Is it possible to run out of music?

The short answer is yes, there’s a limited number of sounds we can hear and thus a finite number of possible ways of combining them. Don’t panic, though. Before you start stockpiling melodies and burying riffs in your garden, you should know that there’s still a lot of them left. New tunes are out there.

How many music combinations are possible?

Bring on the rhythm

Length of melody	No of possible note combinations	Number of melodies (note combinations multiplied by rhythm variations
3	469	240,128
4	7,825	32 million
5	122,461	4 billion
6	ca. 1.84 million	4.8 x 1011

Is there a finite number of musical notes?

If one hundred writers each created one new melody every second, this would exhaust every possible melody in 248 years. So music is not infinite, but has a finite number of possibilities. Having said that, there is a lot of music that sounds familiar and we don’t tend to move too far away from familiar patterns.

Can people run out of ideas?

First, Know That You’re Not Really Out of Ideas Sometimes when people get stuck, they worry that they’re going to be stuck forever. What you need to know is that your brain is a virtually endless source of ideas. You’re constantly feeding input into your brain, constantly giving it new information and stimulation.

Will we ever run out of original songs?

So, if you’re thinking that there are a finite number of songs, but a very large number which could take aeons to get exhausted, it is probably safe to say that we will never run out of new music. There are around 130 million songs in the internet database, with a total time of about 1200 years.

How many possible notes are there?

There are twelve possible notes in traditional Western music, but many more if you include all octaves. In non-Western scales there are many more possibilities. You also do not specify how slowly/quickly notes might be played, so once again you could play just one note for an infinite period.

How many piano note combinations are there?

Given a span of 15 notes for one hand; and two hands I make it out to be less than 49 billion but the exact number eludes me (fingering constraints, duplicate notes between the two hands when they overlap). The 49 billion is 3003 (15 choose 5) * 73 (the number of positions you could do that in) squared.