{"id":1422,"date":"2009-12-11T14:09:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T22:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/?p=1422"},"modified":"2026-10-11T12:45:25","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T19:45:25","slug":"when-will-we-run-out-of-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/2009\/12\/11\/when-will-we-run-out-of-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"When will we run out of songs?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a thought: at some point we&#8217;ll run out of songs.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, there are a bunch of reasons why this won&#8217;t happen, but it&#8217;s still one of those random thoughts that entertains my brain. It falls into the realm of trivia, but I think it&#8217;d be interesting to make an educated guess at the number of possible songs.<\/p>\n<p>Here are the numbers I&#8217;d need:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Most pop songs are written at a fairly basic vocabulary level. What&#8217;s the average reading level, and how many words are in that vocabulary?<\/li>\n<li>What&#8217;s the average number of words in a pop song (not counting repeated phrases like the chorus and refrain)?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those two numbers combine to give a seemingly infinite number of songs&#8230; but the vast majority of them would be gibberish and hard to pass off as real language. So we need some rules.<\/p>\n<h3>A portion of the song should make sense<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Parts of the song need to be understood by a human, especially the chorus. (Billy Joel&#8217;s &#8220;We Didn&#8217;t Start the Fire&#8221; is a song where only the chorus makes sense.) Grammatical correctness isn&#8217;t the gold standard, since it&#8217;s possible to build grammatically correct combinations of words that mean nothing.<\/li>\n<li>Really, just the chorus is what matters.<\/li>\n<li>Phrase length can&#8217;t be infinite, because we&#8217;d lose track of the meaning somewhere along the way. So there must be an upper bound on the number of words.<\/li>\n<li>Rhyme isn&#8217;t required in lyrics, but it&#8217;s considered desirable in songs.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Combine the number of words commonly used with the average number of words in a song and it&#8217;s possible to calculate all the combinations and permutations. Then the song has to make sense, which knocks the number of possible songs down quite a bit.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; probably need a few more constraints to run this down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a thought: at some point we&#8217;ll run out of songs. Sure, there are a bunch of reasons why this won&#8217;t happen, but it&#8217;s still one of those random thoughts that entertains my brain. It falls into the realm of trivia, but I think it&#8217;d be interesting to make an educated guess at the number\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[98,105],"class_list":["post-1422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-idle","tag-math","tag-idlemusic"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/img_5029.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1422"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3424,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions\/3424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}