I really like your thread: thank you for writing me back!
I think you have good intuitions about how sound works. I don’t think I can determine whether there’s a consensus on what is good: I’d venture to guess that any audio humans can perceive sounds good to someone. A friend of mine sent me an album that was entirely industrial shrieking.
But I agree with you that there’s a limit to the distinctness—humans can only divide the frequency spectrum a certain number of times before they can’t hear gradation any more, they can only slice the time domain to a certain extent before they can’t hear transitions any more, and you can only slice the loudness domain to a certain extent before you can’t hear the difference between slightly louder and slightly quieter.
We can make basically any human-perceivable sound by sampling at 32 bits in 44.1khz. Many of those sounds won’t be interesting and they’ll sound the same as other sounds, of course. But if nothing else, that puts an upper limit on how much variation you can have. In ten minutes, at 32 bits, in 44.1khz, you have about 840MB of audio data. You could probably express any human-perceivable song in 840MB, and in practice, using psychoacoustic compression like MP3, it would take a lot less space to do the interesting ones.
I think that for us to run out of music, the domain of things that sound good has to be pretty small. Humans probably haven’t produced more than a billion pieces of music, but if we pretend all music is monophonic, that there are four possible note lengths, and twelve possible pitches (note: each of these assumptions is too small, based on what we hear in real music), then you only need to string six notes together before you get something that nobody has probably tried.
What I was really responding to were these ideas that I thought were implicit in what you were saying (but I don’t think you thought they were implicit):
if you try every human-perceptible sound, most of them will sound bad. (we don’t know if they’ll sound bad because there’s a ton of variation in what sounds good)
if you try every human-perceptible sound, most of them won’t be distinguishable. (The search space is so big that it doesn’t matter if 99.99% of them aren’t distinguishable. We don’t know, in general, what makes music ideas distinguishable, so we don’t know how big that is as a portion of the search space. If you think that this comes down to Complex Brain Things, which I imagine most composers do, then figuring out what makes them distinguishable might reduce to SAT. see all the things neural network researchers hate doing)
we are good enough at searching for combinations that we have probably tried all the ones that sound good. (there are so many combinations that exhaustively searching for them would take forever. If the problem reduces to SAT, we can’t do that much better than exhaustively searching them)
I think that some of the strategies we use to search for musical ideas without having to solve any NP-complete problems have dried up. Minimalism is one technique we used to generate music ideas for a while, and it was easy enough to execute that a lot of people generated good songs very fast. But it only lasted about a decade before composers in that genre brought in elements of other genres to fight the staleness.
After a couple hundred years, Bach-type chorales have dried up. (even though other kinds of medieval polyphony haven’t) The well of 1950s-style pop chord progressions appears to have dried up, but the orchestration style doesn’t seem to have. (If we think “nothing new under the sun” comes down to Complex Brain Things, then we can’t know for sure—we can just guess by looking around and figuring out if people are having trouble being creative in them.) A lot of conventional classical genres don’t appear to have dried up—new composers release surprising pieces in them all the time. (see e.g. Romantic-style piano. Google even did some really cool work in computer-generating original pieces that sound like that.)
When these search strategies die, a lot of composers are good at coming up with new search strategies for good songs. We don’t know exactly how they do that, but modern pop music contains a lot of variation that’s yet to filter into concert music, and my gut tells me that means the future is pretty bright.
Thanks!
I think two of your premises aren’t necessarily true:
Probably, but I think your example is a little bit too extreme to demonstrate your point. There are a lot of genres, like taarab, that won’t sound like good music to you because of your cultural background. Acid house probably wouldn’t sound good to people who were raised in the 1800s, either. There are commonalities between how people appreciate music, but people come up with new ways to introduce musicality to a piece really often, which means that it’s hard to enumerate all the songs there could be.
If atonal or microtonal music suddenly got trendy, you’d come up with all kinds of new tone patterns we didn’t have before. If people started thinking about timbre differently, we could come up with instruments we don’t know how to listen to now. Both of these things happened after the first synthesizers came out. I don’t think you can predict in advance what will make people think “this sounds good.”
The great classical artists of the time of Debussy and Ravel were musicians like Chopin and Beethoven. The great classical artists of the time of Stravinsky and Schoenberg were musicians like Debussy and Ravel. Reich and Glass had Stravinsky and Schoenberg. (and maybe Gershwin), and now we’re venerating Reich and Glass. Arvo Part is probably going to get canonized real soon now.
I think that when you’re talking about “classical music” you’re talking about music that most people are only exposed to in curated form. It seems like when that happens, curators stick to examples that are really broadly accessible, which isn’t a good way to get a picture of the whole genre. The last trends of really broadly accessible music were 1800s romanticism and 1960s minimalism, and 1960s minimalism doesn’t seem old enough for curators to put it on the classical music shelf.
It’s not like painting ended with Da Vinci, but today’s public doesn’t particularly like Liechtenstein, Warhol, Rothko, Picasso, and so on.
This doesn’t undermine your point, but I think you might want to investigate modern concert music a little more before you make some of these assertions.