Have we discovered all possible generes? Will there be a point where all music will have been created?

I mean... How in depth do you want to go with this?

I could ramble on for paragraphs about different ways to interpret that question, and different mathematical ways to answer it, but the short answer is that in all but the most limited definitions of originality, notes, scales, genres, etc, the answer to both questions is going to be "no".

But I'm happy to rant, if that's what you guys want.

sure

Okay, well in that case, I'd suggest that the only reasonable way that we can even begin to address a question this broad and loosely defined is by narrowing the scope to something more measurable.

So, let's pretend for a moment that primarily rhythmic/textural music doesn't exist, and let's talk about scales. Scales are a nice place to begin this kind of discussion, because they give a nice sense of how even trying to narrow it down to something that feels really succinct on first inspection can quickly blow up out of reasonable proportions the moment you examine it much closer.

So, scales are made of notes, and a good place to begin asking the question of how many scales there are would be to work out how many notes there are.

So, a keyboard is made up of patterns of black and white notes: a group of two black notes (with white notes between them all), a small space, and then a group of three black notes (with more white notes between them all). If you're not a musician, or not terribly familiar with a standard keyboard layout, I suggest that you look up an online keyboard so that you can follow along.

You'll notice that this pattern repeats every 12 keys (every 8 white keys). This is because most of Western harmony is built off of the chromatic scale (a 12-note scale consisting of the notes A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, and G#). After those twelve notes, if you were to continue onward, you would start again at A. The reason for this has to do with how sound-waves work:

12 steps away on the chromatic scale is what we call an octave. Any note produces a wave with double the frequency of the note an octave down, and half the frequency of the note an octave up. As humans, we hear this simple 1:2 or 2:1 ratio as the most absolutely 'fitting-together', or 'consonant' that two different pitches can be. In fact, these two pitches are so consonant, that we often can't tell them apart except in relation to one another; this is why we consider them the same note, just in a different octave. Have a listen for yourself on that virtual piano, the notes are named for you, so try clicking on C, and C1, and hear how they sound like the same thing, only that one is higher in pitch than the other. So the first thing you have to decide when answering this question, is if you're going to include notes which are the same, but an octave up or down from one another as the same notes or different notes. If you consider them different, then the answer to your question is potentially infinite, since the range of octaves theoretically go both up and down infinitely (though, no instrument could possibly play in all of them, and I will explain further limitations to that idea later).

Say for arguments sake that we're only counting all the notes of the chromatic scale (I'll get into why this isn't a comprehensive list later), and we're only counting each of them once - not counting each repetition of them at the octave as a different note. You'd think the answer to your question of "how many notes are there?" would be 12, but unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. The chromatic scale is not terribly helpful in it's full form, so composers break it up into various other scales. The most common in modern western music are the major scale and the minor scale. If you were to start on any letter of the chromatic scale and call that '1', the major scale would include the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th, and the minor scale would include the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 9th, and 11th. So, A major would contain the notes A, B, C#, D, E, F#, and G, whilst A minor would contain the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.

I apologise if this is all really basic for you, I just want to establish a baseline, so that we're all on the same page.

The problem this idea of major and minor scales raises is that each note along the major or minor scale relates to one another in a particular way, for example, when you move from the 7th note of a major scale to the first note of a major scale, it has the same effect regardless of which major scale it is. This applies in all cases, to all of the degrees of all scales, and is why when writing scales, we have to ensure (in most cases - there are exceptions to this rule as to all rules) that each scale contains all the letters from A-G, and each of them only once. How do we do this? Well... When we take a scale like F major, (which you would think to spell as F, G, A, A#, C, D, E), we have to spell the A# as a Bb instead ('#' means one step higher, 'b' means one step lower on the chromatic scale). Here you see a problem with just answering your question with '12'. Clearly we have the same pitch, given two names (A# and Bb). This can happen for all the notes. Even a C could be called a B#, or an E an Fb. Although this might seem like a cop-out, the more one learns about western harmony, the more one learns just how important that distinction is: it's not just called a different note, it serves a fundamentally different purpose; although it sounds the same, it is in a very real sense a different note.

