is there a finite number of unique songs able to be created in each genre?

Question

And if so, how close are we to reaching the limit?

In: 8

Answer 1

A piano has 88 keys, one for each tone that can be played in a melody, so it’s a good instrument to use as an example for this.

So, composing a new song, for each note you have 88 possible choices. That means there can be 88 one-note “songs”, 7744 two-note “songs”, 600,000 3-note “songs”, 60 million 4-note “songs”, 5 billion 5-note “songs”, and the number increases rapidly the more notes are added.

However, even for a long song (many many notes in it), you still have a *finite* number of unique combinations. Huge number, but not infinite. The problem is that there’s no restriction or rule to the number of notes you could have in a song, so in theory you could decide to “make your song unique” by just moving the goal-posts and increasing “the number of notes”, to infinity really, your song could “never end”. Doing that would actually give you an infinite number of possible unique songs.

Realistically though, melodies that actually sound like “actual music” and can clearly be classified into a genre, yeah there’s a finite number of those. Enormous number, though, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to reaching it.