The difference between music and sound

That's what I'm saying. I'm not hiding behind anything, because there isn't much to hide from. We don't know the answers. In fact, I don't think there are answers. If someone wants to think everything you hear while walking down the street is music, great, and another person contends that Mozart's symphonies are artistic and pleasing but technically not music, that I'll accept too. We've so stretched the idea of music (thanks a lot 20th century) that it doesn't really matter anymore.

During my first electroacoustic music class lab I asked my instructor if he ever thought of his, or other composers', works as sound art rather than music. He gave me a funny look and emphatically said it's all music.

I think the difference between sound and music is tricky. Sound is a pressure fluctuation received by an organ of hearing. The organ of hearing vibrates and converts the vibrations into electrical impulses that, in the case of humans, are interpreted by the brain. So "sound" may refer to the physical vibration or it may be the interpretation of the vibration, but (please correct me if I am wrong) the vibration is not considered sound if it can not be interpreted. From what I understand, by its scientific definition sound must be heard through a specific type of organ, and if the organ does not exist or function at all then an organism can not perceive or experience sound (though most organisms, if not all, can experience and respond to vibrations of some sort). So, if what I said above is the case, it may be problematic to claim that a musician is an artist whose medium is sound for this reason: a completely deaf person can make music and they can experience it through vibration. This vibration, from a technical standpoint, may not be sound, although it may be described as a sound wave. Thus, if we are getting picky, music can not be accurately defined in terms of sound. What I said is simply my understanding of sound, since every definition I have seen suggests that you may only call vibrations sound if they can be interpreted by a specific organ in conjunction with a brain. I'd love to hear from an authority on this issue. Just another thing to think about.

Absolutely nothing.

That the organ in our brain hears one sound as 'music' but differentiates it from sounds the listener cannot define does not indicate any difference biologically. The sole issue is conditioning of the organ that receives the sound, the conditioning of the brain to recall that sound as 'music' to the listener, and for that sound to hold some 'musical meaning' to the listener.

Otherwise, you're right. It's all sound... it's conditioning and reconditioning that comes from knowledge and exposure to different 'uses' of sound that generates the response that what sounds I hear are music, even if they were not music to me before. That's part of the composer's discipline according to John Cage and those who share his philosophy... that it's not enough to just write music but to 'discover', in sound and silence, 'music' that would otherwise go unnoticed.

But this is a 'Modernist' philosophy as well. Postmodern thought would challenge this notion with the idea that, were music to never be 'discovered' in these areas, would it be 'music' at all? This is just the paradox we live with as music artists. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Your answer will generally determine the realm of subjective reasoning you fall under... and you're just as right as the person who answers differently.

Your answer will generally determine the realm of subjective reasoning you fall under... and you're just as right as the person who answers differently.

I know that sounds like the right answer to the problem, as in "everything's subjective, the end" but knowing the answer means jack scraggy if we can't come up with evidence for this. I think we HAVE come up with a rather good amount of evidence from a neurological point of view as well as cognitive, where we can make the prediction that given X set of circumstances, Y behaviors (tastes in this case) are to be expected.

Since it's very hard to test that kind of thing just like it sounds, evidence has to be derived from observation. That's the main kick of looking at composers like Cage and Co, since they were driven by a shift in society/culture that allowed those tastes/views to come into existence. We can also look at isolated examples of other cultures and see what is similar and what isn't to know where is the threshold of music "universality." It's very dangerous to talk of universal elements in music, regardless of what they are, but it's necessary to look at the possibility to see if it's actually the case or not.

It's therefore irrelevant to discuss semantics like "what's the difference between sound and music" since whatever you decide on you're still not doing anything useful. There is clearly the phenomenon of music and the phenomenon of vibration perceived as "sound" to us. Both things can be entirely detached (we can "hear" music in our brains when we remember a melody for example, yet this has nothing to do with actual vibrations in the air but is rather a recreation based on our memory of it.) In fact, it can be pushed as far as saying that what we hear "in our brains," independent from our sense of hearing or any outside stimulus can be called "music."

A good question would be, can someone who is deaf since birth actually "hear" in their brains? If they can, it may end up being the case that even our sense of hearing is unnecessary to experience the phenomenon of "music." By "music," in this case, I'm calling the perception of a stimulus that is processed using the brain centers that are shown to be activated when you listen to music. That's as far as I've gotten into defining what is "music," really.

But it's a lot more complex than just that (such as we can't separate our senses from eachother or the functioning of the brain that easily as the evolution of the brain is incremental and systems often intersect with eachother in many different ways) so woop, lots of researching still needs to be done.

yes, it's always helpful to ask a blind man to help one with choosing between red and blue.