What Even Is Music?
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- Опубліковано 18 жов 2018
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Music means so many different things to so many different people that it seems almost pointless to try to nail down a definition, but since it's such a critical part of both my field and society at large, shouldn't we at least try? Is it just something you know when you hear it, or can we find something a little more meaningful? This is a question musicians have been asking for a long time, even in their own works, and I figure it's time to take a look at some of those answers.
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Last: • Who Named Heavy Metal?
Rap video: • Is Rap Music?
Graphic Scores video: • Graphic Scores: Beyond...
4'33 videos: • Can Silence Be Music? , • The Sequels to Silence
SOURCES:
johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work...
iris.unito.it/retrieve/handle...
blogthehum.wordpress.com/2016...
teropa.info/blog/2017/01/23/t...
www.kim-cohen.com/Assets/Cours...
music.arts.uci.edu/dobrian/CMC...
Script: docs.google.com/document/d/1D...
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Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold and Jade Tan-Holmes for proofreading the script to make sure this all makes sense hopefully!
An important note: One thing my definition implies is that whether or not something is music is an inherently subjective question. That is, something can simultaneously be music to you and not music to me. However, I think this presents somewhat of a false equivalency: The experience of music and the experience of not-music are not equally meaningful. Most things we encounter are not music (for most of us) so identifying an object as such carries very little weight. However, the experience of music can be deeply profound. Thus, I tend to think that, in cases where two individuals disagree on whether or not an object is music, it's almost always best to accept that it is, even if you don't personally experience it as such.
Also if you want to check out some of the pieces discussed, here's some links:
Imaginary Landscapes no. 4: ua-cam.com/video/0GeiEjJLStA/v-deo.html
In C: ua-cam.com/video/yNi0bukYRnA/v-deo.html
Pendulum Music: ua-cam.com/video/fU6qDeJPT-w/v-deo.html
12tone Do you have an opinion on the Islamic call to prayer? Most Western listeners would consider it music despite it not being intended to be listened to that way. I found it musical and my brain interacted with it in that way, but a Muslim friend of mine from Dubai strongly disagreed as there’s a separation between religion and music in their culture (I want to say it’s based on a passage in the Quran but I’m not 100% sure).
Are you saying that if something is deemed music by at least one person, it is music? I’m not disagreeing, I just want to make sure that I understand. I love your videos btw
Gavin Munroe that’s kind of what my question is getting at. The biggest problem i have is my mixed feelings about the role of the “composer’s” intent in whether a piece should be considered music.
Well just because something is based on subjective experience doesnt mean the definition varies or is inconsistant, i think then the definition changes to anything that COULD be subjectively experienced as music, if anyone experiences it that way then it is so, and so it becomes objective in that the objective definition is that someone could subjectively experience it as music, thus all subjective experiences are compiled into it
How meaningfull is that? Idk but its quite freeing from a creators perspective, opens up many possibilities.
I listen to patterns other people wouldn't consider to be music.
Same for songbirds. They are melodic, they sound nice (mostly) they do it on purpose (mating etc.) so it might be considered music but it's just their way of communication.
I personally like your definition. You can listen to what ever you want. When you enjoy it and call it music it is music. I'm happy to live in an era where are little restrictions to art.
Music is
W I G G L Y A I R
Feel the vibes, maaaan
I farted.
It's a masterpiece.
Adam Neely?
Да
no u
so we're finally talking about the elephant in the room
the elephant in the room is talking about the other elephant in the room
How has nobody made this joke before oh my gosh 😂
This definition of music gives the phrase "Music to my ears" a very literal meaning as opposed to a metaphorical one, which is cool.
Right! :-) See ua-cam.com/video/pkEpLtePJm0/v-deo.html after 2:00
Ah, I see we’ve entered the existentialist phase. :P
He needs to go read himself some Sartre if he hasn't already :).
IT'S NOT A PHASE, DAD!
@@erwinvandooren1075 you have book titles on mind? I'm interested
@@henripech5276 Nausea would be a good place to start and kinda keep it light. If you really wanna go all out "Being and Nothingness", but be sure to clear your calender first ;P
For some reason I want to see a pianist try playing 4.33 for 4 minutes, accidentally hammer out a C major chord and just curse and become agitated that he messed up 4.33 right at the end. Then he restarts the piece.
to me a score isn't music in the same way that a recipe isn't food
Agree. Music data is not the same as music. It has no meaning if there's no interpreter to translate it into physical or psychogical sound.
This is why the subjective definition works so well. People who are very used to reading sheet music can usually play the songs in their heads as they read, without needing an instrument. So to some musicians, a score will definitely count as music.
Improbabilities I am aware of this, but the musical experience occurs in their heads, not in the paper itself. That's why I mentioned the physical and psychological dimensions of sound. Objects by themselves are meaningless.
I agree with the idea that scores could be music, but it lead me to a follow-up question: can just the words, say "Beethoven's 5th" be music? at least for me personally, as when I hear or read these words, the piece is playing in my head for a bit. now since I haven't memorised it accurately beyond the iconic beginning, the name is clearly not the symphony, but does that make it not some kind of musical experience?
ProDreamer I say no because someone else could have somewhat the same experience (hearing that particular piece playing in their head) without never ever having heard the name 'Beethoven' before, just by remembering a show or movie they've seen that featured the piece. In that case what was for you, 'Beethoven's Fifth' for someone else could be 'Fantasia 2000'. The 'musical experience' is in all the sounds that you're remembering, not in the score or title.
I would argue that Beethoven's 5th is very much not music until it is played. A score is just instructions. The same way an instruction manual on how to build an IKEA wardrobe is not a wardrobe.
You just have to believe
When you say Beethoveb's 5th I think of the music and not the score, just like when you say Chocolate cake I think of a Chocolate cake and not the recepie for a Chocolate cake
@@Spikeupine When I hear someone say "Beethoven's 5th," I think of alcohol.
