What is true originality (later, what music IS)

Of course they do. But do you mean that when a definition can only be defined by another definiiton no definition is possibe?

If not, physics gives a pretty clear definition of all three. I don't see the problem.

Surely those terms are much less debateble as music since music is foremost a human concept and the other three are physical phenomenon.

But what do you mean when you say they are debatable? Surely everyhing that is not obviously and bluntly wrong is debatable. So the fact that this is debatable is a good thing about this definition.

How does physics define melody?

As for language and what definitions mean... I suggest taking a look at the following paper:

M. Changizi - "The global organization of word definition networks for English: is there a bottom?"

Could you describe, in your own words, what that article says?

It seems clear to me that though definitions are often written down in a dictionary with reference to other words, it is obvious that the origin of meaning is in the real world, where there are no words.

When there are large, distinct categories of things, it makes sense to assign words to them to help us communicate. So if I observe there is a large category of sound created by humans and for humans that is distinct from speech, I can call it music, or anything else I want, so long as others understand what category of sound I am referring to.

In our language, music has come to describe that category. It is just a label, but the huge category of sound it describes is something we observe. No matter how circular definitions in the English language are, it does not change the fact that the meanings are distinct, separate, and observable in the real world.

As for physics defining melody: Octaves and fifths, for example, sound the way they do because they comprise simple mathematical ratios. Since these sound stable against one another, the ear hears them as "arrival" points within melodies.

This is not an arbitrary consequence of Western ideals or some nonsense like that, it's just true.

While other musical traditions such as indian sitar music may not use equal temperment or western style harmony, there is absolutely no question but that the same intervals are heard by human ears everywhere. Listen to the tamboura in indian sitar music. ..fifth....octave........fifth.......octave....(note I use those labels only to describe the sound, not whether indian music always has 7 scale degrees) and it plays lower notes than the sitar! Coincidence?

And so what there are slight variations on those intervals in some cultures? Big friggin deal. Out of tune pianos sound great, too. Doesn't change the fact the human ear hears the same intervals even if they are "shimmering" intervals :D

Note that I do not define normality in terms of Western tradition, I define it in terms of how sound works, no matter who you are, what cultural background you are, or what the color of your skin is. I'm basically trying to convince everyone that the color blue is blue no matter where you come from.

To add to the confusion: http://sonic-arts.org/mclaren/partch/errors.htm

In short, the typical physicists' understanding of musical intervals as small number ratios is unsatisfactory in light of recent psychoacoustics experiments. Yes, if we all hear the same, these anomalies don't change things. But we don't.

That article seems to be saying some people find a slight tinge of violet in the color blue to be a purer blue than the blue one would find in a band of the rainbow. Doesn't change that its the color blue we're seeing :D

If there were all sorts of vast discrepancies between cultures' music, then it would be clear that intervals are arbitrary. But no matter what music I listen to, I always hear the same things. It all sounds familiar, and flattering to the ear. Maybe I have super-musical ears or something, I dunno, but I don't see these differences. Perhaps you could point me to an mp3 of music from another culture that uses something vastly different?

That article seems to be saying some people find a slight tinge of violet in the color blue to be a purer blue than the blue one would find in a band of the rainbow. Doesn't change that its the color blue we're seeing

That Burmese piece rocks! Thanks for the link!

I think I've forgotten what point you're trying to make.

I don't think I'm using any Western yardstick when I listen to music. I'm not listening for chord changes or modulations or anything equal temperment allows us to have, but I do hear pentatonics and some diatonic intervals in there. I mean...are you denying that the human ear is wired up to hear scales like this? Are you saying its completely arbitrary?

It seems like absolutely every culture has music that "makes sense." I haven't heard a single instance of folk music from anywhere in the world that sounds like Schoenberg, for example. It all uses pleasant normal sounding scales which share many sounds with scales sharing tones with our 12 tone chromatic scale, which may or may not be purer than ours. Doesn't matter. My point is these things are like colors. They are just there in nature. If that were not the case, then it seems to me every culture would have a completely different sounding scale system and some would sound hideous to my ears. But none do. So what exactly are you trying to say? What Western yardstick are you talking about? My only yardstick is my ear, and what sounds good.

At long last! I win =)

Uggh

Your only yardstick is your ear-brain, which has been conditioned quite a bit by culture. This causes you (and me) to hear other scales as ours with deviations because that's the frame of reference we have. You hear a pentatonic and implicitly compare it with the pentatonics you've heard, including the equal-tempered ones.

Our brain is wired up to hear just about anything we give it. Taking your color metaphor, there is no true blue here. There is this culture, there is that culture, there is tuning by small-integer ratios, which we most often confuse with an unswerving standard. But it isn't. That's the only point I have.

