in 20 more years, will we have run out of fresh melodies?

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will we in 20 years' time, run out of musicologically sensible melodies and start having to [pay copyright holders] to reuse the old ones? or will everybody just start doing rap? i mean, even sampling has a hard mathemetical limit on permutations. doubtless, some would say we'd be lucky to even survive that long, but that's another thread for another day.

Guess I'd better write a few more songs fast, then.

^^^
but beware of accidentally cribbing from an existing melody. way back in 1970 george harrison stumbled into a big copyright infringment booboo for unintentionally [unconsciously] cribbing the melody for "my sweet lord" on the chiffon's "he's so fine." so among some with a sense of irony, the song is now known as "my sweet he's so fine."

This has been one of my worries that I shouldn't really spend any time worrying about for years. Well, there will also come a point when there are so many songs that some are lost to time and they can and will be pretty much remade without anyone ever knowing, even the remakers.

20 years seems a little soon for it to happen, though.

Also there's endless material to be mined in non-repetitive melodies but that takes more effort obviously.

So final answer: no even though I already voted I don't know.

^^^
yes, there will be some that fall through the cracks of detection. but for several years now there have been computerized automated melody bots that scan radio broadcasts looking for copyrighted melodies with different lyrics. these work by noting the key/melodic contour and/or tempo, and if it senses an infringement it flags the broadcast, logs and saves a soundfile/reference file, and notifies a system operator to examine it further. you just can't get away with zip nowadays.

How many notes are on a piano?

88 I believe.

How many notes does it take to create a melody?
Not a whole three minute song, just a melodic statement that can be humed?

Twinkle Twinkle Little star is eight notes.

So it should be easy to calculate mathmatically.

The number of possible melodies is 8 raised to the power of 88.

Thats a pretty big number.

How many new melodies are published by BMI and ASCAP each year? I dont know. But I would think it would a lot less than 8 raised to the power of 88!

Okay - if you start a melody with the lowest note on a piano- the next not is not going to be the key at the opposite end.

For the human mind to connect the sounds as a melody they have to be closer the whole 99 note scale- atleat within the same quadrant of the piano. Okay its more like 8 raised to the power of 22. But still. We got a few thousand years to go.

Well actually, melodies of today aren't as good as they once were. Lots of things aren't as good as they once were but especially music. I am a music freak and listen to everything from Beethoven to Katy Perry but I love the older stuff best. I also wrote a post and am hoping to get more respinses. Its called " do I seem like I may be a person with aspergers?". Can someone please take a look? Also, I apologize for its length and it is very broken up due to me being on my phone. It types funny.

No.

When you run out of melodies, you then enter the realm of rhythms. A song can be made to sound entirely different if you change the rhythm of the notes. And as a drummer, I can assure you that new rhythms are endless.

There are 2 possibilities:

1) Everyone ends up sounding like Lady Gaga or one of those corporate manufactured ret*ds that could be replaced with a supercomputer and a Japanese robot, and they will use fireworks and a platoon of backup dancers to try and hide how bad they suck, or,

2) All pop music will sound the same. To know what that feels like, spend an hour listening to Christan music.

Genuinely talented rock, country, and classical writers and composers will be in business for a long time. Pop music will do fine. That crap being marketed to air-headed 14 year old girls can be recycled every few years, and all the producers have to do is put a new face to it. For example, in a few more years I bet early Brittany spears stuff could be re-released by another lunatic under a new name since it's so unmemorable that even women in their mid to late 20's wouldn't recognize it!

Get beyond the concept of long melody and think of motivic structures instead. Coming from a classical music background, I can tell you that Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No 3 (probably pre-1721) and Brahms' 2nd Symphony (1877) are based upon a melodically-identical three-note motif yet they are completely different pieces of music. Two of the three notes are the same in that the middle note is a semitone lower. The Bach version is G-F#-G and the Brahms version is D-C#-D.

When you build a tapestry of sound from the minimal material of a short motif, you actually increase the variety of results possible because there are more direction changes possible from an atomic source than from variations and ornamentations of a longer melody. You also enter more into areas which should be of special interest to a lot of Aspie minds - mathematical patterns and the "ghost" patterns which they can produce, like many overlapping triangles producing curved forms which aren't really there. In music, this may take the form of the non-existent slow violin melody in the finale of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony. Here, the first and second violins have strange lines which bounce up and down in opposite directions, producing a "ghost" melody from the upper notes of the bouncing lines with alternate notes coming from the two violin sections.

If you are a non-classical musician with little or no prior interest in classical music but with a real interest in atomic structures and mathematical patterns, consider what you could produce in your own style of music by using motivic techniques!

Haven't we ran out of melodies already?