So... What does that mean for the number of notes we have? Well... if we're only looking within an octave, that gives us Ab, A, A#, Bb, B, B#, Cb C, C#, Db, D, D#, Eb, E, E#, Fb, F, F#, Gb, G, and G#, so... 21, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, it's even more complicated than that, because of scales like Fb major which would contain the pitches Fb, Gb, Ab, A, Cb, Db, and Eb if letters could be repeated, but must instead have the A replaced for a Bbb (double-flat). There also exists notes like Ax (A double-sharp). That leaves us with the following notes (all of which are fundamentally different, even if many sound the same pitch): Abb, Ab, A, A#, Ax, Bbb, Bb, B, B#, Bx, Cbb, Cb, C, C#, Cx, Dbb, Db, D, D#, Dx, Ebb, Eb, E, E#, Ex, Fbb, Fb, F, F#, Fx, Gbb, Gb, G, G#, and Gx. That's a total of 32 notes, and even this list is not complete, as (although it's so rarely necessary that there isn't even a standardised notation that I'm aware of) there theoretically exists (if not scales that contain triple-sharps/flats), double/triple/quadruple/etc-augmented/double-diminished note relationships potentially to infinity.

Now, to be fair, the greater the number of enharmonic steps away from a single sharp/flat, the less likely there is to be a justifiable reason for such a distinction (for instance, I can only think of maybe two examples of a triple-sharp in any of the music I've ever played which I would agree with the usage of), but I could certainly contrive musical situations where such notation would be the most sound analyses, and don't worry, it gets way worse than that!

Throughout history, and across various cultures, the notes that we call A, B, C, etc. now weren't always the same ones. In Western canon alone, though equal-temperament is nearly universal now, the use of Just Intonation, Pythagorean tuning and mean-tone temperament in the past meant that the distance between say A and B has not always been the same, and instruments could sound "in tune" in some keys, but would then have more dissonance in other keys. On top of this, all such temperaments only relate necessarily to the distance between the notes, as for exactly how high or low a note is used as a reference pitch, well... even today people are arguing over what should be standardised.

Most orchestras and programs will use A440, which means that they count the frequency of 440hz as their baseline for measuring the note 'A', and all the rest of their notes will relate to that 'A' depending on the temperament. That is not to say that A440 is universal; the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and many European orchestras (especially in Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Norway and Switzerland) use A = 442 Hz, while nearly all modern symphony orchestras in Germany and Austria and many in other countries in continental Europe (such as Russia, Sweden and Spain) tune to A = 443 Hz. Historically, there has been no standardised concert pitch at all, and many modern ensembles which specialise in the performance of Baroque music have agreed on a standard of A = 415 Hz. To give an idea of the kind of variation that came about from this (especially in the pre-standardised concert-pitch world), an English pitch-pipe from 1720 was found to play the A above middle C at 380 Hz, while the organs played by Johann Sebastian Bach in Hamburg, Leipzig and Weimar were pitched at A = 480 Hz, a difference of around four semitones. In other words, the A produced by the 1720 pitch-pipe would have been at about the same frequency as the F on one of Bach's organs.

While there is no theoretical limit to both how far one can extend the search for new notes either inwards or outwards, there are practical, biological, and physical constraints to bear in mind. Firstly, there's the accuracy and precision with which a performer can play: fingers are only so thin, voices only have so much control, people are only so reliable, etc. Secondly, there's the limitation of your instrument: most modern pianos are equal-tempered and chromatic, it would be very difficult to play a quarter-tone scale on one without altering it; similarly, most bugles are only naturally able to play notes from the harmonic series, and it is very difficult to get any other notes out of them without using extended techniques.

Thirdly, there's the limitations of our ears: The human ear can nominally hear sounds in the range 20 Hz (0.02 kHz) to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz). The upper limit tends to decrease with age; most adults are unable to hear above 16 kHz. Tones between 4 and 16 Hz are generally perceived via the body's sense of touch. Although the lowest frequency that has been identified as a musical tone is 12 Hz, this was identified under ideal laboratory conditions, which raises the question of how well we can perceive pitches around noise. Although it does not strictly relate to pitch-identification, the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) measures a person's ability to hear speech in quiet and in noise. In the test, the patient is required to repeat sentences both in a quiet environment and with competing noise being presented from different directions. The test measures signal to noise ratio for the different conditions which corresponds to how loud the sentences needed to be played above the noise so that the patient can repeat them correctly 50% of the time. I'm afraid I don't know the human average, or how that might relate to the identification of pitch over noise, but you may want to look into it.

Putting background noise aside for now, there are other obvious limitations to the human ear: for one, there is only so much and so little noise that the human ear can pick up without failing to identify anything at all, or causing pain and deafness. The threshold of hearing (that is, the quietest sound a young human with undamaged hearing can detect at 1000 Hz) is generally reported as the RMS sound pressure of 20 micropascals, or 0.98 pW/m2 at 1 atmosphere and 25 decrees Celsius. Although this does not directly relate to pitch-identification either, the threshold of hearing is frequency-dependent and it has been shown that the ear's sensitivity is best at frequencies between 1 kHz and 5 kHz. The threshold of pain is usually measured as 63.2 Pa/30 dB. It is arguable that sounds beyond 101,325 Pa/194.094 dB are no longer really pitches or notes, as that is the theoretical limit for undistorted sound at 1 atmosphere environmental pressure, and they are well and truly within the range of shockwaves.

