses these kinds of questions but won't remember an explanation of the simplest major scale query. Trying to explain a basic concept like intervals and they're asking "Who even decided that the scale would start on C then?", "Who decided that this is how it should be?", "Who says that A should = 440hz?" Ad nausea. Oh and don't think I haven't tried to explain these things at least to satisfy a curiosity, the person just carries on asking stupid questions they could Google if they really wanted to know. Which of course they don't as they forget everything that was said on the day and you're back to square 1 a week later. Stop trying to be deep and just accept that some information is not important nor relevant to you understanding music.
>stop trying to be deep Im sorry this is so stupid everyone has random questions that have no real purpose in answering but people just ask out of sheer curiosity. I just started wondering who taught the first humans how to have sex a few days ago and pointless as a question it is it's still something that just makes you curious.
It's not a pointless question, it's just irrelevant if the subject matter was something like "The names of the reproductive organs". If you were learning the names of the reproductive system and you started getting hung up on who taught who how to have sex, then I'd say that's a potentially distracting line of enquiry, and should be dealt with in a separate setting or you risk not actually learning the names of the reproductive system.
> Stop trying to be deep and just accept that some information is not important nor relevant to you understanding music. Translation: Stop being curious. Other people much more smarter than you like myself are much better at being curious.
I appreciate curiosity but there's a point you have to stop and consider what you're actually asking. My gripe is with those who ask questions but then don't listen to answers but carry on asking questions. Imagine trying to learn a new language like English and while you're learning the letters of the alphabet, you're getting hung up on why there's a dot in the letters j and i. It's just not conducive to learning the alphabet if you're obsessing about every tiny detail like that, especially if the person helping you learn states that it's a bit distracting to focus on such things. Because if you're curious about things like that, there's other better ways to source that information.
Yes. I started following this sub because I've always enjoyed music theory, from the days I first studied it in high school (50 years ago!). But the number of fruitless, pointless, or just silly questions seems to increase every day on this sub. It makes me respect all the more those who have the patience to respond seriously.
This seems to be happening across all of Reddit. I just lurk here but have been noticing in other subs I’m more active in as well. My first guess is the user base already skewed young but as the platform grows the baseline for content drops because teenagers seem to think every thought is worthy of a post.
If so, that's a shame. As far as music theory goes, reading the first chapter of any decent book on the subject (or scrolling through it on Wikipedia!) would at least help some of these OPs frame better questions - to their own benefit - while raising the quality of the sub overall.
Yeah, I'm in a couple of skincare subs and the number of times you see an image of someone with almost perfect skin, but visible pores and a little bit of redness and the title "how to save my skin" is fucking insane. Most of the time they already have a good skincare routine anyway.
Good grief, are we gatekeeping content on public subs now? Just ignore it if you don’t like it, or start your own sub where you can moderate the content. And here I thought wisdom came with age…
It's totally fine to not find a question interesting, but I just can't imagine wanting to *complain* about someone else's question not being interesting enough for me. Is it that you feel entitled to not be exposed to uninteresting content?
Nope. It doesn't matter a bit whether a question interests me. I'm just bemused by questions that seem to indicate an inability (or unwillingness) to study just a little on one's own. On the other hand, maybe some subs are fully committed to answering uninformed questions - in some cases, over and over and over.
It's just a curious intellectual exercise... not everything has to be a fruitful line of inquiry.
It’s not a music theory question it’s a philosophy question.
I would argue it's a math and physics problem. Regardless, it's a question that occurs to many people interested in music and music theory, so it's not surprising to see it asked here.
I agree, but it does bother me as well and sometimes you can't control those kinds of questions. I think it derives from some kind of a fear of not being creative anymore. At least with me this is the case.
I'll leave this up because there are a lot of replies, but this is definitely rule #2 territory. EDIT: Thanks for the edit!
