Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime. If I get my kid a phone, I'll be able to keep in touch with them all the time. They'll be on it all the time. He could walk to school by himself. She could see something, she shouldn't. He could chat with grandma. Friends, trolls? They can access anything on the internet. They can access anything on the internet.

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All the notes are related to each other mathematically. The connections between the notes are a set series of ratios, or as music theorists say, intervals of a semitone.

Playing notes in certain combinations or patterns reveal

things like chords and key and melody and harmony and so on. These 12 notes are the building

blocks of our music. Everything from the greatest Mozart opera to the dumbest punk song is

constructed from the same basic DNA.

Now, this might naturally lead you to believe that the number of combinations of notes would

be infinite. And if not infinite, we're certainly dealing with a very, very big number.

Actually, I have that number. This comes courtesy of a guy named Frank Barron's, who wrote about

this in something called the Arts Times back in 2004.

A quick bit of factoring, remember that from math class, reveals that there are 479 million 1,600 possible combinations of those 12 notes, if you just play them once each.

479 million combinations. But if you accept that there

are many ways to play one note, you know, it could be a whole note, a half note, a quarter note,

an eighth note, a 16th note, a 32nd note, you end up with a much bigger number, something

just north of one quintillion possible combinations. That's a one

followed by 18 zeros, one quintillion. Now, just to show you how big this number is, if you played

a new combination of notes every second, it would take you 33 billion, 63 million, 23,0006,360 years, which is about two and a half times the age of the universe.

And again, that's just for non-repeating sequences using the 12 notes of the chromatic scale.

All right, but you just can't stick a bunch of tones and

semitones together and expect them to sound good. Music has to sound pleasing to the ear

and to the soul, too. For example, this works, this doesn't. So that means that despite that

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