"Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin were two of those worried musicians. Riehl is a lawyer who has worked on copyright. Rubin is a coder. They were hanging out after a long day at work when a “a lark, a thought experiment” occurred to Riehl: Maybe they could exhaust all possible melodies—and in so doing, protect musicians from being sued for copying songs they don’t remember hearing.
On the one hand, they can’t really create them all. A melody, simply put, is a sequence of notes. If you’re talking about all the notes and all the traditions of music around the world, the combinatorics yields functionally infinite possibilities for the melodies that result. Take just the 88 notes on a piano and, for instance, 12-note sequences. You get 216 sextillion melodies. And of course, that’s only within the Western tradition, in which these particular frequency ranges are considered notes.
On the other hand, if we’re talking practically about Western popular music in the range in which hit songs are made, that is already a radically restricted domain. And within it, the number of melodies is in a more comprehensible part of finitude. Popular music tends to use a more limited range of notes than an entire piano. And Riehl and Rubin figured that most pop melodies run fewer than 12 notes. If you generated every possible melody with just the eight notes of the C scale, that’d be 8^12 melodies, which is 68,719,476,736. That’s a big but thinkable number, considering that SoundCloud receives tens of millions of uploads a year.
Riehl and Rubin hatched a plot to create software that would write every melody, at least within this popular range. It wouldn’t be unlike dialing every possible telephone number: 111-111-1111, 111-111-1112, 111-111-1113, and so on: do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-re.
As it turns out, there were considerable complications to even writing 68 billion melodies within the team’s existing hardware, which amounted to Rubin’s computer. “It is true that the set of all melodies is finite. But finite is still large,” Rubin told me. “It’s quite large, with the current computing technology that we had access to. We’re not Amazon.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/whats-the-point-of-writing-every-possible-melody/607120/
On the one hand, they can’t really create them all. A melody, simply put, is a sequence of notes. If you’re talking about all the notes and all the traditions of music around the world, the combinatorics yields functionally infinite possibilities for the melodies that result. Take just the 88 notes on a piano and, for instance, 12-note sequences. You get 216 sextillion melodies. And of course, that’s only within the Western tradition, in which these particular frequency ranges are considered notes.
On the other hand, if we’re talking practically about Western popular music in the range in which hit songs are made, that is already a radically restricted domain. And within it, the number of melodies is in a more comprehensible part of finitude. Popular music tends to use a more limited range of notes than an entire piano. And Riehl and Rubin figured that most pop melodies run fewer than 12 notes. If you generated every possible melody with just the eight notes of the C scale, that’d be 8^12 melodies, which is 68,719,476,736. That’s a big but thinkable number, considering that SoundCloud receives tens of millions of uploads a year.
Riehl and Rubin hatched a plot to create software that would write every melody, at least within this popular range. It wouldn’t be unlike dialing every possible telephone number: 111-111-1111, 111-111-1112, 111-111-1113, and so on: do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-re.
As it turns out, there were considerable complications to even writing 68 billion melodies within the team’s existing hardware, which amounted to Rubin’s computer. “It is true that the set of all melodies is finite. But finite is still large,” Rubin told me. “It’s quite large, with the current computing technology that we had access to. We’re not Amazon.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/whats-the-point-of-writing-every-possible-melody/607120/