This course is an introduction to one of the most basic questions in the philosophy of music. The course includes an historical overview, though most attention will go to contemporary, (late) 20th-century ideas about the problems and (im)possibilities to define music.
What is ‘music’? A complex amalgam of melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre and silence in a particular (intended) structure (Hanslick)? A sonoric event between noise and silence (Attali)? A ‘total social fact’ (Molino)? Something in which truth has set itself to work (Heidegger)?
Music. In the first place a word. As a word, it has meaning. As a word, it gives meaning. Take sounds for example: this sound is music. Which actually conveys: ‘we’ consider this sound as music. Music – as word – frames, delimits, opens up, encloses. To call (‘consecrate’ as Pierre Bourdieu would say) something music is a political decision-making process. As a grammatical concept, ‘music’ is useful: using this concept, we differentiate between various sounds. We divide, classify, categorize, name, delimit: not every sound is music. Although, since Cage, no single sound is by definition banned from the musical domain. The word ‘music’ brings (necessary) structure and order into the (audible) world.
But, there is also an other music; there is a ‘musical dimension’ that is much more difficult to capture in words. This dimension might be indicated as ‘the sensual’, something which can and should (at least according to Søren Kierkegaard) only be expressed in its immediacy. This immediate – perhaps one could also speak of ‘the physical’ – is erased at the moment when it, through reflection, would be conceptualized; it is by definition indefinable and therefore unreachable by means of language. There is thus something in music which can only be expressed through or as music. The moment that language tries to pinpoint this something, it dissolves and is lost.
So, is it possible at all to define – that is: to incorporate into a linguistic category – music?
Authors discussed: Plato, Eduard Hanslick, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Howard Becker, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Richard Littlefield, Jacques Attali.
I love muzic so well i want to be the best musician in the world help
In order to really love music, it is not necessary to become a musician and certainly not the best one …
I would even go so far as to state that trying to become the best will severely damage your love for music …
music is a means through which we can communicate our emotions, founded in love, able to express all we feel, tonal, sung, spoken, a gathering of sounds and spectra that form our aural experience, quantifiable as both idea and physical.
WHAT IS REALLY THE CORRECT DEFINITION OF THE WORD MUSIC?
Hmm, IMO a ‘correct’ definition will be hard to give. ‘Correct’ seems to imply a certain truth, a rightness which everybody will have to agree on and which has some notion of universality.
Perhaps we could rethink ‘de-fining’: instead of coming up with clear boundaries, music is in an almost constant process of change …
Perhaps the only thing we can agree upon is that it still has something to do with sound (also silence has something to do with sound).
what is music?
Music is organized sound created by human voices or instruments.
Some historians believe that music started with the desire to imitate sounds in nature.
“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without” – Confucius
what is music ? is the organized sound and silence which is pleasant to th ear …..
Music is fulfillment.
Music is the creation of the feelings of the musician or the creator of the song. She is an ordered sound sequence, which can only unfold in our free minds.
Perhaps we could rethink ‘de-fining’: instead of coming up with clear boundaries, music is in an almost constant process of change …
I fully agree. And indeed, it is definitely not about finding a description of music which is valid for all times and all places. It might be interesting to study how musical developments prompt scholars to rethink accepted and operative definitions. And of course the opposite: scholarly work also changes musical praxis, making certain things possible by opening up, discursively, the field of music. Perhaps we should take ‘to define’ more literally: to de-fine, that is, ‘to not come to an end or a conclusion.
To define music is not to “incorporate it into a linguistic category”. (It is not clear to me what this expression means – when you call a certain class of biological organisms “dogs” are you “incorporating organisms into linguistic categories”? No, you’re just simply referring to certain things in the world using coordinated noises and squiggles).
There is a difference between defining words/concepts and defining the things to which those words/concepts refer. To define something is to state what properties that thing has in every possible circumstance in which it exists. In the case of water, this is having a certain molecular structure – H2O – but “H2O” is not what “water” means. That water is H2O was an important *empirical* discovery. Not something you could know by inspecting the meaning of the word, the same way you know that no bachelors are married simply by inspecting the meaning of “bachelor”.
