Will we ever run out of music ideas?

The short answer is yes, there’s a limited number of sounds we can hear and thus a finite number of possible ways of combining them. Don’t panic, though. Before you start stockpiling melodies and burying riffs in your garden, you should know that there’s still a lot of them left. New tunes are out there.

How many note combinations are possible on a piano?

Given a span of 15 notes for one hand; and two hands I make it out to be less than 49 billion but the exact number eludes me (fingering constraints, duplicate notes between the two hands when they overlap). The 49 billion is 3003 (15 choose 5) * 73 (the number of positions you could do that in) squared.

Is there a finite amount of melodies?

No matter how you represent a melody, as long as the representation uses limited and quantised metrics – like a music score over a certain number of bars does – the number of possible melodies is finite.

Are there infinite combinations of music?

If one hundred writers each created one new melody every second, this would exhaust every possible melody in 248 years. So music is not infinite, but has a finite number of possibilities. Having said that, there is a lot of music that sounds familiar and we don’t tend to move too far away from familiar patterns.

How long will it be until we run out of music?

Even when the harmony and melody notes are restricted to have the exact same rhythm as each other, we’ll need far more than a quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion years to play all possible 14-chord-long sequences. You might call this an overestimate, since most of these sequences won’t sound very musical.

Can melody run out?

No, we will never run out of melodies. There are twelve notes in the chromatic scale. The mathematical possibilities of note combinations are nearly endless. I’ve read that for a melody containing a mere ten notes, there are 82 Quadrillion possible melodic permutations!!

How many possible Melodys are there?

For the first section I’ve discounted rhythm so as to focus only on the permutations of notes. All melodies should be contained within an octave — C to C’ inclusive. Any of the 13 chromatic notes of the octave can be used….Four to infinity.

How long is a melody?

Balance is also important: your melody should usually be 8 bars long, so you should break it down into two parts or “phrases”, (this is called binary form). The first phrase will be bars 1-4, and the second phrase will be bars 5-8.

How many songs can exist?

For the first section I’ve discounted rhythm so as to focus only on the permutations of notes. All melodies should be contained within an octave — C to C’ inclusive. Any of the 13 chromatic notes of the octave can be used….Four to infinity.

How many possible songs can be written?

So, the total number of songs possible is 7^720 which is approximately 3 followed by 608 zereos. But, between 20 Hz och 20 kHz there are 10 octaves, and a song does not need to limit itself to one scale.

How many melodies can we create with our different length songs?

So let’s see how many unique melodies we can create with our different length “songs”. 10 notes: 12 10 = 6.192 x 10 10 (about the number of observable galaxies in the sky) 20 notes: 12 20 = 3.834 x 10 21 (about the number of grains of sand in the entire world) 50 notes: 12 30 = 2.374 x 10 32 (about 100 times the number of bacteria on earth)

How many notes are in an octave?

While these are all true, I’m going to stick to the standard “Western Music” system that primarily makes use of the Diatonic (8 notes to an octave) and Chromatic (12 notes to an octave) scales. Most music is written in 8 bar form.

Are there more musical notes than cards in a deck?

There are more unique combinations than there are atoms on the planet. Now consider that there are only 52 cards in a deck, and there are significantly more musical notes than that. So there are astronomically more ways to arrange musical notes than there are ways to arrange cards, and that number is already astronomically large.