POLING: Will there come a day when the music dies?
- Jun 25, 2022
Somewhere, in this vast land, a computer is humming away. It is programmed to produce every variable of musical notes and chords. Its goal is to literally create every song that could possibly be composed.
This computer and its program were featured several years ago on NPR. It seems that the computer’s originators wanted to copyright every song this computer created.
Creatively chilling stuff and another sign that human arrogance is out of control. That arrogance being, mankind’s ceaseless desire to create machines that can outdo and outthink ourselves, such as computers that outplay world-champion chess masters. Why create human accomplishments that essentially diminish human accomplishments?
But this column isn’t about computers. It is about music and how a relatively small number of notes have created every song in the world. Still in our age, one would think a computer couldn’t exhaust music’s potential for creativity before humans do.
Since the beginning of humanity, people have made music. They have hummed and created instruments. As time passed, humans wrangled music to fit within measures, stanzas and notes. We have broken music into mathematical equations of three-fourth time, or four-four time, as well as whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, etc. It has been categorized into keys and sharps and flats.
Still, it comes down to a finite number of notes and chords which have produced an infinite number of songs throughout human history. A small number of tools to create everything from the sounds of Beethoven and Liszt to Cole Porter and Irving Berlin to The Beatles and Hank Williams to Led Zeppelin and the Squirrel Nut Zippers to ZZ Top and Beyonce.
Instrumentation, arrangement and tempo have increased the diversity of music but essentially Mozart used the same notes as Metallica to invent songs. It’s a matter of how these notes are arranged and used that make the difference.
Yet, is it possible that humans are running out of new songs? Can a computer truly add and multiply the potential arrangements of notes to find an equation for a definitive number of songs? Hopefully, the answer to both questions is no.
Despite this computer’s programmed mission, humans continue creating an abundance of new music. Arguably, more humans are now dedicated to composing new music than at any other time in our history.
Possibly, more humans are creating music now than the combined number of people who composed music up to 2022. Part of this increase is likely due to the staggering growth of world population, another part of this creative boom stems from advances in technology and mass availability; there is the lure of fame, and we live in a comfortable enough era that allows more people to pursue creative endeavors.
So isn’t it possible that we could run out of music? New music? Is it possible there could be only so many tunes?
Hopefully not.
Even the most melancholy music says something about the optimism of humanity and the complexity of mortal emotions and thoughts. Music is as simple as a toddler humming, as complex as an orchestra performing, and every degree of difficulty in between.
Humans make music, play music, sing it and listen to it, because of some innate harmony we find within its varied structures. You can program a computer to create every song but you can’t imbue it with the humanity to play it with the depth of a good musician. You can’t make a computer see past the math and grasp the magic of music. Not yet anyway.
And if not, if we do run out of music, hopefully humans will discover its boundaries before a computer program. If there is only so much music possible, new generations will return to it repeatedly, to play it, to listen to it, to marvel in music’s limitless capacity to inspire and console.
Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.