Defining music or art is not like defining water, though, because music and art are not natural kinds. Yet, not being a natural kind doesn’t mean music only has a “nominal essence” (i.e. that to be music is to *called* music by some group of language users). Social kinds are, obviously, “socially constructed”, but being socially constructed doesn’t mean to have an arbitrary nature; it doesn’t mean absence of logical or metaphysical constraints. For instance, language is a social kind, yet what makes something a language is not being called “language” by some social group. In fact, humans had language much before they “socially constructed” the concept *language*.
Instead of looking for a property or set of properties common to *everything* we call “music”, we should see whether among the things we call “music” there are distinct, theoretically interesting kinds of things. Is “musique concrète” music in the same sense that a Haydn quartet is music? Is “4’33” music at all?
I favour in music a similar strategy that I favour for art. Supposedly “anti-aesthetic” art is only possible and intelligible because it is seen against the background of traditional art, which has an aesthetic function (as well as representational functions, and many other socially valuable functions). Without traditional art, readymades and “conceptual art” would not be intelligible as art. Likewise, without the traditional art of tones and rhythms (and this has nothing to do with a privilege of western tonality), “musique concrète” and 4’33” would not even be intelligible as candidates to the status of music.
I believe that thinking about the nature of rhythm, melody and harmony – the experience of tones, which is a unique phenomenon – is the best way to understand the nature of music. Music consists, primarily, of sound events produced intentionally to sustain the experience of rhythm, melody or harmony (to listen to a sequence of sounds as having rhythm is sufficient for it to be an instance of music, where rhythm is not to be confused with mere regularity). To experience sounds as music is to experience them as tones. Given the ability to experience sounds as tones, we form the concept *music* to refer sound events intentionally endowed with the properties that allow us to hear them as tones, and once we have that concept we can extend it beyond its natural domain, as in the case of “musique concrète”.
Vitor, many thanks for your interesting reflections. Allow me some reactions:
(a) I’m not sure if defining music along the concepts of rhythm, melody, and harmony is sufficient to distinguish it from other sonic events. Many sounds and sound sequences have rhythms, melodies and/or harmonies, but don’t belong (necessarily) to the domain of music. (Which doesn’t mean that they can or will never belong to music.)
(b) I fully agree that e.g. musique concrete and 4’33” could never have existed as music without other composers and works which stretched the contemporary ideas on what counts as music and what not yet/anymore. Of course the two examples you give would never have been accepted as music in – let’s say – the 17th century. So, involved in any definition of music should also be a kind of historical development.
(c) The question I’m sometimes asking my students is, if we can listen to music without knowing what music is. Can we listen to music as music without any predetermined idea of music? To hear something as music, seems to imply that we have a concept available, a concept called ‘music’. Of course we hear ‘the same’ sounds without having the concept of music at our disposal, but it only becomes ‘music’ when we this label becomes available.
(d) Making art/music doesn’t necessarily have to be intentional. Many objects which today are subsumed under the denominator ‘art’ were not intentionally produced as art works (e.g. religious objects, Lascaux paintings, sports cars, etc. but also works by children and animals). Again, it is the historical development which has turned these objects into art works.
(e) Music/art is a total social fact. Provocative implication: we might arrive at a definition of music that is not based anymore on sound/silence …
Music is a well arrange or organize sound that is pleasant to the ear
Music is art or science of combinig vocal or instrument sound to produce beauty to form,harmony and expression of emotion it is way to communicat or send a message music is the most powerfull thing ever to be heard and I know through music we get healing we fall inlove and get to experiance all sorts of emotions musicans feel and I as a christian find spiritual relieaf to talk to the father in communication to get close to him through music
What is beauty? Is every music beautiful? What messages is music able to convey or to communicate? How speculative will any answer to this question (necessarily) have to be?
However, I agree with the important role, function, and position music has in our contemporary society: music has something to ‘say’ about love, spirituality, etc. and plays a role in all kinds of experiences.
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What is music? I think it as well to answer ‘What is pi?’ Pi cannot be defined to the final digit, and, so, neither can music. Of course, one may reply that pi is to math what musical potential is to music: there is no final piece of music, just like there is no final digit of pi. This reply is good to me, then. But, it does not define music, for we know the definition of pi by knowing a circle: pi is implied in the circle. To know a circle is implicitly to know pi, even if one is not cognizant of the fact that the ration of its circumference to its diameter is ‘irrational’. One even may assume, mistakenly, that the ratio is a ‘rational’ number. So it is to know music without knowing music. Music is the ratio between the circumference of the globe of language and the volume of the globe of music. It’s one and the same globe.