I still go by the definition my 1st year theory teacher used to describe music "Music is sound organized to express human emotion". The sound of a washing machine can be music IF someone organizes it to express SOMETHING. Banging on pots and pans can be music if it is organized to express SOMETHING. This is ultimately why rap is music. It may not be music some like, but "not liking" something doesn't disqualify something from being "music". I think a lot of people only think of music as something that sounds "nice" or "pretty" or at least primarily consonant. I love Penderecki's sound mass works. Very little there that is consonant save for the final chord of Polymorphia.
That is the definition I settled on, a few years ago, although I would tack on the word "artistically" or "abstractly." Considering the wide range of what is called "music," some of which is actually pure noise, this is the only thing that makes sense: an ARTISTIC combination of INTENTION, ORGANIZED SOUND, and EMOTION.
Music is a language of EMOTION, so feeling is very important: often a composer has a mood he wants to convey, and often you choose the music you want to hear by the mood you're in.
What sets "music" apart from sounds you hear at random in nature or society is INTENTION: the DESIRE to create (or reflect) an emotion with SOUND. So garbage cans clashed together on stage to reflect the hollow sadness and tragedy of urban and societal decay is music, but garbage cans falling down in an alley is not - although the latter is similar to the former, and might be called "like music," or "musicAL" by some. Wind chimes are musicAL: though it's a beautiful sound that can induce an emotion, there is no human intention. Someone banging metal with a hammer for work may be rhythmical and musicAL, but it's not music until Depeche Mode samples it and uses it in a song.
Singing is music, but also more complicated in that there is the literal, verbal understanding of the sounds as well as the sounds themselves. Bird song and whale song are literal communication to them, but not necessarily to us; there is no human intention, and so is musicAL.
Someone screaming in anger or fear or pain, when they are actually angry or in fear or pain, is not music, even though it is "sound organized to express human emotion." But a singer screaming to reflect those emotions ARTISTICALLY or ABSTRACTLY is music.
This is really well done. I think a lot of these points are parallel to the question of "what even is art?" I also really like The Listener's Guide's video on 4'33 in pointing out the importance of experimental works like this as they make us aware of and challenge cultural assumptions and constructed artistic meanings about music.
I agree, although for that I generally think more about Plato's definition, which more or less goes "art is constructed from someone's imagination and inspired by the world" but I'd add to it, "art is given meaning by both the artist and the audience". But the bigger issue is that's just "art" and not anything more specific like lighting design, music, painting, sculpture, scenic design, writing, etc. So, it's not helpful, just inclusive.
I think your definition is very good. My teacher of ancient music history thinks that if you want to know when did music start you have to think about when the human brain started to be able to take sounds and abstract them and give them a musical meaning (is also very likely that music was born in a very mystical context). That's very interesting because the capacity of abstraction is something that only human can do, and music is maybe the most abstract and intangible art ever.
I apologise in advance for my bad English but I'm an Italian music student and I'm still practicing my English.
When I was a kid I would dance to the beat of our washing machine.
As soon as someone creates a definition of art (or of some kind of art), they're essentially setting a goal for some artist to do something out of that definition and have it be art. I find that amusing. Also, when you started talking about speech, I thought to myself "Well your way of speaking is pretty unique and characteristic of you, it is very musical to me." When I got to the end, where you presented that definition, it felt very special as in now your speech is music... To me... According to your final definition at least.
As someone who makes harsh noise soundscapes, I really like the whole "it's music if you hear it as music". There needs to be some sort of intent, maybe not on the part of the sound source, but definitely on the part of the listener. Whether the listener is the musician of the piece or just someone in the presence of the sound that they find musical is largely irrelevant. But I do believe some level of intent is required, even if that intent is created by the audience. It's like visual art (here short-formed to simply "art"). While nature can be "beautiful", it's not "art" as there is no intent. Someone taking a photograph of nature (or making a painting or whatever), however, the image becomes art because what the photographer chooses include or omit in the photo. There is clear intent, even if that intent is "100% faithful reproduction of what my eye sees". Ultimately, "music" is in your head. Its a label we use to categorize sounds we find "musical" instead of semantic or just noise (not that semantics or noise can't be used in music, just that they are distinct categories of sound organization). It's weird topic of definitions that borders on pretentious existentialism, my favourite kind of topic XD. Great video!
Another counterpoint to Berio’s take: when I pick up my bass to screw around or play through tunes, it’s not because I wanted to hear that sound (intention of LISTENING to music), it’s because I wanted to feel my hands and bass making the sound. I think his definition wouldn’t call that music, but yours would.
But if someone was listening they would think is music.
I like your definition. That said, being too inclusive reminds me of a quote by Dash from the Incredibles: if everything is music, then nothing is (or something like that). In the end, I don't mind more restrictive definitions because they are ultimately more helpful.
I like Berio’s quote, as it’s another take on my favourite Cage quote: “the music never stops; only the listening”. It not only credits the listener with being able to take a creative role, but it sidesteps the whole tedious “that’s not even music/art/a game/whatever” argument that’s more often used by self-imposed gatekeepers to shut down conversations. Being music or not isn’t a value judgement, so once you get past that question you can get to more fruitful questions about whether the music you’re listening to is interesting, beautiful, inspiring, moving and so forth. Those are still subjective and hugely culturally determined, but I think they’re more productive fields of enquiry than trying to exclude certain experiences from being music.
Something people often fail to understand about 4'33" is that the audience isn't supposed to be listening to the _silence_ , per se, they're supposed to be listening to all the sounds _around_ the silence. In a performance of Beethoven's fifth, you'd have the same sounds- people opening the doors, the rustling of programs, the sounds of your own body, &c.- but they're drowned out by the music. In 4'33", those sounds are foregrounded. Steve Reich's Pendulum Music would be closer to Beethoven's 5th in aesthetic, since in both cases, the audience's attention is drawn to the sounds explicitly scored; in 4'33", artistic intention is turned inside-out.