Popular music as it is now is essentially a post-composition era. None of those fuckers have the theoretical knowledge of how to test new possibilities of composition, and have been playing a novelty-of-timbre game for decades. Most music done today with computers and DAW are focused primarily on making "new sounds", not new compositions. Since no one knows how to compose, the musician's job has essentially now become to create a new instrument with every track. Creative musical composition is a lost art. Music has essentially become a game of forging new noises.
And even today's trained composers are running out of space. They ain't innovating shit, compositionally speaking.
OASIF NUMBA WUN. SIMPLE AS.

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More on-topic with pitch-identification is frequency resolution. Frequency resolution details the smallest change in pitch which can be perceived by the human ear. The frequency resolution of the ear is dependent on the tone's frequency content, but is about 3.6 Hz within the octave of 1000 – 2000 Hz. Below 500 Hz, it is about 3 Hz for sine waves, and 1 Hz for complex tones. The total number of perceptible pitch steps in the range of human hearing is about 1400; the total number of notes in the equal-tempered scale, from 16 to 16000 Hz, is 120. That said, even smaller pitch differences can be perceived through other means. For example, the interference of two pitches can often be heard as a (low-)frequency difference pitch. This effect of phase variance upon the resultant sound is known as 'beating'.

Okay, sure. But pop music isn't all music. That's kind of irrelevant to the point at hand, isn't it?

You have to be 18 to post here.

Finally, there's limitations to both our physical, and our theoretical ability to measure pitch. Physically, our ears and measuring devices are only so sensitive, and our psychoacoustic studies are open to bias and error since they are at least partially reliant on human self-analysis. More fundamentally however: pitch is based on frequency, which is in turn based on wavelength. Since wavelength is a physical phenomenon (even more so in acoustic/mechanical waves than others), it is measured in length and time, both of these units are subject to the fact that the Planck length sets the fundamental limits on the accuracy of length measurement (see: quantum physics). We will only ever be able to measure up to that resolution, even with perfect equipment.

So, to summarise: in answering the much simpler question of how many notes there are, we can derive the answer that there are either, 12, 21, 32, 120, 1400, infinite, or almost-infinite unique notes, depending on how you measure.

Taking this into account, with a little maths we can work out the number of scales there are for each scenario. For n number of notes in our selected scenario, there are n!/(1!(n-1)!) 1-note scales you can make, n!/(2!(n-2)!) 2-note scales, ... etc.

Add those up, and we get ourselves the total number of unique scales.

For each of these scales, each note of the scale could be functioning as the keynote, so in order to generate the number of modes, we simply need to multiply the total number of 1-note scales by 1, the total number of 2-note scales by 2 ... etc.

Add those up, and we get the total number of modes which can be formed by each of our scenarios.

This means that:

If we count there as being 12 unique notes, then there’s 4095 unique scales, and 24576 modes.
If we count there as being 21 unique notes, then there’s 2097151 unique scales, and 22117728 modes.
If we count there as being 32 unique notes, then there’s 2091005865 unique scales, and 68719476736 modes.
If we count there as being 120 unique notes, then we’re dealing with exponents exceeding Excel’s maximum limit for number precision, but that puts us in the range of 1.32923×1036 unique scales, and 7.97537×1037 modes.
If we count there as being 1400 unique notes, then we’re way beyond what Excel can even begin to calculate for me (it doesn’t like factorials above 170!), but thankfully Adam from here on Quora is better at maths than me, and worked it out to be about 2.7×10421 unique scales, and 3.9×10424 modes.
Obviously, if we count there as being infinite, or near-infinite unique notes, then there are correspondingly infinite or near-infinite unique scales and modes thereof.

You probably think there are only 12 notes huh

Sorry, that's 2.7×10 to the 421st power, and 3.9×10 to the 424th power.

Great! so we're nearly there with calculating the number of melodies there are! The next step is simply to work out how many orders the notes of these scales can be in.

12 notes can be arranged into 12! (about 479 million) unique orders.

21 notes can be arranged into 21! (about 51 quintillion) unique orders.

32 notes can be arranged into 32! (about 263 decillion) unique orders.

120 notes can be arranged into 120! (about 7 quinsexagintillion - that's 7×10 to the 198th power) unique orders.

1400 notes can be arranged into 1400! (about 10 novemseptuagintillion - that's 1×10 to the 241st power) unique orders.

Now those are all big scary numbers, and I'm sure that if I were a physicist, rather than a music-theorist, I'd contextualise them by comparing them to the number of atoms in the observable universe, or something equally as ridiculous, but I'm not, so I won't.

