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Combinations, Permutations: How Many Possible Songs Are There?
Even though each type of musical property (melody, harmony, rhythm) has a finite number of elements, when you multiply out all the combinations and permutations, you get a practically infinite number of possible songs a songwriter could write. That’s what combinatorial means.
- Chomsky’s universal generative linguistic grammar describes the brain’s ability to compile an inventory of words and apply a set of combinatorial rules.
- Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s universal generative musical grammar describes the brain’s ability to compile an inventory of tones and apply a set of combinatorial rules.
The whole human brain is a combinatorial system, a parallel-processing neural organ of computation. Using mentalese (described below), a discrete number of mental symbols can be combined and recombined, using as many modules and sub-modules as necessary. In other words, humans have the ability to think up, or imagine, an almost infinite number of possibilities, because thought is itself combinatorial. That’s why behaviour is infinitely variable.
Both music and language use small numbers of elements to generate an infinite number of combinations of word phrases and musical phrases. Therefore, it’s likely that the brain function of combinatoriality evolved before the evolution of separate music and language specialties.