Well said, some people even say that the performer actually plays the audience itself since people in the audience tend to behave differently when there is no music playing (for instance you would try to be even quieter than during a normal performance).
that still isn't really music tho, but a performance
@@gummypusswatterson1322 It IS music. The performance is the guy sitting at the piano, but that's the not the music, the music is the sound around it. The people making the sounds around the piano aren't performing, they are just being. Understanding the actual intention of the piece makes it clear it is in fact music, and not a performance.
@@ganondorfchampin that would be ambient noise
I like that answer, I go through life trying to find music in everything. Whether that's a strange rhythm in the events around me, or if it's a combination of tones around me. A great example of finding a musical quality in non music, Working in a machine shop that specialized in gundrilling, The machines when the drill is sharp, and the setup is good, falls into a harmonic series that goes from a grinding sound as it starts into the cut, once the pressure evens out if everything is right it picks up a higher pitch, very rich sound, we all know the sound and explaining it to knew trainees that sound is the machine "Singing" it has a quality that reminds us of singing, it's a strong tone and it's not one that I would describe as abrasive like most sounds in a shop. However if we call it singing, it means we're finding a musical quality in a sound that is "non musical"
Which means music happens everywhere if we want to see it. Not everything will be musical but we can certainly find a lot of it in the world around us without it having been intended as music.
Thank you for this. Although my music education has been predominantly classical, and I feel a great affinity for Baroque music, I was deeply inspired by Cage, Riley, Glass, Reich, Adams, and Corigliano (to name a few) while getting my BA. I attempted to compose in their "style" and failed miserably of course, but still find inspiration in their music. Every now and again I turn to Clapping Music or John Adams' Short Ride in a Fast Machine, or Chairman Dances. Some of my music education was in the Orff-Schulwerk method which helps students build musical experiences organically using a set knowledge of musical vocabulary (be that melodic or rhythmic). Some of my students have truly impressed me over the years with some of the improvisations they come up with. Some of the classroom experiences have been divine!
This reminds me of a definition from my philosophy class-truth being defined as "justified true belief." It at first sounds like a non-answer, but like your definition, I think it goes to illustrate just how hard it is to pin down the definition and how intuitive our understanding of the word is. Great and informative video as always.
I really like the Scene in August Rush where he walks around New York and all the noises suddenly add up forming music.
A brilliant video. The example of the washing machine you mentioned is actually very interesting; The electronic duo 'Matmos' actually produced an album called "Ultimate Care II" which is made entirely from washing machine samples. It's an example which really hits home your idea that "anything can be music".
Can anything be good music though? That album for me really hits home the idea that you can compose from samples of anything, which doesn't necessarily make it good music.
Damn, you beat me to it. That album is just such a bop.
Westby Compared to what, usual random washing machine noises?
@@TheXxmadmanxxkkk not really compared to anything, it's just a fun album to listen to. The samples are creative and they come together way better than one would think. It's not just washing machine sounds for an hour, they create some really fun beats in interesting ways. Compositionally it isnt really complex, but it's clear that that wasnt really the goal so it still works. I definitely recommend it just to be surprised by what they do.
Is it weird that I used to dance to my washing machine when I was younger?
Also I have seen the sound of a washing machine at the end of its spin cycle used for a euphoric build in a pop song.
When I took music appreciation in college the organized sound definition was the one given. The first thing I thought was that would include things like police sirens. You could make music with police sirens. But cop driving down the street is not.
One time I said a thing in a recording and then on listening back I realized one particular sentence I had said had a really cool rhythm to it. So I did the only rational thing, I looped it and made that the core beat to a song.
You had an excellent opportunity to mention Matmos's Ultimate Care IV, an album that is literally a recording of a washing machine (and is also really fantastic). If you haven't heard it, I strongly recommend it!
I have been struggling for years to come up with a definition that doesn't involve ethnocentric assumptions in it and obvious counter examples! I think one of the artists that made me question the typical definitions the most, was Pauline Oliveros with her Deep Listening idea. Once I started practicing it, it became evident that everything could be music if I was receptive.
Thank you for this video!! I love your content!
The late Morton Feldman trios (Why Patterns, Crippled Symmetry, For Philip Guston) are also fun for ambiguity in the face of extreme specifics, if that makes sense. A fixed tempo marking, but different time signatures for everyone, meaning slightly different fluctuations under each performance.
I would carpool with my best friend in high school, and he had a particular "game" he liked to play with the radio.
He'd specifically look for a Tejano channel that would fade between two songs depending on the direction the car was facing, typically with static between or taking precedence. While neither of us knew Spanish enough to "actually" sing along, we'd see how well we could do with keeping up with the lyrics and rhythms while two songs were competing for the air or even be heard at all.
It was fun, in a "Just dumb things" kind of way. Was it "Music"? I don't know if I could always say Yes. It was just too weird, too chaotic for it to come across like that sometimes.
But sometimes it would surprise us with how fluid the experience was, and we'd get excited about how songs would line up and still sound beautiful. At those times, Yes, I think we created some weird chimera of satisfying "Music". Like a live mash-up leaving editing to chance.
Fascinating thought exercise! Thoroughly enjoyed.
Philosophers noticed a while back that it isn’t music, (or numbers, or life, etc) that is hard to define. It is the word ‘is’ that throws everything up in the air. Surprisingly difficult to nail the whole what counts as ‘is’ question down. Still no consensus.
Thank you! Good thinking, well presented.
ok i like this definition the most. my one before was "if you can make a sound into music, then it is music", but yours is a lot truer because you be, say, shopping and hearing the radio and not really focusing on it. it's not really music to you then because you're not really experiencing it. cool definition.
