> and that's entirely the point of music

That's very reductive. Music, like writing or painting, is a medium, not a thing with intrinsic purpose. It can be a means of communication, sharing human experience, conveying emotion, evoking feelings, expressing a story, ...

> "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth".

That space is mostly noise.

Try cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio for an example of the kind of noise that this space contains.

(If you stick with it and manage live long enough, you'll eventually hear a few bars from Stairway to Heaven. If I also manage to live long enough, then perhaps we'll be able to chat about it in a few million years.)

I can’t tell if this is sincere or parody. It is like you set out to write the most HN take on music possible.

> I see music as "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth".

5.6MB? That's an astounding number of combinations. 1 followed by 1733933 zeroes.

> If you think about it, that space contains the intro to Stairway to Heaven and Oops I Did It Again, and the end of either song. It contains every 5-second segment of O Fortuna, plus a previously unimagined O Fortuna Remix with MF Doom rapping the pledge of alliegance backwards. My point is, AI is getting good at searching music space for novel patterns, and that's entirely the point of music, not making a career out of being an alcoholic minstrel with a tour bus.

AI is not searching that space for novel patterns for the most part, it is taking what it has heard before and coming up with things based on that. Which isn't a dig at AI, that's pretty much how humans do things too. I don't think today's AIs would be able to come up with something like Stairway to Heaven if Led Zeppelin and the music they inspired had never existed though.