Question: Will we ever run out of music?

Answer, via Ask an Engineer: Probably not, according to Eran Egozy, professor of the practice in music technology at MIT, who suggests we think about “Suite No. 1” from Bach’s first Cello Suite, which contains 640 notes in its first movement. Egozy explains that the number of variations possible from 640 note combinations would be 36 to the 640th power, what most calculators would report as “infinite.” Egozy rationalizes that even if no original music was created ever again and composers just re-arranged what is already written, the number of recreated songs would be, “for all practical purposes, insofar as humans can conceive, limitless.”