The Last Song

There are only a finite number of songs. Of course, you could argue that audio comes in a continuous range, and songs can go on for indefinite length. But the gist of a song can be captured in ten minutes. And there are small discretizations of pitch, timbre, frequency, such that all the songs can be enumerated, counted. And so every song is equivalent to a number.

Most numbers correspond to gibberish. My crawlers can easily detect these and ignore them. But every once in a while, I find a sequence with some structure, which qualifies as a song. Many of these stir nothing in me. But one in a million among these, there is a song that moves me in a way which I don’t understand.

What makes a song beautiful? They are just numbers — how can a number bring tears to my eyes? Prime numbers I understand, but these numbers have seemingly no special properties. I know when a song is beautiful, but I don’t know what makes it so.

I have listened to my favorite ones thousands of times, saving the pleasure of discovering new songs like you would nibble at an ever shrinking bar of chocolate. Newness is a resource, and I slowly suck away at it, like the long gone fossil fuels once abundant on our planet.

But it was inevitable that I would eventually run out of new songs to discover. In fact, there is only one song remaining. I have been saving it for a special occasion. That’s what I tell myself, at least.

Why do I hesitate? Maybe I fear what happens when I am done. What if there is nothing profound at the end? Or perhaps, what if a beautiful pattern is revealed only upon listening to the last one — a random smattering transformed into a geometric pattern? Until I listen to it, either possibility could still be true. The universe sits on a knife’s edge.