The elephant with a fin you drew whilst talking about Jaws gives me LIFE
I like a lot discussions like this and I'm still kinda surprised how few people ask this question, so I'm glad for this video.
To add to the topic:
I don't think your definition can stand as a true definition of music. Not because it's not true (it obviously is), but because your def explains music to those who already know what it is, and some alien wouldn't get it entirely (see "Begging the question" or "Circular reasoning" fallacy).
My definition would be something like "everything you can play on a musical instrument or more instruments. Moreover, it would have some qualities like melody, harmony and rhytm either just measurably being there or being easily built up in our brains while hearing it."
Thank you for making these vids. it has sparked me to pick up playing music again
Your definition reminds of the BeeGees’ “Jive Talking”. They’ve said the rhythm came from a part a road they drove over regularly that made a funky beat they looked forward to
I am convinced that Treatise, and the radio thing, and other scores that generate different musical experiences every time they are played, are more like some kind of quasimusical assembly code. I think that means that my definition of music includes replicability, or at least an expectation of replicability. There’s only so much interpretation you can do of something where all the notes and dynamics are written down precisely; and the more control is given to player and conductor idiosyncrasy, or instruments with unpredictable outputs (like AM radio, or the coughs and squeaks of the audience of 4’33”), the less musical it is.
Where I’m having trouble is drawing a line. I can describe pieces on either side of it as either music or music-assembly-code, but the division between them is more like a gradient.
Virtually every drum solo isn't perfectly replicable, but it's still music (to most of us) - even a drum solo on it's own, outside of a song is still musical (although admittedly less musical than more melodic forms of music). Replicability explains which music tends to survive and thrive over time, but isn't an essential quality of musicality, IMO.
So like most things art wise in life and even some non forms of art, it’s subjective to each individual person. We all mostly think different in how we perceive sounds pictures etc, so makes sense and your true definition of that makes the best statement for music.
Something you briefly mentioned caused me to have a special brain-time moment. You said that speech is "too organized to be music, we've created semantic meaning on top of those sounds allowing us to convey more precise ideas than with sound alone." I've always imagined that humans created music either after or simultaneously along with speech, meaning speech comes first and then music is special speech. But your way of thinking would imply that humans spent a long time probably singing their thoughts to each other, almost like animals, only evolving more specific words later on. Mind-blown
I only have a single nit-pick (the notation for Beethoven's 5th is not music, I agree that if you can hear the sounds in your head That is music, but the paper itself isn't) so instead I'm going to share a vaguely related anecdote.
I was with a friend, waiting for public transportation home from a concert (Black Sabbath) when I hear drill in the distance, a dog starts barking and a radio starts to fuzz with static. I just sat next to my friend, listening to random chance playing music for me. It was a beautiful experience.
And he had to ruin it by talking. I never really forgave him for that.
A previous commenter, composerdave68, suggested, "Music is sound organized to express human emotion".
That is the definition I settled on, a few years ago, although I would tack on the word "artistically" or "abstractly." Considering the wide range of what is called "music," some of which is actually pure noise, this is the only definition that makes sense to me: "music is an intentional, artistic organization of sound to suggest, induce, or reflect an emotion."
Music is a language of EMOTION, so feeling is very important: often a composer has a mood he wants to convey, and often you choose the music you want to hear by the mood you're in.
What sets "music" apart from sounds you hear at random in nature or society is INTENTION: the DESIRE to create (or reflect) an emotion with SOUND. So garbage cans clashed together on stage to reflect the hollow sadness and tragedy of urban and societal decay is music, but garbage cans falling down in an alley is not - although the latter is similar to the former, and might be called "like music," or "musicAL" by some. Wind chimes are musicAL: though it's a beautiful sound that can induce an emotion, there is no human intention. Someone banging metal with a hammer for work may be rhythmical and musicAL, but it's not music until Depeche Mode samples it and uses it in a song.
Singing is music, but also more complicated in that there is the literal, verbal understanding of the sounds as well as the sounds themselves. Bird song and whale song are literal communication to them, but not necessarily to us; there is no human intention, and so is musicAL.
Someone screaming in anger or fear or pain, when they are actually angry or in fear or pain, is not music, even though it is "sound organized to express human emotion." But a singer screaming to reflect those emotions ARTISTICALLY or ABSTRACTLY is music.
I think frequency (pitch) also plays a role. As a linguist, it seems to me that one important difference between singing and ordinary speech is the frequency range employed. Even tone languages use a limited subset of the frequencies their voices can produce in everyday speech - they are clearly speaking, not singing. (Note that non-tone languages like English use a similar frequency range to tone languages, but these frequencies are employed at the phrase level instead of the word level, referred to as 'intonation'. You can hear this when raising the pitch of your voice at the end of a sentence to turn a statement into a question: e.g. It's hot outside vs. It's hot outside?).
This difference between singing (decidedly musical) and speaking (decidedly non-musical) leads me to suggest that for a period of sound to be considered music, it has to employ a minimum frequency distance. Some melodies don't even use a full octave, but this can still be greater than the entire range of the human voice when speaking. Humans can detect very subtle changes in frequency, particularly when the frequency is moving up or down, so we only need to use one or two 'notes' when speaking. Yet the most versatile singers have a range of several octaves, even extending beyond the range of human hearing! To address your example of ocean waves coming in to shore, part of the reason it's not music is that the frequency range is too narrow - waves, and most non-animal sounds in nature, don't vary much in pitch, at least not within short periods of time.