Will it be correct if I define music as the art of combining sounds either by singing or by musical instruments into harmonious tunes that are pleasing to the ear which is produced for entertainment and is capable of exciting passion.
Several questions can be asked with regard to your “definition”:
1. Is music always about “sounds”? E.g. don’t forget “silences”.
2. What is a musical instrument? Any device that can produce sounds (and, therefore, music)?
3. Harmonious tunes? Why only harmonious? Lots of music is not really harmonious.
4. Pleasing the ear? Lots of music is not exactly pleasing the ear.
5. Produced for entertainment? Lots of music is not (primarily) meant to entertain.
6. Exciting passion – does that distinguish music from “non-music”?
music is expression of emotions and diseminating of informations either by a vocal voice(melody) or vocal voices(harmony) with or without an acompaniment of an instrumentalist or instrumentalists and vise vesal.Music basically has to do with written or printed(compositions), which also has to do with tones, rhythm and pitches. Infact music is also an art of performance.
Music is an expression or creation of different emotions by using sound and silence.
Music is the combination of sound or solfars which are pleasant to the ear
“the art of arranging tones in an orderly sequence so as to produce a unified and continuous composition”. In reality, music does not have any one concrete meaning. Music has different meanings for different people. Music is unique in each person’s life. To a musician, music is their life. They eat, breathe, and live music. Music is their passion. For others, music is a hobby, a pastime. Music is something that arouses interest and is pleasurable. The casual fan may learn about music, how to read music, how to sing, or how to play a musical instrument, but they do not have the all encompassing passion a musician possesses. Music is a means of relaxation for some, while others simply enjoy listening to the sounds, melodies, and rhythms that music brings to their ears, minds, and hearts.
The following definitions are taken from an article that defines music according to different perspectives.
Music is science
It is exact, specific; and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor’s full score is a chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody, and harmony all at once and with the most exact control of time.
Music is mathematical
It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done, not worked out on paper.
Music is a foreign language
Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French; and the notation is certainly not English &endash; but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language.
Music is history
Music usually reflects the environment and times of its creations, often even the country and/or racial feeling.
Music is physical education
It requires fantastic coordination of finger, hands, arms, lip, cheek, and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic back, stomach, and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.
Music is all of these things, but most of all
Music is art
It allows a human being to take all these dry, technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion, call it what you will.
Human speech is not music. Though I agree that the same part of the brain is needed to analyze both speech and music. Music is a thing drived from the speech-like quality of an absence of dissonance. What is deemed musical must conform to the universality of a rigid meter and also posses an absence of dissonance over this rigid meter before it can qualify as music. Note that music as I have described resembles speech because of this absence of dissonance in human speech. With that said, a phrase produced by an instrument or a vocal becomes music only when it modulate a metronome without any perceptible dissonance. Some human speech phrases would do this(especially in the metric poetry of Robert Frost) while others won’t.
My problem with this kind of argumentation is that it excludes socio-cultural issues. What music is, is not decided on the basis of neurological research alone; music is first of all a cultural phenomenon. What music is is decided by people in a specific temporal and geographical constellation. If people agree that “everything that happens within a certain time frame” (or at least everything that sounds within a certain time frame) will be called music, it thereby becomes music. Furthermore, I can listen to speech (especially to languages that I don’t understand) as if it is music or in more or less the same manner as how I listen to other musics.
Imagine a universe in which there is no human or other animal life, and no consciousness, but in which waterfalls naturally, constantly, and endlessly produce the melody of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.
This waterfall-melody is not being produced as ‘music’ in the sense in which music is a product of conscious, or subjective, beings. Is this waterfall-melody *therein* music? Certainly us subjective musical beings can find the melody structure itself musical. But just because we find it musical, does that mean it is music?
Of course, if all we want to ask is ‘Is it consciously produced as music?’, then no, the waterfall’s instance of the melody is not music in that sense. In other words, the waterfall’s instance is not an *artifact*, but merely the result of some natural process, like the wind blowing, or like a tree being blown by the wind.
I suppose this question amounts to asking whether consciousness is at least as fundamental as are natural processes. But if we define music as a particular experience of conscious beings, then to ask whether this hypothetical waterfall’s instance of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star is in itself music is beside the point.
