In my documentary I'm going to ask you all, will we ever run out of new music?
let's think about this, if you were able to
listen to ALL of the songs in the world one after a another in an gigantic
playlist it will take you more then 1200 years to complete! but
since there are finite number of tones that our ears can distinguish, will we
ever run out of new music? will there ever be a day when every melody has been
written and we end up with nothing new to make?... lets begin there with
our modern technology, ...
Digital downloads? CD's? MP3 players? . Digital music are made out of BITS, lots and lots of BITS , but each individual bits exist
in 2 states, not geographical states, they call binary states its 0 or a
1, now for programmers like me will understand what I really mean, who ever
doesn't will have some idea about it in a moment, so... what this means
is say giving 5 minutes of audio file in disc the number of possibilities
well mathematically speaking, is HUGE! but mind
blowingly Finite. Let's just take our compact audio
disc file and store that 5 minutes of music, it will have about 211,000,000
bits, and because a bit exists in 2 states 0 or a 1 it will be 2 to
211,000,000 power, but how big is that number?... for example, a
single drop of water contains 6
sextillion atoms, that
means 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
<= this much atoms in a single drop, now that's 22 digits long, but the
total number of atoms that make the entire earth is 50 digits long, the
total number of hydrogen's
in our entire universe is... 80 digits long, when I say ( digits long ) I mean
there is this much amount of "zero's" in front of a number, but 2 of
211,000,000 power the number of possible 5 minutes audio files, is a number of
63,000,000 digits long! it is a number larger that we can even pretend to
understand, it contains every possible CD quality 5 minutes audio file, inside
this amount is everything from Beethoven to even your sound recorded audio
files, but it is finite not infinite, don't mix
those words, did you know that there are about 79,000,000 song combination? for
example lets take to songs that they have a similar note combinations , we are
getting relatively small here, there is a web site called Sounds Just Like (http://soundsjustlike.com/the-strokes-last-nite-sounds-like-tom-petty-american-girl/ ) it will show you different songs
that sound alike, even thought the number of possible different melodies is
gigantic, so interestingly there are so many possible
unique melody's that we can safely say there will always new room for
new music.. we don't seem to be "wired" to care we
enjoy certain patterns and melodies and calculating how many could be is
a lot less interesting then how connected and similar are the ones that we
enjoy are.
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