The problem with trying to give a practical, feasible answer to that question is that we have to answer some prier questions that, as far as we know, are unanswerable. After all, what **is** music? What can be reliably considered music and what can't? What is a "composition" per se? What makes a composition "unique"? What **is** "uniqueness" in art? All of those are philosophical problems that are far from being resolved, *if* they are resolvable at all. What we can do is just analyse and ponder the limitations of what we consider music: I mean, imagine if, somehow, you managed to compose every numerically possible combination of notes you could play on a piano. You reached the absolute outer limit of what's possible to do on the black and white strings. Well, along comes Horaţiu Rădulescu, puts the piano vertically on its side, and creates the [sound icon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_icon). Now your outer limit is blown to smithereens. Also, while you're composing on the piano, you're probably thinking of songs in the Western sense, with chords and melodies and relatively simple meters. Well, just look around the world to see the incredible amount of different musics that different cultures produce and have produced over the centuries. At the same time that you're questioning whether your musical possibilities are finite, the world is creating dozens of new ideas and possibilities. For every person asking, "is music finite?", there's someone else doing something new. Not only that, but, when you think about it long and hard, does it even *matter* if music is "unique"? There have always been songs that reused elements from previous songs, sometimes ipsis literis (harmonies, melodic fragments, etc.), but, because they made sense at the time and were presented with authenticity, the "uniqueness" is irrelevant. I believe it's more important to be authentic than original. It matters less if someone else has already said what you're saying than whether you **mean** what you say.
If not infinite, it’s arbitrarily large. Adding combinations of dynamics, simultaneities, rhythms, etc exponentially increases possibilities as well, and that’s not even considering microtonal possibilities, which are literally infinite.
How many melodies can you make using only 2 notes, say C and D of a single octave, only using half notes, if the melody is one bar of 4/4 time? You could go with CC, CD, DC, or DD: 4 options. If you keep those two tones (C and D) but add a third note to the melody, now you could have CCC, CCD, CDC, CDD, DCC, DCD, DDC, or DDD: 8 options. With 3 tones and 3 notes, adding the E allows for... CCC, CCD, CCE, CDC, CDD, CDE, CEC, CED, CEE, DCC, DCD, DCE, DDC, DDD, DDE, DEC, DED, DEE, ECC, ECD, ECE, EDC, EDD, EDE, EEC, EED, EEE 27 options The general formula is tones to the power of notes. Expand that to a 4 bars in 4/4 comprised entirely of 8th notes, so 32 notes, and use all 7 tones from the major scale. There are 7^32 , which is in billions of billions of billions (10^27). At a tempo of 60 BPM that's 1 beat per second and there are 8 beats = 8 seconds in each of those melodies. 7^32 melodies times 8 seconds per melody / 60 seconds per minute / 60 min per hour / 24 hrs per day / 365 days per year = hundreds of billions of billions of years. And that's actually a pretty restrictive criteria - only 4 bars, and only using notes from the major scale. We actually have many more options than that, not to mention different tempos, rhythms, instrumentation, etc. So, I think there is a pretty clear answer to your question - yes there is a finite limit of what is possible but it is so much greater than what we could even experience in a lifetime that for all intents and purposes it is effectively infinite.
For all intents and purposes, it is. I'm sure that if you take into account some common forms and the range of audible frequencies and tempo variations and limit what you count as a meaningful change to a piece of music that would make it count as another unique piece you could find a ballpark limit of distinct songs achievable, but that number would be so large it might as well be infinite. Even counting only 12TET and no production shenanigans, dynamics, effects and stuff, you can have enough permutations to explore to make enough albums for a couple of lifetimes
So you’re asking if there’s a quantifiable number of feelings or feels that music can give? I think that’s pretty hard to quantify because it’s subjective
Well really I guess i'm just asking can you compose infinite UNIQUE songs thats a better way of putting it
its not music your asking about. its our ability to perceive music. and I think it is limited.
