hmm, here's one for you:
It was recently suggested to me that "all sound is music" (which i personally think is crap,)

but, When does sound become music?

and before you answer, consider the pitfall. If you believe all sound is music, then what are we in fact doing when we say we're making music?

ie, at what point (if all sound is music) does what I am doing to sound justify itself, if not to become music? to express myself? that's selfish.
are composers then selfish, usless things? if you believe all sound is music then all composers/producers actually do is turn what is already music into "music as they see it"
it makes musicians look like sound fascists

(or you could believe not all sound is music, and that we are useful people doing a service to ther world {carving sound into music})

Sound is music when a musician says it's music

Every sound has a pitch, but just listening to cars passing on the motorwy is not music. It would be music if you were to sample or synthesize the sounds of the motorway and manipulated them in such a way as to include some sort of structure (but not necessarily a rhythm or melody). It is a creative process that transforms what you would otherwise consider everyday sounds into music.

Changing the sounds of traffic (somehow) and presenting it as a piece of music forces the listener to re-evaluate everday sounds and listen to the musicality of them.

This may be a bad example - but the sounds of motorways influenced Kraftwerk to make Autobahn. And they were building on precedent: just think of the number of songs (mainly American) about railways and steam trains, either lyrically or rhythmically appropriating the clack-clack of a train going over points.

I disagree. In the right context, the sounds of a motorway could be considered as music.

Define the context! If I (as a musician) told my colleague that the motorway noise they could hear was music they'd tell me to piss off.

Music is sound that's been organized by someone.

Ok, so it's our job to basically appraise sound for it's artistic value and declare it music if we deem it such?

sound like a cross bwetween a Dj and a Jeweler

Ah, but that says more about the listener than the musician (or the music).

I'm sure you will find those who would feel it was music. So even if a single listener thinks it is music then it is music

Only last week, I pulled over on the bypass, and recorded ten minutes of traffic passing by (hear my next album).

I believe it is music. Music is in the ear of the beholder.

now now, let's try keep on topic, "I believe it is music" is just that: a belief; what I;m asking is when does sound become music?

you just judged it(the traffic) to be music then, and you are a musucian, so the idea of a sort "jeweler" type figure taking a stone and deciding it to be a gem fits perfectly with a man recording traffic and calling it music. all gem are rocks. but not all rocks are gems.
Like wise all music is sound but not all sound is music

are you saying you called the traffic "music"? and that that's the difference?

I'm saying it's in the ear of the beholder.

The question is similar to: what makes a woman beautiful?

My thinking on the matter is directly related to presentation - if the sound is just there, on the motorway, it's just sound, if you assemble a group of people to come and listen to it, or repackage it as a musical recording then it's music. Clints definition is a good one (and it is a position which both Landy and Wishart argue) but the use of 'organisation' can be misunderstood, whilst taking sounds cutting them up and putting them in a different order are organisation, equally, taking an unadulterated sound and selecting a portion of it and presenting it to people is also organisation.

I have oft argued that it is the notion of presentation which makes 4'33" such an interesting piece, and it is the presentation of it as a performance which makes it a piece of music in the first place. The other thing is that presentational methods are the only thing which could be said to be broadly corporate across the musical spectrum - people playing, people listening, Rx/Tx type process.

Duchamp's Fountain is a really valuable piece for this discussion. It's not music, it's "sculpture" I guess, but it does clarify for all time the basic argument across all artistic disciplines.

Duchamp's position was that a urinal was elevated to the status of artistic object when it was selected by an artist. Egg's recording off traffic is art if he selects it to be art. Doug's definition works in both the case of Fountain and in Egg's case - Duchamp's urinal became art when he entered it into an art exhibition, and Egg's traffic sounds become art when he puts them onto an album - but that definition raises a question: can't you make art that's not meant for presentation? J D Salinger apparently has been writing books for 50 years without showing them to anyone. Is it art because it has an audience of one (the artist)?

The answer to that question has serious ramifications regarding whether it's imperative for an artist to find an audience.

Duchamp didn't only select the urine and present it, he turned it upside down!

I'd call some pieces of art audio sculpture rather than music. I think that describes them more accurately. We need more names for organized sound than just "music" nowadays, methinks. There's more stuff around.

A sound is music when:

1) there's a ryhtmic pattern within it, and or

2) there's a tonal development which is pleasant to the listener.