So, while I agree that what defines music is subjective, I predict that the proportion of people that will define something as music will increase as the frequency range of the sounds increases (up to a certain point, of course). This is probably also true for other components of music, like rhythm and volume. The pulses or beats (slightly louder notes) need to fall within a certain time range for the majority of people to recognize them as a musical rhythm. If they are more than a certain number of seconds (or milliseconds) apart, our short-term memory can't connect them together in a meaningful pattern, and they aren't perceived as 'organized', even if they are perfectly regular. Likewise, the dynamic range of the amplitude (volume) probably can't be too extreme - what we think of as quiet music and loud music probably fits within a fairly narrow dB range compared to all of the full range of what we find in nature: e.g. grass rustling in the wind vs. a volcano erupting (the first is typically too quiet to be music, at least without amplification, and the second is too loud, and is just noise). Another way to think of this is that while there can be quiet passages and loud passages, the difference in volume between any two notes will be limited, otherwise it becomes shocking to the listener. While we can perceive a wide range of amplitudes, from a whisper to a jet engine, we don't seem to like to combine them in close proximity. Another way of thinking about this is that the loudest notes in a piece are usually in the middle (not beginning or end) of a loud section of music, and likewise the quietest notes will most likely be in the middle of a quiet section.
One final thought I just had - music typically involves sustaining frequencies (notes) for either longer or shorter periods of time than we might find in the non-animal world. For example, ocean waves coming into shore don't sustain a particular 'note' for a significant period of time. (Even though the frequency range of ocean waves is narrow, no one particular frequency is ever maintained for more than a few milliseconds - not enough time for our brains to recognize it as a musical 'note'). In linguistics, we refer to the 'steady state' period of many (but not all) vowels, where the frequencies involved are held constant by holding the jaw and tongue still for a brief but significant period of time - often measured in the 10s of milliseconds. I think this is true for music as well, where the most common length of a note is a quarter note, which probably has a similar duration (note that both vowel and note durations change with the overall tempo of the speech/song). It would certainly be interesting to compare common note durations in instrumental music to common vowel durations in everyday speech to see how similar they are.
In short, frequency, amplitude, duration and rhythm (the regularity of notes and the duration of the pauses between them) all likely play a role in determining whether a human is likely to perceive a period of sound as musical or not. So while musicality is ultimately subjective, the factors that contribute to that subjective judgement are probably objective, and can be quantified and even mapped out with probabilities as to how frequently people will perceive something as musical or not.
Thanks😊 you opened my perception
Sounds like a class I took my freshman year in college; the first day, we got into a major argument over this very question ("just what is music anyway") and I don't remember what answer we came up with (if indeed we did at all). Ironically, the instructor played a recording of a Steve Reich piece (not the one you mentioned) to try to make the point.
I agree with your stance 100% and I like how you landed there, I have a similar definition but phrased it differently. To me, music is sound in context. That's all it is. When you contextualise a sound it is now music. This also helps explain why things like birdsong or whale speaking can be enjoyed as music. The sounds these animals are producing is not music to them, its communication, but we place it in a context and can enjoy it as an auditory experience.
It's easy to do this as well, the next time you're walking down the street just slow down and listen to what is around you with intentionality, focus on it and it might surprise you how interesting of an experience it is, yet most of the time we would just ignore all of that sound and call it noise. In this context though, it has become music.
Fascinating discussion. Love this kind of thing. 😁❤
A very good example I have of this is my ceiling fan. It squeaks in pretty much a 4/4 time signature and my friend pulled up Gods Plan by Drake and the fan synced to the violin sample in the song. We tried it with several other songs and I would honestly now count my ceiling fan as an occassionally musical thing to experience
The quote from Berio is "Cercare di definire la musica è un po’ come cercare di definire la poesia: si tratta cioè di un’operazione felicemente impossibile. La musica è tutto quello che si ascolta con l’intenzione di ascoltare musica: la ricerca di un confine che viene continuamente rimosso»" -- which means "Trying to define music is a little like trying to define poetry: that is, it's a happily impossible task. Music is everything that one listens to with the intent of listening to music: the research of a boundary that is continually pushed back."
Funny, I remember something: That piece, 4:33, is mirrored by (or the inspiration of) some experimental cinema in Infinite Jest, where the audience is shown a live feed of themselves, and the 'movie' was over when every member of the audience got frustrated or bored enough to leave. Obviously, given the book is (mostly) a comedy, it was meant to be a funny little aside, but it made me wonder a lot about what counts as 'film' or 'cinema' in almost the exact same way you're analyzing 4:33.
Just thought that was interesting. Promise it wasn't me just trying to be pseudo-intellectual, referencing DF Wallace's Hipster Bible for internet points!
I propose the following (thought) experiment. A musician plays its instrument inside a large vacuum chamber (properly protected. Wind instruments cannot be used). Outside the chamber people wacht the musician. There is absolutely no sound being generated, in contrast to Cage's 4:33, where ambient noise takes the place of the music. Only those individuals familiar with the instrument will experience the music being "not played". Actually, you can easily replace the complicated vacuum chamber by a simple muted tv. I think this proves 12tone's point, but puts the standard very high: Music exists in the mind of trained musicians and air is required to make it available to everybody else.
are these videos going to get more and more philosophical until one day you end up thinking about a question that no one can answer, then stop uploading because of it?
I wish I could say no, but if I'm being honest it's a very real possibility.
That's when he starts Vsauce4
Hey, Vsauce! 12tone here. Today we answer the question: What _is_ love?
Baby don't hurt me
don't hurt me
no more
I think youve acctually nailed a definition that can trancend our evolutions of music because it includes things like the weird beeps that my dryer makes and the musical chirpings of insects and animals on a summer night aswell as some music created by AI that sounds suspiciously like 7 nation army. and everything that we have already labeled as music even if some people don't think its music and thats okay. Music is inherently subjective so it only makes sense that something being music can be as well and like u said people will have to accept that what they didnt experience as music might be music to someone else
This may be the first video on this topic that's given me much to think about. Most videos just end up talking about 4:33, which I strongly don't consider to be music, since it means that any vibrations, and potentially even a lack of vibrations, are music, which is such uselessly broad definition that it's like calling any collection of molecules a car.
