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.

What sort of music are you most familiar with/like the most?

Western art music (i.e., the sort commonly described as "classical").

how much you know already about the formal/scholarly theory of music.

I know a diminished seventh from a minor third and a ritornello from a ritenuto, I can tell you which bit of a classical sonata-form movement is the exposition, and I have a tolerable understanding of the relationship between timbre and tuning systems. But I couldn't enumerate the different species of counterpoint, express any useful opinions about the relative merits of two serialist works, or write you a convincing musical analysis of "Yesterday". If that (either explicitly or via what I didn't think of mentioning) doesn't tell you what you want to know, feel free to ask more specific questions.

Western art music (i.e., the sort commonly described as "classical").

Well, first of all, note that the music that system generates is entirely derived from the model's understanding of a dataset/repertoire of "Western art music". (Do you have any specific preferences about style/period too? That would be useful to know!)

For a start, note that you should not expect the system to capture any structure beyond the phrase level - since it's trained from snippets which are a mere 8 bars long, the average history seen in training is just fo... (read more)

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

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

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