> I don't know much music theory, and this is what I've been wondering. There are hundreds of songs written every year. Many have new and catchy tunes, but some sound too much like others that have come before. This prompted the question--whether there is a limit on the number of feasible melodies. Of course, there can be infinite different arrangements of notes, but most of them would be discordant and not suitable for melodies. Another qualifier is that there is a practical length range for a melody, I think: super-long ones would be hard to learn and forgotten early, and super-short ones can hardly be called tunes. So, with these things in mind, is there a limit? We will ever reach it? I suppose we might, and then we will merely plagiarize creatively. Or we could change to a new system that doesn't use twelve tones, thus opening up an entirely new playing field.
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> gab"Imagine trying to distinguish eighty-fourths of an octave"by

This is precisely the argument put forward by microtonal music advocates (see my post below here). But the problem with microtonal music, of course, is the one raised in your closing middle-name comment. Namely, to most of us these intricate little microtones will just sound like the same note played off-key lots of times. :) It's one thing to ask composers to retrain *their* ears; asking the audience to do so, in the competitive world of the music industry, would probably be certain death. (Not that some artists don't try, and probably make a passable living at it.)

Myself, while I think microtonal music has potential (any new art form has potential), I don't think we should give up on the 12-note chromatic scale *quite* yet. :) After all, it's not what melody you use, it's what you do with it. I remember some great jazz improvisers could fill whole records with amazing riffs on the same five, four, or even three notes. (Okay, three might be an unconscious mental exaggeration on my part, but still.) Style is still a very big factor, and the same melody (or variations on it) can make many, many very different pieces. Mozart, Bach, and Duke Ellington all worked at proving this. :)

After all, it was over a hundred years ago when some person or other said all the great plots for novels had already been taken, and that old novel still isn't dead yet. And while the postmodernists have undoubtedly invented worthwhile new ways to tell a story on paper, and I wouldn't want to give up *any* of the new media technology has brought us, I don't think the novel will die for a long, long time. Or the stage play. Or the epic poem. Or the orally-transmitted folk tale.

It's not a bad thing that a song reminds you of one you've heard before; if it reminds you of a song you've heard before so that you don't enjoy it, that's just a sign that it's a bad song and the composer was unskilled. A great artist can make you feel like you're hearing that one chord for the first time all over again.

Art"never dies, it just keeps coming back in new ways; that's the beauty and wonder of art"hur