I recently heard of a computer program (requiring an insanely
powerful computer) that could take various pieces of
music by the same
composer, and after crunching a while, output some music that could pass as being
written by that composer.
The potential for this technology is astounding. I envision home computers becoming fast enough to perform this process in real time, and also being able to accept music with lyrics and handle inputs from various composers.
What this would lead to is the ability for your computer to compose your own, personal infinite song. You would input, say, your 50 favorite songs to start with, adding other songs you encounter later on. It would then start to play the infinite song as it recieves output from this algorithm in real time. You could give it feedback, such as notifying it if a certain section of the music sounds like shit, or if it played something truly amazing and it should try to come up with more like that.
Certain musical themes might be temporarily retained and repeated for effect, but the music would never loop. Your musical preferences would change before the program ran out of music to generate.
You could pause the infinite song between the times when you have the opportunity to listen to it, but rewinding would be discouraged. You could expend the same effort to give the program feedback so that it could eventually generate music even better than the section you wanted to hear again.
The song would have elements of all your favorite composers and/or bands. It would incidentally sound boring or unpleasant to most people other than you.
I predict, with the large advances in computing, that this technology will exist before the year 2020.