PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WRITING SONGS for almost as long as there have been people, and writing them down for over half a millennium. So will there ever be a limit to the number of tunes songwriters can come up with, before they start repeating themselves?
Let’s write a simple four-note tune together. Our first note can be anything we like. The second note, in practical terms, can be anything between an octave higher (as in Somewhere Over the Rainbow) to an octave lower (as in Springtime for Hitler from The Producers). That’s twelve notes up or down, or it could be the same note. That makes 25 possible tones for the second note.
Then there’s the length of the note. It could be anything, but let’s be conservative and say it could only be a minim, crotchet, quaver or semi quaver. That’s four possibilities: multiply that by the 25 possible tones and you get 100 options for the second note.
The third note also has 100 possibilities, as does the fourth. Multiplying all those together gives us one million variations just for the first four notes of our tune.
Typically, popular songs are 32 bars long, split into 8-bar segments. And if we assume (again, very conservatively) just four notes per bar, that makes 32 notes in the 8-bar segment that defines the tune.
Which means there are 100 to the power of 32, better expressed as 10^64, possible variations on the tune. That’s more than the number of atoms in the solar system.
So no, I don’t think we’ll run out of tunes any time soon.
