Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2013 May 16

= May 16 =

Is there a finite number of guitar melodies? And emotion from certain melodies.
I don't play an instrument so forgive me if this is a no-brainer for those who do. The guitar is one of my favorite instruments and I'm wondering if there are a finite number of melodies or chords or tunes - what I mean is, any combination of sounds from a guitar - that sound good? And is there a place where I can listen to all of them? If such a site exists it'll be a feast for my ears.

My second question is about the emotion exuded by certain melodies or tunes. Sometimes you hear a song and even without a singer's voice and lyrics to tell you "This song is sad." you can hear the sadness from the guitars and other instruments themselves. This is interesting. Is there an educational place I can listen to a factual collection of the melodies or tunes that exude emotion? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.65.51.113 (talk) 03:29, 16 May 2013 (UTC)


 * For the second question, we have an article Music and Emotion, and you may find this article useful. --TammyMoet (talk) 09:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Music written in a minor key is often felt to be sad. --Viennese Waltz 09:54, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * This actually might be a question worth asking at the science desk. There certainly are a finite number of melodies, and just as certainly a finite number of melodies that wouldn't sound completely horrible to the vast majority of people. What that number is, I cannot tell you. Incidentally, while it doesn't answer either of your questions, you may be interested in this short story from Nature. Evanh2008 (talk&#124;contribs) 09:47, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I would doubt there are a finite number of good sounding melodies. Taking two notes which harmonise nicely (so any combination of the two notes will make a good, if a bit boring, tune), and you could express the tune as a binary number.  There's definitely an infinity of binary numbers, each of which would represent a distinct melody in this case.  If you add in some variation in length, or some other notes (increasing the "base" of your number system), then they might even be interesting. In terms of chords, there is a finite, but probably rather large, number, so long as you restrict yourself to western scales.  If you allow any harmonic sounds, you can probably vary quite a lot, I suspect to infinity, since I see no reason why the human ear would prefer 1000 Hz over 1001 Hz (or 100.00001 etc.), so your base frequency for the chord could probably take any value.  The number of distinguishable chords is a different question... MChesterMC (talk) 14:37, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I would think that mathematically speaking, there is a finite number of arrangements of audible notes, but it would be an incredibly large number. A given note can fall anywhere within audible range, so that would be finite. Let's call it X. Each note in the song could fall within that range, so if a song has 10 notes, there could be X to the 10th power possibilities. But then there is also the duration of a note. There could be at least 10 possibilites, so there are at least X to the 10th power times 10 to the 10th power note combinations in that 10-note song. There are many other considerations. So it may not be truly mathematically infinite, but it might as well be. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:31, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Not necessarily. There are a finite number of standard notes within the audible range (i.e. stuff that can be transposed onto a staff, of consists of the 12 standard "notes" of Western music).  However, those notes are not the only possible ways to subdivide music, there are an infinite number of notes one can play, because there is no restiction on how finely you divide the audible range.  That is, I can play a note of any arbitrary frequency, not just a named note, and I can vary that note by any arbitrarily infinitesimal amount.  While the human ear may have a hard time distinguishing between notes of say 440 Hz and 440.000000000000001 Hz, as a physical matter, those are different, and you have thus an infinite number of notes you can play even between 440 Hz and 441 Hz.  Even a fretted instrument like a guitar is quite flexible, in that you are not just restricted to the notes defined by the frets: you can also "bend" the strings to create other notes; lots of guitar music has notations to perform things like a "quartertone bend", quartertones aren't notated in standard music notation; for example, a quartertone bend on a C would play a note halfway between C and C#.  As far as the "emotional content" of a melody, guitarists can impart emotion through ornamentation outside the written melody, things like grace notes and effects pedals, as well as subtle differences in pacing and phrasing can drastically change the feel of a piece of music.   -- Jayron  32  17:13, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Looking at it that way, it is indeed mathematically infinite. Not necessarily infinitely "listenable", but that's another matter. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:51, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * If you restrict to notes in the standard scale (no "half-sharps") played in the standard range of a guitar, and if you restrict to melodies using less than some fixed duration (could be very big, but needs to be capped), and if you assume that the duration of each note is greater than some minimal duration (could be very small), then the number is finite. So the number of all melodies less than 100 years long in which each note sounds for at least 1 nanosecond is finite. The number of such melodies is easy to calculate- it's (the number of notes on a guitar) to the power of (the number of nanoseconds in 100 years). In fact wolfram alpha can do this for you. It's a very big number. Staecker (talk) 17:27, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Had a rethink on this before bed last night, and I think I may be ready to recant on the idea that there are a finite number of melodies. Certainly, just taking the chromatic scale (the arrangement of an octave into twelve semitones, almost universal in western music), it's a mathematical certainty that, assuming a limited number of time in which you have to play the music, there is going to be a finite number of combinations of notes (my math suggests that, for a four-minute pop song in common time at 120 BPM, the chromatic scale allows for in excess of 20 x 10200 possible songs. That's assuming you really like sixteenth-notes and don't care what order the notes are in.) There are more possible four-minute pop songs than there are atoms in the universe.


 * That's a big number, but it's still finite (there's a point here somewhere). But there are other ways to break up an octave. Microtones can get almost infinitesimally tiny. If you want, you can break up an octave (say 440 hz -> 880 hz) into an arbitrarily huge number of microtones; tones separated by .0001 hz or less are still separate tones. So the only real limitation is the ability of the human ear to perceive the difference between those tones enough to make sense of them. Evanh2008 (talk&#124;contribs) 19:21, 16 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The OP also mentioned chords - just allowing three notes at a time cubes the number of possibilities. You also need to allow for rests, so add one more to the numebr of notes in the calculation. And don't forget volume and various playing techniques that change the sound of a note. We're not looking at the possible outputs of a simple tone generator, but all the combinations of sounds a guitar could make over a set amount of time. 38.111.64.107 (talk) 12:20, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Django unchained
What was the point Tarantino was trying to make in Django Unchained? Was it meant to be a serious film? Clover345 (talk) 11:44, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Have you seen the rest of his movies? It isn't out of place with the general tone, style, and theme of the past 20+ years of his filmmaking.  There's nothing about that film that struck me as particularly out of place with what I've seen from him before.-- Jayron  32  11:56, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Also, I don't know what you mean by "was it meant to be a serious film". I haven't seen it, but I've seen others by him, and they have comic elements as well as serious ones.  Anyway, you might like to read this short piece by Tarantino  in which he writes about his inspiration for the film. --Viennese Waltz 12:03, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Old Macintosh game, help?
I am trying to find a game I used to play as a kid on a Mac SE (possibly also a Classic? can't remember). It was a very simple side-scrolling B&W (obviously) game where you play a wizard. The wizard could jump, and had a wand that fired... wand-y things. I've searched List of Macintosh games and the web at large, but the googles, they do nothing. (Also checked the Mac Garden of abandonware, nada.) I think it may have actually just been called Wizard. Any ideas, anyone? The Potato Hose  ↘  14:38, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Andreas Johnson song on TV
Hi, got told that the music in this TV programme http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l48cuXYDAjM&t=20s is from "GLORIOUS" by Andreas Johnson. But i can't seem to find that actual melody in GLORIOUS. Am I missing something? Thanks. 80.1.143.5 (talk) 17:34, 16 May 2013 (UTC)


 * It sounds to me more likely to be based on "Glorious" rather than the actual tune. If it is the song itself, it is the orchestral theme that is the counterpoint to that which is sung in the chorus. --TammyMoet (talk) 19:55, 16 May 2013 (UTC)