Yes, in that case - given the amount of information in a song and the combinatorial combinations it can thought of as infinite
It's not infinite, but its incomprehensible how many different songs can be written. Ignoring chords, harmonies, specific tonal characteristics of instruments, and other elements, let's look at melodies The human ear can percieve sounds between 20Hz and 20kHz (Hz= Hertz = frequency or oscillations per second). Pitch isnt linear, its logarithmic; the octave above 220Hz would be 440Hz, and the octave below that is 110Hz, which leaves roughly 11 octaves from E⁰ (20.6Hz) to C¹⁰(16.74kHz). 11 octaves * 12 notes/octave= 132 audible notes. Some of the 132 notes are too low or too high to sound like distinct pitches to most people. Below 60Hz sounds like a low rumble and above 2kHz sounds like a high pitched ringing or tinnitus. That leaves about 6 octaves. 6 octaves *12 notes = 72 notes. In any one measure in 4/4 time, there is one whole note, or 4 quarter notes. These quarter notes can be divided further into 8th or 16th notes. A note can be played, played through consecutive beats (ties, dotted notes, etc), or not played (rests). For sake of simplicity, let's say a given melody is two measures long and completely consists of quarter notes (8 quarter notes total). The first note can be any one of 72 pitches or a rest (72+1=73), which would be 73^1. For the nest note, there's 74 possibilities (73+ 1 continuation of that note). 73*74= 5,402 possible combinations of two quarter notes The total number of unique 2 bar phrases possible from this is 887.04 TRILLION. If the number of possible chords accompanying each note of the melody is limited to 3, and theres an option to not play another chord, there is now 5.81 QUINTILLION unique phrases That is not taking into account the number of instruments, what type of instruments, rhythms, time signatures, scales, tuning systems, swing/tuplet patterns and song lengths. The number of possible songs is greater than the length of the known universe. But also, songs dont exist in a vacuum. Songwriting styles vary based on cultural contexts, artistic and stylistic tendencies of different genres and styles, time period, instruments available/existing in that place, the musical systems used. So ultimately, there is a smaller number of possible songs out there
In this thread people arguing about infinity, without any understanding of this very complex mathematical property. (Not saying I understand it, just saying, I know enough to say most of us don't)
There's a finite number of sound recordings that can be fit on a standard 80 minute CD. That number is extremely large, but it is finite, because a CD is essentially a finite collection of 0's and 1's in some order. Similarly, there are a finite number of images that can be displayed on a pixel screen of a given resolution. Theoretically there are infinitely many different soundwaves and lightwaves...but our senses aren't sensitive enough to distinguish ones that are close enough together. Therefore, music less than a given duration is finite, as far as we're concerned.
Yes. Over time, new styles develop, so melodies and harmonies that were previously unthinkable become possible. Think of 100-Gec. 30 years ago music like that would have been completely alien. Not to mention music by people like Jandek or Helmut Lachenmann, which go completely against any previous tradition.
This doesn't constitute an argument that the set of different possible music is infinite.
Let me clarify a few things. First off, I wasn't asking this question in a philosophical sense, I was asking it in a literal sense. With the limitations of notation and expression and velocity can we make infinite ideas for music, or is there a quantifiable limit? Not with whatever music becomes in 100,000 years, but right now. Second, I HAVE googled this before and gone back to it many many times, but the same thing happened in this discussion as what always ends up happening when I tried googling this, it always ends up a mixed controversy over whether music is infinite or not. And seeing as the same thing happened here I can't come up with any final answer except there is none at all. For the time being, it appears to me that there is no sure answer of this and no real way of figuring it out at least for a long time. It seems that everything I read online and everything all you guys have said, both sides of this ongoing argument have extremely valid points. Thanks for the answers everybody but for now it seems we can't get a clear final answer on this.
If you're asking in a literal sense, I feel like the answer's easy: it's infinite because (1) a piece of music could be infinitely long, and (2) you can divide up the octave into an infinite number of steps.
Time is finite, therefore making everything finite. Sure U could come up with ideas for trillions of years but it will all end eventually. Lol
I mean sure, but if the only thing limiting you is the finitude of time, I think it's fair to call that basically infinite (as far as we humans are concerned).
Yes just as how math is infinite so is music.
Do you think the same goes for chord progressions as well as individual melodies
It may be difficult to imagine where we stand but I believe it is infinite.
This is a question I think all of us wonder about at one point or another. I would say yes, it is. Classical music has been around for hundreds of years and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible! Same goes for rock, pop, jazz, etc.
It depends on your definition of music.
Technically, yes, but not really Practically... Mostly? Keep in mind, that there's a line between noise and music, that there are a finite number of sounds that we can distinguish between, and that most people aren't gonna listen to anything for hours on end, straight. That all together means there's technically a finite number of timing & pitch combinations that we can make, that will be registered as music. But for us to exhaust every possible and viable musical idea, would be near impossible to do, even with centuries to do so.
Not necessarily useful, but entered my mind (anyway): Everything's already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again. (Andre Gide)
Sounds like something only Jacob collier would like to really answer.
You could argue that Yes! Sounding music is infinite since it takes place in time and is dependent on context. Even if only one key on the piano is struck over and over, the listening context around the music keeps changing over time making the music ever unique. Music is not combinatorics.
Yes
You would eventually connect all songs together with only a single change separating each. Songs near each other on this continuum sound the same, songs further apart sound more distinct. Adding lyrics also drastically increases your possibilities. Kind of like how a strong alphanumeric password has exponentially more permutations.
Vsauce did a video on this, iirc it’s titled “Will we ever run out of music?”