Or more simple:

A sound is music when the listener feels that it is music.

I would say that actually presenting it to an audience is not imperative, its the process of organising it so it *could* be presented to an audience. In some cases (live performance modailities in particular - the motorway performance mooted above would be an example) that might involve, to some extent at least, the piece actually having an audience, in order to validate it, but actually having an audience is not the be all and end all.

Clint and Doug said everything I would say, but in a more erudite way, so I'll add nothing.

I disagree with Nemmo's description; e.g. Phil Niblock's music is definitely music, but it is neither rhythmic nor tonally progressive. What about Noize? What about the old guy who thinks anything made after 1967 isn't music? I think saying music is only something subjective, that each listener has his own definition, is lazy.

"Organised sound" is the best definition I know of, where 'organised' is used in its broadest sense.

I Don't thing you can really say "Music is in the ear of the beholder" Eggman, it dosn't answer any question because it leads to: what is it that the ear beholds?
and for that matter what then, could be the difference between beautiful sounds and music?

ie wavs crashing on the shore while you take a walk at the beach: it's most definatly a beautiful sound, and not music.

It is if i decide to do a cover of 4:33 while listening to it.

but anyway..

I think this question boils down to the same fundamental problem as any such question (what is art, what is human, what is reality).
And the answer to all of them is that it is just a word, an abstraction(and in music's case an abstraction of an abstract expression, d'oh). The word itself contains a lot more meaning to most people than what any definition will be able to provide.

I think trying to break apart a word searching for a meaning will always lead to disapointment, as the full meaning of it doesn't lie in the word itself. The true meaning of a word lies in the collective understanding of it shared between the people using the word.

Trying to search for general definitions like "Music is organised sound" are missing the point more than anything imo. To me that the nihilist version of musical philosophy or what to call it. That definition is completely dead and boring. If that's your opinion you've sort of given up trying to figure out what it is, or rather what it can be.

I'd rather hear people say stuff like "music appears when a person are able to transmit a piece of his soul through an instrument". That's at least showing a bit of passion.

That's too narrow. There are all kinds of music that aren't meant to be a mode of self-expression. And in any case, that gives too much consideration to the author of the work.

Yeah, but my point is that it doesn't necessarily matter if one definition doesn't directly equal the meaning of the word, because I think it's the multitude of several millions of people's different understandings of it that makes up the true meaning of a word.

In responce to Per's earlier post, Music was never an abstract idea, that's a new thing.
"Music can be anything you like" is fine I'm not trying to limit the freedom of being inspired by a sound making thing or what have you, I'm trying to talk about the practice of collecting, editing, composing, exposing or otherwise, arranged sound for or as part of an artistic endevor.

I think musicians need to strap on a pair of down-to-earth man-balls for a week or so and fix the leaky sink of indefinition of what it is they actually do:
Music now means something new (lots of somethings new in fact) and has many new meanings, those meanings and distinctions need "words" for people to address them in conversation without having to vomit up 20 minutes of goobledeegook philosophy or get lost in a sea of subjectivity,
words like
"car", (reffering to a 4 wheeled mechanically propelled vehicle)
"box", (reffering to a cube or cuboid object in which to store things)
"dream", (etc)
"chicken nugget"(etc)
and "hair dryer" (etc)

as opposed to:
"music" (refffering to nice sounds),
"music" (reffering to composed exercizes in harmony)
"music" (reffering to recorded and transmitted sound),
"music" (reffering to popular music)
"music" (reffering to furniture or background scoring)
and "music" (reffering to instrumental art)

do you see the problem? I say "music" and you hear "music" and someone else hears "music" it's a complete joke. People seem to be happy going around as though they're masters of their arena, an arena they're not even equipped to talk about, or give even a vague definition of it's elements.

I don't really see that people aren't equipped to talk about this. There is a huge, HUGE body of theory in this area, going back hundreds of years. The definition evolves as the definition of art evolves. Doug, Joe and I are operating under a definition that's been pretty well-established - at least in the mind of academics - since the mid-20th Century. That's not to say it won't change again if there's some kind of unanticipated cultural shift*, but it's a good one because it accounts for pretty much all of the possible stories you might want to interpret it through.

*for example, there could be some kind of anti-postmodernist backlash where artists suddenly decide that narrow definitions of art are useful. That is not currently the case.

Auron, I guess we just relate to language in completely different ways all together.

