How much music is left?

Before I ever wrote a single drop of music I thought that the job of a composer must be impossibly difficult. I knew enough about music to know that there were seven notes in a scale and that these scales built melodies which were music. I wondered why computers hadn’t started writing music and just combining all of those different notes into every possible melody. I mean, seven notes. There are a lot of different combinations of those seven notes. But there are only seven upon which to work! The periodic table gives us 118(+?) elements which make up the world and you are telling me that only seven elements make up the world that is music?
Admittedly that comparison is a bit crude. The elements which comprise the known world are very, very complicated and have an intense amount of complexity and variety within themselves. And the elements which comprise the known world of music are a bit simpler, relying on (sometimes very complex!) acoustic phenomenon and organizing them into a series of twelve discrete pitches.
Of course, that was my first mistake – thinking that the world was divided up into 7 notes. I know now that
1) Seven notes comprise a traditional scale, but we are definitely beyond that as a musical culture (in fact we never were really there at all) so the contemporary composer, in fact, has twelve notes at his disposal – a not insignificant increase in the number of useable pitches.
And 2) That our western way of tuning things is not the only way. The octave can be divided into any number of partitions and often is, not only by musicians across the world (see indian classical music) but also within our very own western culture (See Harry Partch’s 43-tone monster). To say that the traditional western system of music is the only way is not only completely euro-centric but also completely wrong (also considering that musicians often use alternate tuning within all kinds of music).

Anyway, this comes up because I watched this video on YouTube the other day.

It poses an interesting question and poses some interesting answers as well. I don’t know how much I agree with it, but it’s certainly something that is fun to think about. Some of their calculations seem to be a bit…wrong by basing their calculations on what a judge might deem as a different. The day that non-musicians get to decide what music is will be the day I quit music. Mahler 1 and Frere Jacques are very different things, guys.
But I do like the fact that the video ultimately begins to question if the question itself really even matters. Most of that music they are hypothesizing about is purely theoretical and probably is really bad at being music! And besides (as they point out) we like the familiar and we like our memes, so music tends to stay toward a certain area of tonality, rhythm, and affect. (But tastes change over time, so music will never be the same going forward!)

But here is my major problem with this idea of ‘running out of music’….

Music is much more than a series of pitches linked in time. Music, when it comes down to it, is a human response to auditory messages (See John Cage). So in order for music to *happen*, in order for music to really work and be music, it requires both of those things – an auditory message and a human response. Composer’s take care of that auditory message (at least in a traditional setting) but it up to YOU the listener to create the meaning and make the experience of hearing sounds a musical one. Music’s effectiveness as an artistic form is dependent upon attention, intent, and awareness. This is why your favorite song can make you cry one day, and totally fly by when you aren’t paying attention the next (or maybe that only happens to me…).
All this is to say that music is an incredible and exciting art form, but it’s much more than sound.  It feels like they are using such a small definition of music that it precludes the most important part of it! Music is about people. All art is. And we aren’t going to run out of people, or human experience. So I pose that music is infinite. Just as humanity is infinite. We can’t possibly explore all of the ways that music can go, but we can damn well try.