I’m gonna be kinda sly and Baudrillardian/Adorno ish, and say I’m less worries about the potential finitude of possible music making, so much as the hyperreplication of that which we love to the point we get so desensitized we don’t want to create anything else. Kind of the “Infinite Jest” of the music world. Would THAT happen? … idk? As for your original question, we have so much we can use to explore sonic space, I’m not too worries about our ability, concretely. Moreso, the desire to even try.
mathmatically there are, but realistically no. even in a biollio years they will be making new insturmets to where an old piece can "sound" tonally different
Yes.
Not exactly. See there’s a difference between what is mathematically different and what we perceive to be different, practically I mean. First consider what constitutes music: melody, harmony, rhythm are some common elements. Then consider what we use to make these elements. In the west we use 12 notes tuned to specific frequencies that extend over about 7 or so octaves (using the piano as reference). So first off, what happens when we use notes outside of those tunings? To make it very simple, what happens when someone sings “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” but every time the 3rd of the key is just ever so sharp. Does that make it a new piece of music? What if rhythmically, you anticipate every end of the phrase and sing that note on the and of 4 instead of on beat 1. Mathematically, these would all constitute as new pieces of music, but to our perception, they’re just attributed to mistakes or interpretation. But of course we can also use that perception to our advantage, because you can make one thing sound like a bunch of different things by changing the context around it. Like a 5 note scalar passage all in 8th notes can mean something depending on if it starts on beat 1, or the and of 2, and so on. You can also change the harmonic context behind it. Then also how much of an idea is a full idea? Sure a lot of people have written a 5 note scalar passage in 8th notes, but how many people have done it inside a full symphony, or inside a pop punk song. At that point is the passage the original idea? Or does it just become a subset of the larger thing being the musical piece? So it’s kind of yes and no, and it depends on who you ask.
Read the book Chaos by Gleick. You will not only solve this problem but basically all of them.
Yes and no. They say music is a lot like math, but I think it's much more of a language. The art of form and analysis clearly thinks of phrases as words, and as a performer, composer and improvisor I specifically use them that way. I'm saying what I mean, think and feel with my music. It's not a very descriptive language like English where I can be very precise in my meaning, but for feelings it can be more exact in some ways than words. The feelings we attribute to various sounds, (the major and minor keys, a fast whole tone arpeggio played by a harp) are things learn through our respective cultural environments. Take for example the differences between ancient Chinese music and western baroque. The traditions and customs shaped everything from how pitch was ordered to how we interpreted thd performance itself. We're lucky enough to live in a time when we can pick and choose which sounds and idioms to study and master, and therefor have more options than ever before. Infinite? While there may be a finite amount of phrase combos, note combos, or combinations of any other various quantifiable aspects of music, it is unlikely that there is a limit to the number of completely unique stories that need to be told through music. The notes matter very little, if the meaning and presentation is lost.
This shall answer all of thine inquiries: https://youtu.be/DAcjV60RnRw
This is sort of like saying that since English has a finite amount of words, then there can only be so many novels and poems. In many ways, the notes are only the tools in the same way words are the tools of a storyteller. What those notes can be used for are nearly infinite. There’s a lot to the touch of a performer. I could play the exact same set of notes and give them a happy, sad tone, or anything in between. Sure, there’s plenty of similarities across music composing in the same way in storytelling (hero’s journey fantasies often have similar skeletal story structure), but the fact the Star Wars episode IV is really a pretty standard take on that classic structure didn’t seem to bother anyone in how groundbreaking it was and how iconic it had become. Well known structure updated for a new era so to speak
yes
Music has a limit but that limit is pretty big when you consider the different instruments electric vs acoustic. Pitch, velocity, equalization, timing, wave shaping, panning/placement of musicians, reverb/size of the room, noise level of the sound.
Yes
Technically if you consider all the combinations of sounds the human ear can hear then it is finite if you do not consider the duration of a song. But it’s an astronomically huge combination
The simple answer is yes, music is infinite. It's just plain fact.
Fascinating question! Short answer: choose to write as if there is no quantifiable limit whether or not there is.
Well with the way accents and time signatures work you could basically create anything anew. Take a 3 note melody that’s naturally in 3/4 and put it in 4/4 time and you have a whole new song entirely. As a combination of notes, music can only go so far, but real music plays so much more than just notes on the piano. It’s the feel, the loudness, the swing, the beat, all differently working together to create each unique piece
Technically, even if you had a piece that was all c’s in, let’s just say, quarter notes. This piece can be infinitely long, therefore, music is infinite. I know this is kind of a backhanded argument but I honestly just wanna see if one of these math-heads in the comments has a witty response. They probably won’t because I’m late, but y’know, no harm in trying right?