To me it seems like you want there to be truths in language. Like you want the ideal to be that a word has an exact, constant meaning that everyone agrees upon. To me it's more interesting to see the language itself as an abstraction which can and should be interpreted in many different ways.

I see a single word more like a single note in a composition; by itself it becomes kind of meaningless and naked if you try to disect in and search for a deeper meaning to it. But put in the right context of a well made composition it becomes something greater. I feel the same way about how a word can relate to a sentence. And I think this relativity is much more important to understand "the true meaning" of words than going about the scientific way of picking it apart and analysing the words one by one.

Sorry for floating of on a cloud.. it just got me thinking

I think they're useful. As long as we're free to jump from one narrow definition to another and neither of them are set in stone. It helps to gain focus.

Per, above, sees the definition of the word as the sum of all personal, subjective definitions--an amorphous, shifting blob. Musical theorists see the definition as a best-fit box around that mass. They are both correct, but the latter perspective is more useful to musical theorists. Like FoK says, if the blob grows and shifts far enough outside the boundaries, the box will have to be made bigger, but the box in its current size has held up pretty well for something like a century now.

There's a box and a blob, and they are both true.

That's kind of what I was trying to say.

I think this was best summarised in the crappy 60's psychedelic knock-about comedy Wonderwall. (As sampled by PWEI)

"I don't like songs. Music is just organised noise, and noise is poison to the mind."

Fair enough, but I think this topic has been thrashed out as much as is possible.

Now, when does sound become a horse?

discuss...

We fell out of topic really, and I blame launguage, I was asking a particular question about music and it turned into a phenomological look at launguage and at the concept of music as a whole.
I think it's redicilous.

2 Per, I'd say, yes I'm very much objective with launguage, i believe words have to contain the essence of their "signified" in order for a launguage to be useful, words need to retain a meaning outside of a persons opinion or interpritation which is ridgid for aslong as the word exists
words like "aweful" which should mean "fill one with awe" but because of misunderstanding means "very bad"

and things like abortion, means the process of aborting (exiting or caancelling etc) not the termination of a pregnancy.
it does drive me mad, to think that when people say they're talking english, what they're actually doing is talking using a grand scheme of slang, using english words, but constantly shifting their meaning because of misunderstandings like hearing "Fired" only being used on th apprentice and thinking it means "to lose one's job"

Perhaps the misunderstandings come from the fact that you need to lrn2spell.

I believe sound becomes music when it is interacted with in some way. So music has to be a combination of two or more things eg. A sound plus modulation.

Speech is just sound interacted with by the vocal chords. Interact in a certain way and it becomes singing.

A guitar string continuously resonates at it's own natural frequency, pluck it and it becomes a musical note.

Stand on the side of the motorway and listen to the sound of the cars passing buy, may not be music but it can become musical if you interact with it. Shake you head from side to side and the sound changes repeatedly, shake your head from side to side 120 times in a minute in a steady 4/4 pattern and the sound of the cars becomes musical.

It's all about the interaction.

The aeolian harp is played by the wind. Beautiful, random, ethereal sounds come from these babies, when left in a window or wherever.
These sounds are not organised by anybody, there is no interaction required by anybody, apart from, of course, the making of the instrument in the first place.
They really do make beautiful music in my opinion. However, I can see how the drones would irritate others, who would not call it music at all.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_harp

The interaction is caused by the wind, same as wind chimes

well someone did build the harp so the sound is arranged. The only difference with that is they arranged the dimentions of the instruments as opposed to ink on a page, midi on a sequencer or pitch on a violin.

I'm confusing myself with this now, and although I'm sure that the well defined theory that Beige and Doug speak of, is indeed a well defined theory that will stand up, I still feel the answer is much simpler than that.

For there to be music, there only needs to be a listener. There does not need to be a presenter, or arranger, or an artist or anybody.

There only needs to be a sound (where it comes from does not matter), and somebody to hear it. Whether it is music or not is dependent on the listener.

To complicate things further for myself, imagine water dripping in a cave, and each drop corresponds to a note, and it's playing a pleasantly random tune.

There is nobody there making this happen, and more importantly in this situation, there is nobody there hearing it.

Is it music? I'm sure it is.


The bottom line is, I don't really know the answers, & I'm not sure I even grasp some of the explanations,

I do know that what I would call music, in some cases raises eyebrows.