How many potential songs / tunes are out there, yet to be discovered?

Quadrillions

Arrangements of notes indeed becomes exponentially high very rapidly.

But then, what percentage would sound like music to us, and not just random notes?

To some creatures its ALL just noise. Or it may evoke a mood without being a particular connection of notes. So isn’t it as much about the complexities of the brain, as to which ones are music and which ones are bad attempts at music, and which ones are totally random hit-and-miss?

A Red Book audio CD is digital. Just 74 minutes of binary ~ 700MB. So you could calculate the possible combinations of 1’s and 0’s to make that up. But that would be overkill. The fidelity is way higher on a CD to make a recognizable track of say, three minutes.

I don’t know what the lowest bitrate would be to make a unique audio track would be. But it is way lower than a CD. Average song length of three minutes at that bitrate and you could calculate how many possible combinations there are. And a computer could churn out every possible combination if there were enough hard drives to store them.

I’m lazy and tired of doing math so maybe Luckyguy could work on this problem. This seems like the sort of thing he enjoys.

That is something I’ve alluded to for years: that there are a finite amount of combinations, due to the mathematics of how many notes there are.

If things are digital you could reproduce every combination of picture, tv show, movie, song, webpage. Most would be gibberish. But you could do it.

@Yellowdog “But then again, of all the potential arrangements, only a very small percentage of these arrangements would be recognizable or considered music to the human ear.”

That depends very much on the human ear beholding those arrangements.

Some people consider Nickleback music..

All of them.

Infinite.

There are only 26 letters in our alphabet. Yet do you think that there is an finite number of books that can be written?

I think there is a finite number of books that could be written. Just look at TV these days: every thing, every subject, every genre has been covered. That’s why the new shows are so far out.

Yes, there ARE a finite number of books to be written.

The only limit is the length of the books themselves. If someone were to write a story called, “The Never Ending Story” it could go on forever. But all other books are as finite as the potential arrangement of all the letters in all the books.

Only a tiny, tiny number would be anything other than goblty gook.

Do you have any idea of the enormity of the numbers you are talking about? There are 26**100 ways of writing 100 letters. The number 10**100, 1 followed by 100 zeros, is called a googol (namesake of Google), and is larger than the number of atomic particles in the visible universe. Granted only a small fraction of the 100 letter permutations would make up coherent sentences, but we are only talking about 100 letters. I can’t imagine ever having to worry that all the possible 100 page books has been exhausted.

Yet the brain to write such a book came about by similar fashion.

Subject matters limit all of those possible books. It’s one thing to create lots of letters, but if there is no meaning, the letters are meaningless.

None, if they are out there they have been discovered.

@Yellowdog , The formation of the brain was greatly helped by natural selection. If we had an algorithm that randomly selected 100 letters, but favored combinations that contained words, it would be far more likely to generate coherent sentences.

If there are a finite number of books that can be written then there are a finite number of original thoughts. Also a finite number of inventions.

Our brain is not limited by 26 letters. The human brain capable never ending creative ideas. Not by me of course but by brilliant young people now and into the future. I’ve never had an original thought. I’m living proof that a guy can go through life on borrowed words. HA!