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>do mathematical objects exist?

Yes, they do, in an abstract sense. Existence in math means a very different thing from existence in physics. There are mathematical objects that exist, and those that cannot and do not exist. Someone posted a SEP entry earlier, which is a good start on this topic.

>the main difference between concerning ourselves with whether or not mathematical objects exists vs music

There is no 'vs', because there is no difference. Music is math, any song or sound is a mathematical object. A physical waveform that you hear can be encoded digitally in numbers: ones and zeros. So any given wav/flac file is just a bunch of numbers that give rise to the qualitative experience of sound, when interpreted in a certain way. For example, a digital waveform consists of samples, each sample takes 16 bits to encode. Sampling rate of 44.1kHz is 44,100 samples per second. So you have 16 bits per sample x 44100 samples per second per channel x 2 channels x 300 seconds = 2^423,360,000 possible permutations of a 5-minute audio file without compression, which is a number with over 127 million digits. A little percentage of these permutations would count as music (even if your tastes are really diversified), most of it would just be noise. But all these possible 5-minute audio files include not only every song and every performance that existed or will exist. They also include every possible sound recording: songs that will not be written, Paul Graham saying that he hates HN, Paul Graham saying that he loves me and the rest of the file is silence, you and me discussing this topic with Plato for 5 minutes, etc, etc. The data exists and can be discovered and listened to, even though some of these examples are obviously not physically possible (i.e. Plato is dead).

So all music already exists mathematically, and it can be a useful mindset that your job is to discover it. A lot of musicians see it that way, Tessa Violet, for example: https://youtu.be/QzBoGVToWEo?t=342



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