What is music?

blue hell · Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2005 12:37 pm Post subject:

Why not, there are two more apart from the stolen one.

Jan.

elektro80 · Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2005 12:43 pm Post subject:

Oskar · Joined: Jul 29, 2004 Posts: 1751 Location: Norway

Yentl is mental. Cool

zynthetix · Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2005 6:58 pm Post subject:

mosc · Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2005 7:17 pm Post subject:

I haven't heard too many twelve tone tunes on the pop charts... Laughing

Noise music - who is the first person credited for noise music? I mean noise intended to be music. Anyway, noise is something that is gaining acceptance. I think it's because people can control the noise and morph it. Noise is then another musical vehicle for self expression.

Some experiments work out better than others...

play · Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2005 4:17 pm Post subject:

mosc · Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2005 9:49 am Post subject:

Johan Zwart · Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2005 3:52 am Post subject:

[quote="play"]

mosc · Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2005 10:14 am Post subject:

Well, I could rephrase, but I wanted the discussion to be more general.

Here's another thought, probably half baked...

Human's developed language a few years ago and immediately started using it not just to communicate with one another, but to think. There are whole philosophies and sciences about this. I've even heard it said that something doesn't exist if there isn't a word for it. While language is great, it does have a downside or two. For one, it separates us from our essential consiousness - or core non-verbal awarness.

Music, seems to provide a function for us - it brings us to the level of non-verbal consiousness. With music we can experience things and communicate things for which there aren't any words, or at least we can bypass language processing.

Johan Zwart · Posted: Fri Jan 21, 2005 1:27 pm Post subject:

I guess, music started with the imitation of the sounds of nature.
Like the overtone singing of the Mongol people is an imitation of the sounds of the wind.
Maybe music is a way to synchronize with (our) nature.
Music can have any kind of function.

Someone said "music is organized sound".
I would say music is "structured sound".
It can be structured on the base of rhythm ,melody ,harmony or even gaos.

play · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 11:04 am Post subject:

Johan Zwart · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 2:24 pm Post subject:

LoKi · Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 10:30 am Post subject:

my 2 cents:

Music is deliberately created sound which triggers an emotional response.

Any sound can potentially trigger an emotional response, but in my opinion - to qualify as music, the sound MUST be created with the intention of triggering that (non-specific) response.

steampump · Posted: Fri Mar 25, 2005 8:30 am Post subject:

Music is the recall of the sounds of our body. We are feeling and hearing the beat off our heart, the noise of our blood trough our heads. We need different rythm at different times. The rythm of love is not the same as the rythm of revolution. Our rythm is not the same in morning , in the middle of the journey or in the evening. We do find analog music around the world because we have the same ears and have the same feeling when we hear harmony or dissonance. Our ears have same limits in frequence and differentiation ( 2 savatar).
The memory is the tanks in which we combine sounds and emotions we are learn since our life is beginning . This is what we call musical culture.
If we have so much noise in our music today , this is only because we have so much noise all days long and this is the reason why arborigines have not invented the Techno....

dmosc · Joined: Jun 23, 2003 Posts: 298

Wout Blommers · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 3:03 pm Post subject:

Art and emotion are always in dialog. Emotions are only at the part of the receiver, in whom art can change or reinforce (or other doings) the emotions. The receiver must be able to sense the emotion, though. One has to be in the mood or must be able to get into that special mood (drugs?).

I had a very strange experience, lately. On the same day my future wife to be and me visited two different locations, where an 'echo-scope' were made of our soon to be born child. The first one produced only sounds, like the heart beats of the child. My emotions ran out of my eyes... Later that day there was an moving image of the baby, but it didn't reached my soul that deep. My face was kept dry...

The sound was intended for medical use, but my moods transposed it towards emotions. Kind of a 'ready-made'. Not exactly a 'deliberately created sound'. But it was music to my ears!

Wout

redskull · Joined: Aug 16, 2003 Posts: 203 Location: Texas

In my opinion, music is existence, and everything tied to it. When a black hole is born, there is sound, albeit unaudible by us. When a plant grows, there is a distinct sounds that acompanies the growht, albiet below our range. Sound resonates in the atom and the quark, in the zeon and the axion. It is the bloodstream to all that lives, breathes, and moves...whether we see the motions or not Wink

ian-s · Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 2:29 am Post subject:

dmosc · Joined: Jun 23, 2003 Posts: 298

nescivi · Joined: Mar 23, 2005 Posts: 94 Location: Montreal

Sound is a wave and a lot of things are waves, but I think it is logically incorrect to say that therefor all waves are sound.

It is surely possible that one wave can be converted to another (like radio waves to sound waves, sound waves to brainwaves), and that one type of wave can thus create a resonance in the other wave.

I suppose it is a matter of definition. If we define sound as the mostly linear pressure variations, which we can perceive with our ears, without physically hurting them (in such cases the pressure differences would be getting to the non-linear domain anyway), then I suppose we have something we can talk about.

I suppose music would then be the kind of sound, which creates in us an emotional or intellectual resonance.
This can happen at intentionally organised sounds, but also in accidentally organised sounds (such as a specific sound scenery, a special constellation of sounds that we come across). In the latter case, we could wonder whether not our mere presence at the specific location at the specified time, makes the listener the composer in a way.

Which reminds me of a wonderful experience I had in the evening of a very rainy day in Singapore. I was walking through a park and at a certain place I was so overwhelmed by the sound of all the frogs there, that a park surveillance person got the impression that I was very lost... well, I guess I was, but in a very beautiful way. When I could break loose from the rapture, I went looking for the frogs, and found that they were inside the little water canals, which were designed to transport the rain water elsewhere. These little canals provided a perfect resonance body for the frogs' mating songs.

ian-s · Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 11:49 am Post subject:

elektro80 · Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 2:03 pm Post subject:

seraph · Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 2:08 pm Post subject:

Stanley Pain · Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 12:54 pm Post subject:

i'm going to annoy you all by rendering all your posts obsolete. Smile

this may sound arrogant, but i won't take credit for the following, i must have just read up a lot more than the rest of you... Razz

i am yet to hear any better explanation of what music is than when John Cage responded to the same question by saying that music is

"sound that has been noticed".

you ever been on a train and started tapping your finger on the armrest in time to the wheel mechanism?

you ever noticed the beauty of bird song?

you ever noticed how a C major to Ab major chord just sounds... kinda nice?

you ever noticed how satisfying it is on a dance floor when the bass is dropped one bar sooner than you would have anticipated?

you ever noticed how much nicer your car journey is when you remember to turn off the airflow once the windows have demisted?

John Cage thought that an artist's job is to notice the beauty in the world around them, and i guess in reference to Charles Baudelaire that can include ugliness too.

a composer would notice sounds but then also have the ability to present them to an audience... if only to say "listen to this".

if you can think of any musician or musical event that is exempt from this rule, do let me know.