Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Will We Ever Run Out Of Music?


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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