Ok i was thinking about it last week and i got to no answer for that.
Just let us count it :
We have limited instruments -> so we have limited sounds
There are limited notes (tunes)
and limited ways to put these notes together or to make a specific chord progression.
So Multiply some numbers together.You will get a very big number,very very big... but it's a number.It's not unlimited anyway ! So There should be a day when new albums will just sound like rip-offs.
Well, if you detune a guitar between normal notes, then you're in a set of tones that is almost wholly untapped. At any rate, you can still mess around with time signature, using different instruments to play separate notes to make up a chord, tap into ambience perhaps. Awhile ago, I saw an interview with Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien from when they were promoting In Rainbows. They believed that melody was dead, and that rhythm was what was to come next. This certainly explains The King of Limbs, The Eraser, and Amok. So, if we shift the focus of music, we at least get a little leg room. With rhythm, you could, in theory, make music in infinite meters. So, even if you recycle sequence of melodies, the way that they would be played would certainly vary in the time they're played.
No, we don't. We can make instruments out of anything. Putting a limit on how many instruments we have is like putting a limit on how many physical resources and ideas we are capable of mining.
Behrus58 wrote:
There are limited notes (tunes)
and limited ways to put these notes together or to make a specific chord progression.
You seem to be talking in a very small-minded way about traditional western pop music. So there are 12 standard notes, running from A to G#, on a guitar. From these notes there are a massive number of chords we can produce, though of course that number is finite. But when we start to bend the notes, or detune the strings, we create new sounds. The potential of that one instrument alone is massive. Then multiply this across every other acoustic instrument imaginable, and you'll see a never ending potential for creating new combinations of sounds. This is before we have even got onto our ability to manipulate and create music electronically, whereby the boundaries are pretty much non-existent. The opportunities for forging new sounds and new melodies, albeit ostensibly leftfield ones, are infinite.
Behrus58 wrote:
So There should be a day when new albums will just sound like rip-offs.
We are already at a point where the vast, vast majority of new music we hear has some sort of previous musical reference point, but that wasn't your question. You asked if music is unlimited in its scope and its potential, and my answer is a resounding yes. It's akin to asking if the human imagination is "unlimited".
We have limited instruments -> so we have limited sounds
Not really. If someone can hollow out a rock and hit it with a mallet and make it sound nice, we can basically make anything into an instrument.
If you dissect how many chords can be played on a piano (playable or not), it comes out to an outrageously large number. I don't think we'll ever run out of music... like, maybe one day, but not in the next hundred or so generations at least. _________________ Doubles & Conch
Spoiler alert: Even if we limit ourselves to the 12 traditional tones (ignoring octaves), the number of ways we can combine them is decidedly NOT finite. This depends partly on the fact that there is no restriction on the number of these tones that can be strung together, but more importantly the lengths of each tone run along a continuum and are not discrete-valued, and are thus infinite. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that no two notes played in all of history have had the exact same duration.
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