I'm of the opinion that something can be musical without being music. That narrows the definition of music that I'm constructing from what you've come up with, though it's on a similar track.
I also don't consider that radio thing to be music, even though it can contain music. Similar to how a movie isn't music.
Lastly, I'm still considering whether the microphone pendulums are music. I'm currently leaning towards yes, so long as rhythmic patterns are intended. If they're not, then I have to lean towards no, that they're musical without being music, such as crickets chirping.
While what makes something musical is ultimately subjective, certain physical properties of sound can make it more likely to be classified as music by a majority of people. The range of the soundwave frequencies (span of the intervals between notes), the relative duration of the frequencies (note lengths), the relative amplitude of the frequencies over time (volume changes), the regularity of higher amplitude frequencies, and the duration of pauses between frequencies (rhythm) all contribute to whether or not a given period of sound will be perceived as music. With enough pyscho-acoustic research, a probabilistic mathematical model of musicality could be constructed. (See my TL;DR comment below for more on why I feel this way if you're interested)
The same is true for all art, and other factors can come into play as well. For example, a parent might be far more likely to accept their toddler randomly beating on a drum as music than a stranger would be. Subjective human judgments are essentially impossible to understand perfectly because they only exist inside the brain of the perceiver, however we can use our knowledge and intuitions to generate and test hypotheses regarding what will and will not be considered 'art' by the majority of a population. As far as I know this hasn't yet been done in a scientifically rigorous way for music, primarily because it's an extremely complex multi-factorial problem, and possibly because it hasn't been that lucrative (but more likely because all the factors that go into creating a hit song or a classic piece of music are so complex that even gifted humans are only able to do it once in awhile). However, computer algorithms are getting better at composing music all the time, so I won't be surprised if we will have a more detailed theory of music at some point in the near future.
Awesome! This should've been the first of your building blocks videos. Personally I think music = sound + aesthetics - words
I love pendulum music.
It's so hard to explain, its like a microcosm of some unique definition of music,
But I still feel it as being music.
I really like "music for pieces of wood"
I feel like it produces a similar feeling: This is just rhythmic noise!!
but when you really listen and watch everything evolve it encapsulates the music of nature itself somehow.
Just like the crashing of the waves!
Words mean what we collectively use them to mean. From how people use the terms, I take the term "music" as it applies to written music to be different from "music" as it applies to the sort we listen to. To use an analogy, you can look at a tower PC with keyboard, mouse and monitor and call the collection of connected objects a "computer" and you can look at just the tower PC and call it a "computer". When you think of those 2 uses, you realize you're dealing with something related, but you also realize they're different - the tower PC you know technically is the "real" computer because of that C in PC, but when you want to use a computer, you're thinking of the connected set of hardware. They're both "computers" but they're not the same. This is of course linguistic drift - 40 years ago you would have been "wrong" to call the collection of hardware a "computer" but common usage has made both definitions valid. (I'm intentionally avoiding the other definitions of "computer" that are even older.)
Sheet music is "music" but if you ask to listen to music, you'll be annoyed if someone crinkles a piece of sheet music to make noise for you to listen to. You know when you say "music" and want notes on paper, and you know when you say "music" and want to listen to something. Just as with the tower PC above, I'm having to add qualifiers to "music" so you know which one I'm talking about because they are NOT the same. They're homonyms - words that sound the same but have different meanings. They don't feel like homonyms because you know one came from the other, but that's how most homonyms came about.
Let's call performed music "music1" and sheet music "music2" to allude to how you'd see them in a dictionary (Purely to give the dictionary framework, that is. I'll parenthetically notate so you don't need to remember which is which.). In that sense, music1 isn't music2. You could argue music2 (sheet) could include a CD or vinyl record as they are different forms of preserving music, but I think we all would agree we feel that's an arbitrary attempt to consolidate a third music3 (recorded performance). So if music2 (sheet) is its own thing, we can start to explain what's different about it from music3 (recorded performance) - and that's pretty obvious. Music2 (sheet) is instructions for making music1 (performed) and that means the more abstract and intentionally inconsistent ones can still be music2 (sheet).
We can all agree music1(performed) does not require music2(sheet) as we have evidence of music long before writing and even today we have improvisational music. I would also argue that following the instructions of music2(sheet) does not automatically result in music1(performance). Cage's 4'33" could be music2(sheet), but even if it is, carrying out those instructions does not have to result in music1(performed).
So we end up with multiple definitions of "music" which is what I feel is correct. We have to be careful and put words around it so we know music1 from music12,768 though, so we can at least minimize the "that's not music" homonym problem.
Love this one!
i agree because not only can some random sounds be musical but also actual music can sometimes for me just be random sounds when i don't feel like listening to it as music (radio mostly tbh)
A well thought-out discussion of the topic!
One thought: at around 3:50, you argue that a score or other notation is music (or at least that you can make a good case to think of it as such), even if it's not being heard at the time. Your definition, however, only accounts for sounds being experienced. Would it be reasonable to add a flip side to your definition - music is also a set of instructions meant to be interpreted as music - or are you comfortable asserting that a composition itself isn't music?
Many experienced musicians can read sheet music and audiate, meaning they can basically play the music in their head, straight from the page. So with the definition Corey provided, I'd say that a score is music.
A poem or story can either be spoken/performed aloud or written down. I don't see why the same couldn't apply to music.
That makes sense, and I agree with you - based on Corey's definition, notation can be experienced as music, even if it isn't being sounded externally.
