Music, if you think about it, is undoubtedly one of the greatest mysteries in the universe. Not according to "why are we alive?", "Does God exist?", "Why do dogs die if they eat chocolate, but do they like it so much?". For music it is the same. What drives man, in every age in which he lived, to put in line tones and silences, words, sounds of nature and different timbres to create what we call "music"? What satisfies us, and why do we like very different genres of music?
Was the best Sanremo the 2018 edition or is it the last 2020 edition? Today we have no answers to these questions, if not the famous 42, universal answer to every fundamental question about life, the universe and everything. What we can ask ourselves, even managing to give an answer vaguely accurate however rough it is, will we ever end all the music? That is, we will get to the point where you give two melodies, a random sequence of tones and silences, these are not the exact copy of something that already exists, of something that, for example, is already registered on a cd?
The problem
The question is far from trivial, because our ear can recognize a finite number of tones and very few notes are enough for two songs to be even vaguely "similar". At the same time on Spotify (now in the sights of the Italian tax authorities) about 40,000 new songs are uploaded per day, for a total of 280,000 tracks per week, 50 million tracks every 3 and a half years (approximately).
It seems therefore, to think it in these terms, a sufficiently simple undertaking to reach a premature saturation of the immense music industry, where all the writable has been written and many greetings: a world full of covers of already existing pieces. Will we get there? When? Let's see it.
Let's start right from digital, to make the calculation, initially carried out by the Covered in Bees site, sufficiently simple. Digital music is in fact composed of bit (like all existing processable computer data), which we all know they can have the value of 0 and 1. Potentially, for an infinite sequence of 0 and 1, there are infinite combinations, but if we take for example an audio file of 5 minutes, the number of possible combinations of bits, however enormous and not humanly conceivable, remains an absolutely finite number. A normal compact disk (a CD) in fact needs 211 million bits to play a 5 minute audio file.
In practice, any audio file of this duration is made up of these 211 million bits, ANY thinkable audio file: a song, a cat that meows (any cat that meows and has ever meowed, or that will ever meow), the audio of any dialogue you have ever had (but even all the dialogues you've never had, with the exact sound of your voice and the sound of the voice of any possible interlocutor, alive or dead, known or unknown, in any language), the noise of when you bang your head silently against the wall because they are too heartbroken from life. Any thinkable sound and experimentable. If you stop to think about the unlimited (but, indeed, limited) possibilities of such a quantity of audio files, you will find that it is sufficiently mindblowing. And the possible combinations capable of reproducing all this variety of different sounds and reproductions is, simply, 2 raised to 211 million. But what number is it? How large is it? Very big. Very real indeed. A number with the beauty of 63 digits, for a file of only 5 minutes (which is a reasonable length for a song).
How big is a 63-digit number?
Does it seem a few 63 digits? In the end 63 seems almost a small number. Let's put them in perspective. The human body (let's take, for example, a person of about 70 kilos) has on average one hundred thousand billion cells.
One hundred thousand billion is a frighteningly large number, it is scary even to say it: it owns 15 digits. A drop of water has about 6 trillion atoms: a number a 22 digits. Very small compared to the estimate of all the atoms of which the planet earth would be composed, a number a 50 digits. Yet nothing compared to the total (estimated) number of all the hydrogen atoms present in the entire universe, an 80-digit number. But the scary thing, interesting for us and our account, is that it remains a finite number.
In this number so far from what we can hope to imagine with our (equally) limited brain there is everything, and for this we have to take away a lot. In fact, we are not interested here in meowings, verses, dialogues; but to music and only that. And this is where the calculation needs strong approximations. As reported by Vsauce (a YouTube channel that I recommend and that inspired this and other articles) it is possible to do the count considering all the possible combinations of only 8 notes divided into 12 intervals. A strong simplification. Times, intervals, octaves can be varied, silences can be added. The music of the future may be very different from the simple combination of only 8 notes. However, it remains a good estimate to understand if we are near or far from "finish" the possible melodies. Also because, for example, two melodies made at different octaves result in our ear the same melody. Well, the possible combinations of different melodies of 8 notes divided into 12 intervals are the beauty of 79 billion. A much smaller number than that obtained before, almost a disappointment. But in truth it is still huge: if 100 different melodies were produced per second we would exhaust all possible combinations of 8 notes in "only" 248 years.
Moral of the story?
We still have a lot of time before reaching the dreaded terminus, but if we survive long enough, between one edition of Sanremo and the other, we could actually reach the dreaded full saturation of all the music and there will be no more no new melody available. But the truth is that there will be so many different melodies in existence that it will be difficult without the help of a super computer to realize that we have finished them, and for a while we will continue a healthy and mutual plagiarism which will lead to a further blockage of the judicial systems of the future.