Music ultimately is what is *experienced*, regardless of whether the source is intentional at all or not. In fact, without the _experience_ of something being musical, can any music qua artifact be consciously *produced* by conscious beings to begin with?
Let’s see if this discussion is still alive:
Recent neurological studies have shed new light on this question, and as a musicologist this has opened up a whole new path of ideas for me to wax philosophical on.
It seems that Broca’s area, the area in the brain responsible for speech pattern recognition and speech production, is just as active when listening to music as when listening to speech. When listening to sounds not generally considered as being musical, Broca’s area is not active. This leads us to an idea of music possibly being an evolutionary byproduct of the development of speech in early humans. One could perhaps even say music is “Grammatical sound”, or, if we want to be very narrow in our definition, “any sound that arouses Broca’s area upon listening to it, independent of its semiotic content”. Or would this not capture the ‘essence’ of music, the sensual as Kierkegaard would say?
Hi Dylan,
Thanks for your contribution. I’m not very familiar with the domain of (bio)neurology but I do think it has interesting issues to contribute to thinking about music. One of the conclusions I draw from your text is that speech, usually not considered as being musical, should be considered as such for the simple reason that it activates Broca’s area. Would a possible explanation be that we’re never only listening to its semiotic content but also to its melody, e.g. to understand whether we’re listening to a question, to an ironic remark, a joke, etc.?
If neurology will be able to capture music’s “essence” is quite another thing. I’m at least convinced that the relation between music and a listener is also based on corporeal reactions, taking place outside, next to, beyond or before any brain activity.
Music is the only language where everyone in the world can understand in terms of communication to express the feelings and emotions.
Oliver Sacks begins the Preface of his 2007 book, Musicophelia, by recounting that the fictional Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi novel Childhood’s End, had no musical sense; had no subjective, experiential concept of music.
So it could seem that it is rightly supposed that people who ever have lacked any measure of audition are precluded the experiential concept of music.
But this supposition profoundly overlooks something. At worst, this supposition could be espoused in combination with the presupposition that those born strictly lacking audition have no sense of rhythm. I take it for granted that (1) otherwise normal humans have a sense of rhythm, and (2) a sense of rhythm is inherently a musical sense.
This is not to say that human musicality is restricted to any overt sense of rhythm. Much normal human musical experience is not about a ‘rhythm’. But the human-pragmatic mid-range of duration that we normally think of by the term ‘rhythm’ is by no means the ontological limits of a biological sense of rhythm.
So, to my way of thinking, any biological sense of rhythm is as musical as, say, blue is both colorful and light-ful. I think all natural living biological systems necessarily are musical. Therefore, I think that the idea that Arthur C. Clarke’s fictional Overlords had strictly no musicality is an idea that conceives musicality too narrowly, too simplistically, and too pragmatically in merely human ‘musical’ terms.
Mr cobussenma, u always react to people’s post but u have not make any attempt to define the term “music” please mr man your not helping @ all. Thanks
Hi, okay, let me give you the “definition” of music I most often use: music is what people at a certain moment (in history) and at a certain place (the Western world) regard as music. This “definition” at least indicates that I will not use any intrinsic sonic characteristics to separate music and musical sounds from non-music or non-musical sounds.
This is a good start to an essential kind of definition.
But most humans are not abidingly interested to understand ‘What is music?’ merely from within the anthropocentric/exclusive usage of the term ‘music’ (which normally is meant merely for human sonic artifact). The perceptual definition you are using here does not specify whether it includes non-human animals in the range of perceivers of ‘music’.
Is it a boat, or a duck? Is it a boat or a non-human-produced bit of drift wood? Is a seabird riding on that driftwood? ‘What is music?’ is like this. Not all boats are those by humans, even though by far most of the non-human boats are not boats by any standard of artifact.
This is a good start to an essential kind of definition.
But most humans are not abidingly interested to understand ‘What is music?’ merely from within the anthropocentric/exclusive usage of the term ‘music’ (which normally is meant merely for human sonic artifact). The perceptual definition you are using here does not specify whether it includes non-human animals in the range of perceivers of ‘music’.
Is it a boat, or a duck? Is it a boat or a non-human-produced bit of drift wood? Is a seabird riding on that driftwood? ‘What is music?’ is like this. Not all boats are those by humans, even though by far most of the non-human boats are not boats by any standard of artifact.