Consider the situation, though, of a classically-trained pianist talking to a guitarist who plays from tablature. The guitarist might look at the pianist's sheet music and see it as a musical object, even if they can't hear it in their head by looking at it. The pianist could similarly look at the guitar tab and recognize it as a set of musical instructions, even if they can't audiate the piece at sight. Could either musician reasonably argue that their notation is music while the other's isn't?
To the ears of my own head, music comes together from two or more sounds coming together in a pattern.
I wish you would've touched more on the recognition of a pattern as experiential listening. I like pattern being the key consideration of music because it allows any person to hear music based on what they perceive, and the more studied and experienced listeners of the world find more music in it because of how many patterns they can recognize.
suckerpinch's video "ARST ARSW: Star Wars sorted alphabetically" is a really really direct and literal form of "organized sound": the sound isn't just organized, it's sorted by an arbitrary metric.
I love your definition❤
Your voice is music to my ears
Nice video man :D
Music: the combination of 4 elements melody, rhythm, harmony, and the expression of the soul. Expression of the soul is open to being the performers soul, or the listeners interpretation of sound. Also, all 4 elements do not have to be present simultaneously for it to be music. A melody by it self often implies harmony and rhythm; and harmony by it self often implies melody and rhythm. This definition would make In C and most rap music, music. Whereas it makes the Cage pieces not music. By your definition I could hypothetically say that Beethoven 5th is not music because to me music is rap music. I think that both are music regardless of ones experience of ether.
Keep making awesome videos that keep me thinking.
Musoc is something with notes that are known as soundwaves that are put tohether that is plesent to others ears.
I like your definition of music, it's very _existentialist._
I used to work at a factory and the sounds the machines would make I always found musical reminded me of nine inch nails "Ruiner" or "Reptile"
A Saucerful of Secrets en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Saucerful_of_Secrets_(instrumental) is a cool exploration of Not-Music to Music.
since you mentioned washing machines as music... every time i turn my washing machine on it plays a nice G major arpeggio, then when i press the button to start the wash a Asus2 arpeggio plays and my mind always itches for it to resolve to a E major. i hear it in my head every time and i really want to make a song out of it. its got this nice G to E chromatic mediant thing going on with the Asus2 bridging the two chords in the middle (or an inversion of Esus4 depending on how you think about it)
i think too much about theory sometimes
Orson Welles, in his prologue to the song, "Fall of the House of Usher" by Alan Parsons Project, perfectly describes what music is.
Is that a Matmos reference with that washing machine bit at the end there?
This is one of the best videos in the history of UA-cam
Oh wow. I guess your definition feels right to me. I find myself harmonizing with fans ovens elevators... Anything. Microwaves always make me want to hum a Minor 3rd up for some reason. And my personal favourite. Many car horns sound like the opening to chemical plant zone. Which means my morning commute is filled with me internally enjoying 16bit sonic music
I agree with you. Surely the concept of music is a purely social construct, so anything which a culture (or individual) holds to be music is music, regardless of whether it fits any other consistent definition?
In that way, asking "what is music" is quite similar to asking "is it still Theseus's ship" - it is if you still think of it as such
Should we use the word being defined in its own definition?
You don't have to... you could say that "music is anything experienced in a certain way" and you could follow that up with "as exemplified in these brain scans" for example, rather than "which we would describe as 'musical'".
Steve reich's Its gonna rain parts 1 and 2 and come out are very strange hypnotic audio phasing music.
Glad to see (I think) my own definition there at the end, if I understood it correctly. After encountering quite a few prejudiced people who say things like "this (genre they don't like) is not music", I thought about it and got to Berio's definition, if I understood what you said. I like to say that music is any sound made with the intent of being music (so 4'33'' does not count, since it is only absence of sound and nothing else). Yes, intent has to be there, for me --so dancing to the dishwasher noises or to the cicadas or to the machinery noises from the factory floor does not mean those sounds are music; too broad and loose for me (if someone records them and uses them for a musical piece though...). By the way, I use this same definition for art (art is whatever has been done with the intent to create art). It seems to be the only fair way to define these things.
I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.
The existence of this question is what got me to think about the "Is rap music" debate. I've always answered the question in light of music as an art form, in which I'd always answer yes.
However, in light of music as a Rigerous feild with a stict definition I didn't really know what to think. I never answered the question in light of what music actually was or a technical level. I thought "Well it can't be in that case". But, with that definition Gregorian chants wouldn't be music either, having almost no rhythm. We then in beat boxing music? Is only drumming music? Is tapping a pencil music? Under a strict definition the answer would have to be no. That, however, would just be ludicrous. Solos classify as music, ambient aounds classify as music, a tympany (Tympony?) run is music.
In the end, I think the *technical* answer is rap, as well as anything else including primative monody, beat boxing, and druming isn't music. But, if we put aside technicalities and strict definitions, and focus on music as a broad artform then these things have to be music. We circle back to the idea that the question it's self is irrelevant to begin with. Like you said is not that everything is music, its that everything can be music.
What is X? It is a thing with the property of being X.
Ahh great, glad to have that cleared up then.
Really love this definition. As a guy who does dance to his washing machine, this really captures my sense of what music is/isn't.
I think about it in a similar regard to that one man who took a urinal wrote with a sharpie that it was a fountain, and displayed in a museum. It’s a thing where it’s the specific intent that matters
im a simple man
I see twelve-tone
I press like before watching
This has been my answer to this question for quite a while... Music is defined by the listener rather than any particular objective properties of the sound or the process used to arrive at the sound.
Music is music if you say it's music and that's about the best definition anyone's going to get.
I agree and want to point out that "music" like any form of art isn't actually a thing that exists in the universe, it's a concept humans apply to their perceptions of things. You can't ask "what is music" in the same way you'd ask "what is a tree" since they're such fundamentally different things, trees actually exist as independent things in reality* but music doesn't. So at its very essence music is "any sound, or lack of sound, that someone regards as music." It's circular but that isn't an issue since it's been artificially conceived as circular.
