The human race. I meant that term ear pleasing loosely. People have pretty much come up with a consensus of what is and what is not musical. I may not like Gregorian chants or death metal but I recognize them both as musical --as opposed to the sound of fingers on a chalk board or a dog with his toe caught in a barbed wire fence.
I was thinking about this after I wrote it and I think it might be less than theoretically infinite if you put a time limit on the song -- and no I didn't listen to Norris' video (dude said something in the first few seconds that made me roll my eyes) -- but the "there's a limited number of notes and thus a limited number of songs" is silly. That's not how ears work. They aren't limited like that. That type of question might answer how many songs you coud make on a piano using only the piano. An actual number would require the number of discrete frequencies the ear can hear, how many simultaneously, and how sensitive they are on the time scale. You could limit the song to a half minute and you're still looking at a nigh incalculable number (though perhaps less than theoretically infinite).
i never said or thought "limited number of notes" translates to "limited number of songs". what makes an artist an artist is the ability to take what we've all heard before, and make it something we haven't, if that makes sense. but it's inevitable when songwriters write songs, that a similar melody here, the exact same chord progression there, is going to get used again. technically, any chord can be put at any spot in a song, but putting a g-flat diminished chord in a song in C major is most likely* going to sound terrible. *i guess it's possible that it wouldn't, but it would be an extremely strange occurrence.
You do agree the human ear has only so many notes it can distinguish? And we can only distinguish notes at a certain tempo before it all just becomes white noise, correct? And if we limit our songs to something reasonable, say 4 minutes, that there can only be so many ways to arrange said songs so that they are discernible from one another, correct? Can we hear every possible variation in a single lifetime? Of course not. Humans don't live that long. But that is not the question. It is purely a theoretical question with an answer, but one that we don't have to worry about placing into practice. Btw, KidB, what did Michael from Vsauce say that made you roll your eyes? I am interested to hear.
If you think a song is different because it is played on tortoise shells instead of a piano, I'm not sure what could be said to you on this matter that would be anything but a waste of time.
I listened to the first few minutes. His approach isn't bad. It's actually similar to the one I described in the post that it was like you didn't even read. Not sure what I rolled my eyes at initially. He's not so bad after all.
I said there were limited number of ways to arrange the finite number of notes. Which there are. I said nothing of tempo, volume, etc. Just arrangement. Don't argue like droski.
Now listen to this one. [video=youtube;amGI5T0JGDc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amGI5T0JGDc[/video]
