Topmusicanswers
For the first section I've discounted rhythm so as to focus only on the permutations of notes. All melodies should be contained within an octave — C to C' inclusive. Any of the 13 chromatic notes of the octave can be used.
...
Four to infinity.
| Length of melody | No of possible melodies |
|---|---|
| 2 | 25 |
| 3 | 469 |
| 4 | 7,825 |
| 5 | 122,461 |
- Is there an infinite number of melodies?
- Will we run out of melodies?
- How many melodies can you make with a piano?
Is there an infinite number of melodies?
No matter how you represent a melody, as long as the representation uses limited and quantised metrics – like a music score over a certain number of bars does – the number of possible melodies is finite.
Will we run out of melodies?
The short answer is yes, there's a limited number of sounds we can hear and thus a finite number of possible ways of combining them. Don't panic, though. Before you start stockpiling melodies and burying riffs in your garden, you should know that there's still a lot of them left. ... New tunes are out there.
How many melodies can you make with a piano?
If you're talking about all the notes and all the traditions of music around the world, the combinatorics yields functionally infinite possibilities for the melodies that result. Take just the 88 notes on a piano and, for instance, 12-note sequences. You get 216 sextillion melodies.
