This topic had been covered by one of my favorite inspirations, Michael Stevens (an American Educator) on his YouTube channel Vsauce. So I wanted to update it and share it with you guys. And we’ll be following Michael’s pattern.
Starting with some basic “today’s” stats, the iTunes store offers 35 ~ 40 million songs. Google Play Music offers about the same number. We would never listen to all of these songs. We can’t. It would take more time than our whole life. That’s how much music we’ve made.
It is well known that there are a finite number of tones our ears can distinguish, and we know that it only takes few similar note for two tracks to sound similar, will we run out of new music? Would the day come where we’ve already used every possible combination and there’s nothing new to make?
Let us all agree that today is the digital music age. Or at least that’s how we distribute it. This means that any track of music can and is translated into a digital format. If you’ve read my previous article about Quantum Computing, you would understand how basic computing work. In other words, music is translated into binary -> into bits (1’s and 0’s). And if a song is represented as 1’s and 0’s, given a limited length, it’s obvious that at some point, the possible combination can mathematically be exhausted!
If we were to take a five minutes song at a sample rate of 44.1 kilohertz, on average, it can take up to 211 million bits (1’s and 0’s). And each bit can exist in one of two states, either a one or a zero. So all the possibilities and combinations are simply:. Yes. That value represents every 5 minutes audio file in the world! Inside that amount is everything from Beethoven’s Fifth, to Taylor Swift’s “Look what you made me do”. It even contains every 5 minutes conversation you ever had with your parents, at any given point in your age. It even contains every 5 minutes conversation you didn’t have with your parents.
But how to understand this number? How to put it in perspective?
In a drop of water, there are about 5 to 6 sextillion atoms. That’s a big number. It’s a 22 digits long number. The number of atoms that make up our entire earth? It’s a number approximated to be 1.33 x … a 50 digits long number. The entire universe? It’s an 80 digits long number!
But? The number of all possible 5 minutes audio? Well… It’s a 63 MILLION digits long number!! It’s too large of a number that we cannot even pretend to understand it. However, this doesn’t answer our question. Because noises, speeches, and conversations do not count as “music”. So we need to narrow down this number.
So to keep our calculations limited to music, let’s look at the number of total different melodies we can create within one octave. Thanks to Ferrous Lepidoptera who made the calculations, containing any or all the intervals, given a single measure containing any measure of whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth or thirty-second notes, she calculated that there would be a number composed of 36 digits. 123,511,210,975,209,861,511,554,928,715,787,036 to be exact. This is a much smaller number compared to a 63 million digits long number. But putting it in perspective again, until the time of writing this article, this sentence to be exact, the age of the universe is approximated to be 13.82 billion years. That’s 435,800,000,000,000,000 seconds. So we’re still a bit far. However, melodies, as we know them today, only contain about 3 different types of notes length. For example, quarter, eighth and sixteenth. That assumption is based on Yerricde’s statistical post. That won’t always be true, but for melodies that we know today, across 8 notes over 12 intervals, there are 78,364,164,096 possible combinations!
We’ve got relatively small and the number have incredibly shrank from to 123,511,210,975,209,861,511,554,928,715,787,036 and finally to 78,364,164,096 ONLY!!
On that scale, based on Michael’s calculations, if 100 writers were to write 1 new melody each per second, all the combination of possible music would be exhausted in 248 years.
Although it sounds small, but in fact this is still a HUGE number. Way bigger than the total number of songs that have been written and that we know about.
Based on that, we can say that, mathematically, we can run out of new music. But in reality, we can safely say that we won’t. Not in the imaginable near future. Nor in the reasonable far one.