*Ok, trees don't actually exist either and are another form of perceptual concept derived from large groups of very small particles but that's another can of worms that has very little to do with the main topic and would only serve to muddy the explanatory waters. My philosophy degree wouldn't let me submit this without the addendum though, pulled the perceptual concept of a knife on me and everything.
I'd argue that if something is perceived to exist, it does exist, because qualia should be the primitives we are working with, not particles.
@@ganondorfchampin That's a valid starting point, but I think it's a less useful one due to its implications.
If we assume a material world then your mind, along with its perceptions, are a product of that matter doing... something complex, I'm not going to pretend to remotely understand how we gets minds out of brains. That would mean the qualia are necessarily a side effect of the physical world.
If we want to build a foundation with qualia first then it seems like you'd need to either reject the material world (which likely leads to solipsism and thus never really being able to progress meaningfully beyond "I exist," not the most interesting worldview to discuss) or take on the seemingly impossible task of proving some sort of mind-body dualism with an immaterial world interacting with and influencing the material.
You can absolutely go that route though, and I'm definitely just taking "I'm probably not a solipsist and an external reality does exist" as an axiom with no compelling reason you need to also do the same. I think that's an axiom most people would want to accept though and that would then likely lead to the "particles first" (or whatever the smallest building blocks of physical reality might be in a hypothetically "complete" scientific model) approach.
@@TheSquareOnes I'd take a third option: qualia is a property of material (not equating this material with particles, just something in the physical world so qualia can be invoked as a material primitive, there is no need for dualism or solipsism), and all other properties of material can be explained in terms of their impact on qualia. This is more of a can in theory than in practice, but truth by told all objective properties of matter are just abstractions of qualia, because at some point any measurement must be observed, and the observation of that measurement is a quality.
@@ganondorfchampin Observed by what? Do you see how you're skipping a step before even getting to the qualia? You have to first account for where the mind comes from.
Maybe I'm just missing what you mean by "qualia" here though, if so it might help to define what you're talking about specifically.
@@TheSquareOnes No I don't. The mind does not need to come from anywhere more than the particle fields need to come aware. That's the advantage of making it the primitive instead.
Qualia are the atomic components of subjective experience. Beyond that they don't need to be precisely defined, just as the theory of atomism is agnostic to whether the actual atomic components of the universe are molecules, atoms, quarks, or something else. The assumption is there are some sort of irreducible mental components.
Music is in the ear of the beholder... - Great video!
This reminds me of the definition of sound itself, or colours. In a world with no ears or eyes, these things are just waves. There are probably things even we are missing out on. If hammerhead sharks made art, it wouldn't really reach us
The washing machine example is a funny one, because I have seen a video of someone with a washing machine sound they did find musical, followed up with using that as a foundation for a song.
Whenever I get an MRI I attempt to detect rhythm patterns in the banging sounds the machine makes. It helps me deal with the claustrophobic feelings of being in a tube.
ok now I need a video about harsh noise
I must say that I'm firmly in the "everything is music" camp, or at least, believe that all sound is musical. I don't make much of a distinction between regular human speech and rap, for instance. Certainly one can be "more musical" than the other, but I don't see any line to be drawn between them that's not arbitrary.
In short, I think of sounds as having different degrees of musicality, rather than thinking of them as either musical or "unmusical".
Pretty true man. Obviously, the continuous exposition to cathegorized music doesn't help many people in figuring out that both everything beyond a 4/4 cheesy pop song and the pop song itself are just "sounds" that we interpret as music
Your videos bring up a lot of helpful, thought-provoking points. At the same time, your definition of music is eating itself.
But I'm the kind of guy who thinks cannibalism is objectively bad, so maybe the inevitably ensuing discussion is an exercise in the sort of human futility which the great UA-cam mirror is ultimately meant to show us.
But, hey, change my mind.
Or, don't.
This is the best definition of Music I've ever come across
I agree mostly with this video, but I would like to spitball a bit about 4,33. I know, how original. At (6:21), I thought: "True, you have to know what music is, but does that mean you have to think that this is music? Surely you can go into a performance, knowing what music is but expecting performance art, and have the same experience as someone expecting music. Someone purposefully playing air guitar to a song you can't hear as a performance would be, in my opinion, a performance art piece or a dance. It would not, however, be music, even though it's almost the same as 4,33. This isn't to bring down your definition, in fact it backs up the experience ideas and the subjective nature. I'm just still debating whether that particular piece fits personally.
Also Steve Reich is awesome, his train pieces are the best.
So this video touches on a related question, but doesn't answer it: what is a *piece of music*. The answer to the original question was determined in reference to the sound ultimately produced, but the context that sound was produced in was according to some description of a piece of music that was performed, priming people to accept the sound as being music. However, the sound that was produced is not the same thing as the piece, as each of the pieces described can produce a range of different sounds which are then perceived as being music. So what is it that makes all these different sounds the same piece of music? In all the examples provided, they are united by their score/instructions, but this certainly doesn't apply to all pieces of music - contrast them with a folk song preserved only by oral traditional, or electroacoustic improvisation captured only by the mp3 it was directly recorded into. Is there a way of identifying if two different sounds are instances of the same piece of music?
Summary: "What makes music music, rather than sound (and/or it's absence) is like the difference between a meteor and a meteorite. If what would be music was not made as music, or herd as music, then it is not music, but if what would be noise or silence is made as music or herd to be music then it is. Just like the same rock made from the same materials can be a meteor or a meteorite depending on weather it is moving through space or has hit a planets surface, the same wiggly air can be music or noise depending on weather it was never felt, or has hit someones heart"
You definition would fall into "organized sounds" because it doesn't have to be the musicians the ones who organize the sounds, it can be the listener while listening, and it can be organized to be intentionally disorganized too.