Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s

It is difficult to judge at first, but it appears that some music genres (classical and jazz especially) have seen a radically slowed or non-existent output of significant works in recent decades. By significant, I mean works that would be seen in league with the most acclaimed artists in the genre (eg Beethoven, John Coltrane). In a similar way, there is a building popular consensus that Hollywood is not pursuing original ideas as much anymore and is relying on rebooting old stories and franchises. But is this because of a fault of the Hollywood system, or is it because there are few significant movie story ideas left that have not been done?

It seems to me that there are limited possibilities in art (or any field) of what we can discover or create. It appears that the matter and rules of the universe (in concert with human nature) manifests itself into these limited possibilities. When we develop a field or genre, we learn and create at an increasing rate but then eventually "complete" the field (in a boom and bust pattern).

I wrote a brief article called The Big Niche to try and explain this concept.

The relevant questions seem to be:

Do you agree that from experience and observation, we can tell that certain genres or fields appear to become completed?
Does this concept or another concept best explain what is happening?

I'm interested if any of you agree with this line of thinking or have other possible explanations of this phenomena.

I wrote a brief article called The Big Niche to try and explain this concept.

The relevant questions seem to be:

Do you agree that from experience and observation, we can tell that certain genres or fields appear to become completed?
Does this concept or another concept best explain what is happening?

I'm interested if any of you agree with this line of thinking or have other possible explanations of this phenomena.

I really like your thread: thank you for writing me back!

I think you have good intuitions about how sound works. I don't think I can determine whether there's a consensus on what is good: I'd venture to guess that any audio humans can perceive sounds good to someone. A friend of mine sent me an album that was entirely industrial shrieking.

But I agree with you that there's a limit to the distinctness -- humans can only divide the frequency spectrum a certain number of times before they can't hear gradation any more, they can only slice the time domain to a certain extent before they can't hear transitions any more, and you can only slice the loudness domain to a certain extent before you can't hear the difference between slightly louder and slightly quieter.

We can make basically any human-perceivable sound by sampling at 32 bits in 44.1khz. Many of those sounds won't be interesting and they'll sound the same as other sounds, of course. But if nothing else, that puts an upper limit on how much variation you can have. In ten minutes, at 32 bits, in 44.1khz, you have about 840MB of audio data. You could probably express any human-perceivable song in 840MB, and in practice, using psychoacoustic compression like MP3, it would take a lot less space to do the interesting ones.

I think that for us to run out of music, the domain of things that sound good has to be pretty small. Humans probably haven't produced more than a billion pieces of music, but if we pretend all music is monophonic, that there are four possible note lengths, and twelve possible pitches (note: each of these assumptions is too small, based on what we hear in real music), then you only need to string six notes together before you get something that nobody has probably tried.

What I was really responding to were these ideas that I thought were implicit in what you were saying (but I don't think you thought they were implicit):

if you try every human-perceptible sound, most of them will sound bad. (we don't know if they'll sound bad because there's a ton of variation in what sounds good)
if you try every human-perceptible sound, most of them won't be distinguishable. (The search space is so big that it doesn't matter if 99.99% of them aren't distinguishable. We don't know, in general, what makes music ideas distinguishable, so we don't know how big that is as a portion of the search space. If you think that this comes down to Complex Brain Things, which I imagine most composers do, then figuring out what makes them distinguishable might reduce to SAT. see all the things neural network researchers hate doing)
we are good enough at searching for combinations that we have probably tried all the ones that sound good. (there are so many combinations that exhaustively searching for them would take forever. If the problem reduces to SAT, we can't do that much better than exhaustively searching them)

I think that some of the strategies we use to search for musical ideas without having to solve any NP-complete problems have dried up. Minimalism is one technique we used to generate music ideas for a while, and it was easy enough to execute that a lot of people generated good songs very fast. But it only lasted about a decade before composers in that genre brought in elements of other genres to fight the staleness.

After a couple hundred years, Bach-type chorales have dried up. (even though other kinds of medieval polyphony haven't) The well of 1950s-style pop chord progressions appears to have dried up, but the orchestration style doesn't seem to have. (If we think "nothing new under the sun" comes down to Complex Brain Things, then we can't know for sure-- we can just guess by looking around and figuring out if people are having trouble being creative in them.) A lot of conventional classical genres don't appear to have dried up -- new composers release surprising pieces in them all the time. (see e.g. Romantic-style piano. Google even did some really cool work in computer-generating original pieces that sound like that.)

When these search strategies die, a lot of composers are good at coming up with new search strategies for good songs. We don't know exactly how they do that, but modern pop music contains a lot of variation that's yet to filter into concert music, and my gut tells me that means the future is pretty bright.

Thanks!

Yes, you are getting into the heart of what I'm trying to examine. This concept began to form for me as I was writing and recording rock songs and trying to create a distinct sound within that genre. New distinct music is largely created intuitively by people borrowing on the past but adding variation (like you said). But songs contain a more specific balance of factors than I think people realize, which makes a song more like a complex puzzle than just a complex combination of attributes. Many factors must sync together correctly including chord progressi... (read more)

0bogus9y

The best results in computer-generated romantic piano music are actually not from Google but from an unaffiliated researcher - see Composing music with recurrent neural networks. It's true that Google Brain has released some generated piano sounds from their WaveNet, but those (1) are not actual piano sounds, rather they're the network's "dream" of what a piano might sound like; a real piano could never sound like that; also (2) these samples have comparatively little long-term structure, as a natural outcome of working on audio data as opposed to notated music. These results are actually the reason I don't buy that "strategies we use to search for musical ideas without having to solve any NP-complete problems have dried up". Neural net inference doesn't do any NP problem search, and this network creates rather innovative music simply by virtue of successful generalization, enabled by some very good (I'd even say outstanding) features of the model design.