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Will We Ever Run Out of New Music?

Vsauce · 16.8M views · 2012-11-20 · 11:48

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Overview

Vsauce asks whether music will ever run out of new melodies. It counts the possible note combinations and discusses how common chord progressions and remixing affect originality.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as the reference for counting how many songs or melodies are possible from a finite set of notes.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2015–2020

Topics

Music theory, synthesis & productionRecreational & visual mathProbability & game theory
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music theorycombinatoricsmelodyoriginalityvsauce

What people said

grenoire · 2020-01 · Reference

This is likely akin to the question of how many individual songs you can write with the chromatic scale ( [VIDEO] ).

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throwmeback · 2019-02 · Reference

I don't have much time because I'm at work, so I won't write everything I have on my mind. I've been in your spot before, I also have perfect pitch (which I'd argue is irrelevant to the discussion) and I severely disagree. There's more music being produced than ever before. There is a vast amount of music you didn't listen to yet - it's humanly impossible to sift through it all. There's obviously a lot of cheap, quickly produced music, but IMHO the way you describe it makes it feel like "music died 15 years ago". It didn't. E.g. we still have readily identifiable trends in music (eg. indie, vaporwave, chillwave, trap beats). Filling up concert halls isn't a viable way of measuring an artist's achievement in the internet age for me. People go to concert just because they know the band's name, because someone bought them a ticket or because the media built up the hype. As for melodies - we won't run out of them anytime soon. [VIDEO]

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cleansy · 2015-12 · Reference

This could replace my spotify subscription at all. It's exciting to hear a song that I and a software have made for the first time and maybe I am the only one who ever listens to it*. Michael from Vsauce talked about 'will we ever run out of new music?' [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Vsauce, played through YouTube.

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