But there's a problem here: that's just using one of each note once each, which is great if you want to write omni-tonal serialist music, but not terribly indicative of how most people write music, but my boyfriend just got home drunk, and I should put him to bed, so that's more than enough ranting from me.

Suffice to say if you were to then somehow work out some limits to the way you can arrange notes, and work out a number of possibilities to that, you've then got to consider rhythm, then harmony and polyphony, then timbre and texture, then dynamics, then overall length, and every step of the way, the answer is going to be "infinite or nearly infinite".

So no: there will never be a point where all music will have been created, and it's pretty unlikely that we will ever discover all possible genres either.

Goodnight, and thanks for listening to my TED talk.

checked and nice blogpost. I read it all.

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Based theory rant

Danke.

You must be even more bored than I am!
Glad you enjoyed.

Oh and because I haven't quite left yet and got curious, according to Google, it is estimated that the there are between 10 to the 78th power and 10 to the 82nd power atoms in the known, observable universe, so we're well beyond that scope already just with note-selection.

So, by what you're saying, taking a pre-existing composition and modifying just ONE single note qualifys as creating new music, just because it created a new quantifiable series of notes?
Imagine the pOsSiBiLiTiEs

Well no... Because what I was talking about didn't even begin to take the range of a full song's duration into account. It was talking about purely permutations of a given set of notes. So, the better analogy would be taking a pre-existing tone-row and modifying the order of a single note.

Which absolutely has precedent as a generator for new music (see: serialism and dodecaphony).

And yes, I'm still here, apparently: the boyfriend's snoring his head off, and I'm too sore from fencing to be fucked getting up and going to bed.

we either have to get crazy with weird rhythms or devolop our hearing beyond what we're capable of to invent new sounds

.... >invent new sounds
See? This is what most people think music is. Nuke this board.

A thread with actual intelligent discussion and no wojacks? Wow. Proud of you, Yea Forums

kill yourself retard
if you like being a caveman and doing the same shit over and over again be my guest, while people like us will keep exploring the possibilities of music

They said the same thing in 2010, and here we are 9 years later

>while people like us will keep exploring the possibilities of sound
ftfy

Well I've got style
For miles and miles
So much style that it's wasted

-Pavement

Music is sound in order, dumbfuck

Where I think is potential for progress is in transcending the association of particular instruments with particular genres. (e.g. electric guitar/bass/etc for rock, banjo/fiddle/mandolin/etc for bluegrass, the list goes on.) There is also potential in the incorporation/appropriation of interesting musical ideas/instruments from folk music traditions around the world, which are often pretty neat-sounding but virtually unknown in the realm of Western popular music.

What if musicians played musical ideas usually associated with a genre using instruments usually associated with another? (For example: playing musical ideas associated with metal, but without metal guitars. It could have electric guitars playing with a clean, "jazz" tone, or acoustic guitars, or no guitars at all, and use violins/mandolins instead. Or keyboards.)
What if a band decided to play music that draws from rock and roll, but incorporates instruments and rhythms from Balkan folk music? What if people took musical ideas typically played on horns, and played them on synthesizers instead and took advantage of the technological ability to loop, delay, or alter the sound in other ways that would be impossible with actual horns?
Or maybe i'm out of my mind and all these suggestions are just progressive rock all over again.

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>For example: playing musical ideas associated with metal, but without metal guitars. It could have electric guitars playing with a clean, "jazz" tone, or acoustic guitars, or no guitars at all, and use violins/mandolins instead
Math rock like Chon or This Town Needs Guns

hell no
e.g. many genres are based on particular ostinato rhythms ("beats"). Rhythmic patterns with more than three notes to a grouping are relatively unexplored, as the predominant linguistic tendency is to group notes in twos or threes.

I totally agree with this. Counterpoint with non western scales, balkan rythmic with touareg styled pentatonics, all the above with instruments not typically associated with those styles... lots of neat things are possible. A lot of jazz musicians already pioneered those things like John McLaughin/Zakir Hussain, etc, but for several reasons this remains difficult : one phenomenon I witnessed having played with very different people is the ethnic/disciplinary silos surrounding certain folk music styles : a lot of talented flamenco musicians think that unless you are born in southern spain you cannot really play what they play for instance. This type of thinking is the same as a Douglas Levinson mixing up degree of expertise and actual intelligence. If you want to transcend barriers, genres, schools, habits, you need musicians who have both solid skills in their "native field" and this je ne sais quoi that makes them able to acquire skills in other unknown fields/traditions and furthermore make the product of all this accessible to a wider audience. Those are rare.

Thanks for reading my blog.