Hi, it’s true that my “definition” excludes the possibility that animals “know” the concept of music (which doesn’t mean that they cannot perceive something as what humans would call “music”). So, indeed, “music” as a concept is an anthropocentric term (just like “sex”, “football”, “french fries” and “computers”).
Is it a boat or drift wood? Yes, that’s the point. Depending on the context a drift wood can become a boat (or v.v.). Depending on the context certain sounds can become music (or v.v.)
Hi, it’s true that my “definition” excludes the possibility that animals “know” the concept of music (which doesn’t mean that they cannot perceive something as what humans would call “music”). So, indeed, “music” as a concept is an anthropocentric term (just like “sex”, “football”, “french fries” and “computers”).
Is it a boat or drift wood? Yes, that’s the point. Depending on the context a drift wood can become a boat (or v.v.). Depending on the context certain sounds can become music (or v.v.)
Does music require a decision on behalf of the listener as to whether it is music or not or an intention of the performer as to whether it is music or not or is there the possibility of music as a thing in itself, is this perhaps what Kierkegaard referred to as the “musical dimension”?
I have another question, when someone is talking we may call it musical but it is not intuitively considered music, although speech is often used in music, but as soon as the speech turns into singing it seems to gain some kind of added musical quality, perhaps through the line or form or pitch added, if there is no distinction between what is not music and what is, is there perhaps “more music” and “less music” … Does this make sense? Or does it not have this kind of measurable quality?
I have a final question, in terms of listening, I feel that everything I listen to informs the music I am able to create, in this way listening seems to provide some kind of archive of information that informs what I am able to produce. Then I wonder is everything we create in terms of music only a reconstruction or recombination of what we heard? Is this how we “learn music?”. My question then is, is music created from combinations of what we hear in the world or perhaps more precisely, the sound combinations we consciously categorise as music and then re-organise into new patterns or is there an added ingredient or perhaps even a something beyond the hubbub where we find inspiration?
(I have an added question but perhaps it is more nuerological. Also does what we listen to translate into action, does what we listen to literally move our fingers on the piano or manipulate the muscle in such a way that it makes singing possible? In other words what is the relationship between listening and the action of music making?)
Too many questions – but the blog got me thinking.. 🙂
Dear Anna-Liisa,
Challenging questions … One of the questions I’m sometimes asking my students is if we need to know what music is before we can listen to it (as music). The majority thinks “no” but in my opinion the concept of “music” is a linguistic concept with which we categorize objects, subjects, events – in this case a sonic “stroke”. If music is part of a much larger sonic environment, we do need to know what it is in advance before we can select those sounds which are “meant to be music(al)”. So, in that sense, not only everything you listen to informs the music you produce; it’s also a matter of enculturation. Not a solipsistic “decision” but an intersubjective interaction with present, past, and future.
As for the “neurological question” – in Musicophilia Oliver Sacks is quite explicit about a direct connection between listening to music and music making – well, provided that we can make such a distinction at all. Said differently, is listening in itself not already a way of making music?
We seem to get all hung up over definitions. We could even go so far as to inquire the meaning of “definition”. If by “definition” we mean what something “is”, I will continue along this line. First, I wish to address your reluctance at finding a definition for music, even implying its impossibility. Although some things may be very hard to define or resist definition, that does not necessarily mean that a precise, all inclusive definition does not exist. For all the verbal stumbling, confusion and posturing, there does seem to be a lot of consensus over what music “is”. We listen to it. We talk about different kinds of music. We talk about how it makes us “feel”. Although what is considered music may change over time, certain commonalities remain. The most important one, which should be beyond dispute, is sound. Along with silence, as you mentioned. But not just any sound or sounds. It seems pretty clear, whether the sounds are produced by humans or not, whether intentionally “as music” or not, that certain criteria must be satisfied in order for us to perceive sounds as “music”.
1. It has a certain order or pattern – hence the relationship to Broca’s area and speech pattern recognition. It seems hardly a coincidence that music is referred to as “the universal language” – it would appear that music is indeed a language, an actual form of communication.
2. The sound frequencies have specific relationships to each other – hence the comparison to mathematics – which I believe music is a direct physical expression of.
In other words, music is a sonic form of mathematics.
3. There is some kind of regularity and order in the timing of sounds in relation to each other – again suggesting a form of communication (language) and mathematics.
There may be other criteria as well, but I will leave that for someone else. Because I’m a bit tired. I must say music as a whole certainly stirs the passions – I who have trouble writing to anyone took the time to respond to this. It’s certainly an important part of my life – becoming more and more so as time goes by. I certainly believe it is a very important language by which to communicate our emotions and the state of our
society – and in a much more powerful and visceral way than words or speech ever could.
Dear James,
Many thanks for your (re)action. My reluctance or reticence of defining music mostly comes from the problems I have with definitions of music that still rely on so-called intrinsic qualities of music. Stating that music can be defined by “specific relationships that sounds have to each other” or that music has “some kind of regularity” might not be untrue but many other organized sounds which are not (in the first place) music share the same principles. That’s why my “definition” is a rather minimalistic one: music is what people at a certain place and time consider as music. And of course this is influenced by past and present circumstances (e.g. what has been considered previously as music, what kind of categories are “available” now). Sure, sound is perhaps the most important feature that all musics (up until now) share; but, again, it may be a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient one.
And sure, somehow music is a means of communication. The question, however, remains as to what it communicates.
Music is a powerful and unique phenomenon through which and in which we are able to effectively communicate and share our feelings, views, opinions and desires, and to others and the outside world using words and musical instruments in an organized and orderly manner.
2 Brief reactions to this “definition”:
(1) Re the first part (about communicating and sharing feelings and opinions): this might be a necessary condition but not a sufficient one as we do that through many other media as well.
(2) Re the organized and orderly manner: of course, music is neither completely chaotic nor random. However, to what extent can we still speak of “organization” – already in 1951 Cage made clear that marking a time-frame could/should be enough to let music happen. IOW, no “internal” musical organization is needed.
Music, is a human beings’ way of making time interesting!
I think of music as something we feel, if you’re in a bad mood or could lift your spirits, it could also make us cry or laugh. When you listen to music you can feel what the singer felt, you could communicate with the singer. I listen to music everyday and it’s the only thing that makes me feel good about the world, my self, my life, and my day.
So music is basically something that helps me to be myself.
Dear Annie,
Thanks a lot for your rather personal contribution to this little blog. What you’re expressing here is most probably felt by many many people: music has an important function in our society and in our personal lives, sometimes protecting you against the outside world, and also helping to get rid of negative vibes. If you’re interested to learn more about the role and position of music in our contemporary society you might like to visit the MOOC I’ve made a year ago: https://www.coursera.org/learn/music-society
The question here is if you’re short reflection on what music does to you is sufficient to be used as a definition of music, the necessary and sufficient conditions to call a specific (sonic) event music or not (that is, “just” sound).
Responding to your comment, specifically the question of what exactly music communicates, Annie’s comment, and mine as well, albeit briefly and near the end, states that music appears to be a method of communicating various emotions – you can just pick up on that in a very instinctive way – different tones give one different feelings – like for example some sounds seeming to feel cheerful, while other sounds, particularly minor, sounding “spooky”. There definitely appears to be qualities in the tones themselves which appear to represent various emotions, moods, and even seemingly “good” or “evil”, among other things. It appears that we simply don’t know enough, in an intellectual sense anyway, to fully articulate and flesh out the intricate and complicated relationships between tones and the various other aspects of music with the corresponding emotions, vibes, ethics, values, intentions and all the other possible emotional nuances involved, to be able to give definitive verbal statements about what exactly a particular piece of music may be communicating in its entirety, although we can often get a general sense of a particular vibe or message to the music – in the feelings that it evokes in us, in the way that we respond to it.
In terms of what we define as “music” as opposed to being just sound, it would seem that what we would consider to qualify as being music has enough qualities in its various aspects of tone, rhythm and other relationships for it to convey some kind of coherent message, feeling or vibe that is still mysterious in terms of trying to explain in some kind of verbal analysis.
Some random sounds not created by humans or other living organisms could, by chance of accident, have enough of these qualities to be able to convey some kind of message or feeling and hence satisfy our criteria of what we consider to be music, therefore leading us to interpret it as so.
I believe in the future we will become much more enlightened about the deeper meanings behind all this – we will understand more about our relationship to various tones and vibrations. Taking something that I heard from the world of physics, the fact that we, and all matter, are the lowest vibrational frequency of energy – we’ve all heard that matter and energy are simply two different sides of the same coin – so this would seem to indicate that music, being composed of vibrational frequencies, is a language in its most fundamental and purest incarnation.
Thank you for giving us this platform to explore the still many mysterious aspects of that most beloved, ethereal, and, I’m sure, timeless phenomenon. I’m sure there is still much more for us to discover about its various aspects in the years to come.
Dear James, thanks a lot for continuing this interesting topic. For sure, music arouses (I prefer this word over “communicates”) feelings and emotions (pace Hanslick who would say that talking about emotions and feelings would move the attention from the music “itself” to the listener) but so do many other sounds (e.g. the cry of a baby, church bells, sirenes, or clanging pots in Chile and so many other countries).
I’m not convinced that “aspects of tone and rhythm” are able to make a distinction between musical and non-musical sounds. Of course, Cage’s 4’33” remains a crucial “soundmark” here. Instead of relying on any intrinsic characteristics of sound to make that distinction, I’d rather say that the way sounds are framed (put into a specific context) which make some of them music and others non-music.
Your remark about tones and – especially – vibrations is very important in relation to the arousal of feelings and emotions. Here we enter another domain, that of frequencies, of resonances, and affective tonalities instead of the cultural divide between musical and non-musical sounds. This domain deals with how sounds enter our bodies, how they affect our mind, how they unconsciously work on our being.
Hi, thanks for your reply. What I think I’m trying to say here basically is that music has an element of non-randomness – that is the main criterion I think we use to distinguish music from non-musical sounds. In other words, it requires an intelligent, creative imput. Some sounds not created by sentient beings could potentially be interpreted as music if they, as I mentioned in my last message, have a pattern to them which we find pleasurable or interesting, and/or their pattern somehow seems to create a message interpretable by our emotional, as opposed to our intellectual, understanding.
What I think I forgot to mention previously, when I brought up the idea from physics that we and all matter are considered to be the lowest vibrational state of energy, is that it would appear to be, in some sense, that we actually ARE music – or rather, that we are both vibrational states of energy; music being then in essence a kind of creative echo of our own existence. Hence the language connection – the similarity to language in terms of activation in Broca’s brain – and the emotional connection – the sense that it “resonates” with our emotions, that it is the “universal language” – which I believe to be the language of emotion.
That is what I find to be an interesting possibility: that we and music are parallel constructs –
we, after all, are an ordered, patterned being whose existence seems to follow some sort of rationale: hence why not the same for music? You could distinguish music from random sounds the way you would distinguish human beings from a more “disorganized” state of matter – let’s say some flotsam floating on a lake. Music could parallel us not “only” in terms of being vibrational frequencies (that is a very big “only” ), but also in terms of being a very highly sophisticated, organized “entity” – it has order, patterning and a “rationale”.
Thanks for listening – I hope I was able to convey more of my own “rationale”.
Dear James,
thanks a lot for your interesting addtional observations! I do agree with you “some intelligent and creative” intervention is indeed required. Taking that to its edge, this could mean that simply “consecrating” something as art/music would be sufficient (think e.g. of the recent banana duct-taped to a wall by Maurizion Cattelan, or even cleaning beaches from plastic as an act of eco-art).
Your remark about vibrations is extremely interesting and relevant, I think. Discourses in sound studies and sound art have already explored this path in the past decades. Regarded that way, music would just be a specific type of vibrations, e.g. those that happen between 20 and 20K hZ and which are named and framed by people as music. Considering “everything” as vibration, or as “in vibration” would indeed lead to a connection between music, human beings, and nonhuman beings/events. This is certainly a path worth to be explored in more depth. Do you (or anybody else who’s following this blog) know of any literature in that direction????
My own definition of music is the sound made from inspiration and energy
Dear Oghenekuvie,
I agree with you that inspiration and energy are very important aspects in making as well as listening to music. What I’m looking for, however, are necessary and sufficient conditions that define music, that is, that separate music from non-music. In that sense I can think of many sounds that are – to use your words – ‘made from inspiration and energy’ that will not (always) qualify as music. I was for instance thinking of the yelling of football supporters yesterday during the final of the female soccer European championship: lots of inspiration and energy, but is it music????