On the other hand, some music does sound hideous to people when it doesn't sound hideous to me at all.

hah! I have exposed you. Everything (in music, but why couldn't you make the argument for color, too? how do you KNOW we aren't perceiving colors differently?) is arbitrarily determined by culture. These ideas make me want to puke.

Then puke away...

How can I like carnatic music and hate pop music while I am an European that has never been in Asia and has rarely met someone from Asia?

Surely culture is irrelevant from musical perspective. The differences are extremely insignificant. People just stick to their traditions, regardless of musical and technical matters.

Culture bends our natural perception of music only slightly when compared to what it does to visual art.

If it all has to do with culture, then why do the vast majority of ancient musics have striking similarities for never coming into contact? For instance, semitonal music (relatively consonant music with some sort of key center) was common among many different ancient cultures.

Music, in my opinion, makes use of physical and perceived tension to give the listener meaningful illusions that only he needs to identify with.

That is the best definition of music I can think of. The key words that apply to this message are: "that only he needs to identify with". If people understood this they wouldn't need to get so pissed off about traditional/radical views. Being on the more radical side myself, I've accepted the fact that people may love or hate my music. All that matters to me is that for my type of thinking, my music integrates perfectly, and that is why I write it. For me, there is no other serious reason to compose.

Your definition is puzzling. Firstly, tension. Surely there is music without tension or with very little tension. Modal music has no harmonic tension. Indian music stays the same harmonicly though the whole piece. Serial music each note is equal and so there is no harmonic and also no melodic tension. There could be rhythmic tension though. But why use this word? Tension isn't the point. Organisation is. Physical and percieved? Why those two? Don't they at least overlap? You can't percieve anything that isn't physical. Why not leave them both out. I don't see how adding them makes a difference.

Secondly, meaningful illusions. Illusions? Meaningful? Huh? Really this does not make any sense. To me music in itself has no meaning and is never an illusion.

That only the listener can identify with? Identify with what purpose? Do you mean relate? Accept? I don't see how idenifying can have any meaning in this context except as 'recognition'. And then the listener? Why add this bit? Do you want to leave out the performer or the composer? Or do you want to narrow things out to listening only? So why not looking at the score? A score of music isn't music? But if you mean 'accept', surely this has no place in a definition of music but rather it is a view about how one should go about judging music. If I am going to judge music wrongly, by not identifying with it properly, according to your opinion, this does not change the music into non-musical sound, obviously.

The only part that makes sense is the tension part. But surely it is ill placed for music doesn't require tension. The others, I don't get that at all. Maybe I am going about this the wrong way. Also, you start with "Music makes use of" So how can this be a definition? Surely tension does play a great part in many forms of music and other arts. But surely it is not essential at all, let alone it's essence.

Hello to everyone I knew on the old board. I am quite busy these days so if I drop out of existence for a while, you will know why.

I appreciate your post Prometheus. I will put what you said in quotes and reply to as much as I can.

Who agrees with me that music is a combination of the subjective and the objective? Surely one cannot say: "music IS relative." or "music IS absolute." It has objective and subjective elements.

I would say that harmonics, that is the pitches that make up scales, chords, what not, are objective. It is not exact, but it is objective in that, as I, Prometheus and some others have pointed out, all cultures' produce music with scales that make sense and sound good to our ears. The sound of scales is not culturally arbitrary.

Our metaphorical projections onto music, however, is of course culturally defined. This is why a lot of Western music is deliberately "goal oriented" and logical, and Eastern music is more organic and intuitive.

However I find these projections unimportant with regards to how music actually sounds. I love both Beethoven sonatas and Indian Ragas. Sometimes I'm in more of a mood for one than the other; this is where music is subjective.

In addition, I can't really say that the architectural component of Western music means much to me. Individual musical moments or ideas are what I, and I think other people truly respond to. Anything else is just a projection, a satisfaction with architecture, etc.

Surely culture is irrelevant from musical perspective. The differences are extremely insignificant. People just stick to their traditions, regardless of musical and technical matters.

Huh? Could you rephrase that?

If it all has to do with culture, then why do the vast majority of ancient musics have striking similarities for never coming into contact? For instance, semitonal music (relatively consonant music with some sort of key center) was common among many different ancient cultures.

Hi John Bouz! What is semitonal music? Do you mean semi-tonal or semitone-al?

If isoalted cultures are left to come up with their own music...yes, a lot of them come up with fifth- and octave-based systems. It's a pattern, and it's far from arbitrary. If I had a voice (with harmonic spectra) with a range about an octave lower than the females, I can definitely see me coming up with that.

But who came up with this stuff? Individuals singing their own folk music, sure, you find variation, but who in a culture first decided what was and wasn't allowed? If anyone?

This whole thing is very stickily involved with aesthetics with its questions like "what is beautiful or desirable in music?" With these questions I find culture to be a huge influence as well as personality. In deciding what we like...there's a desirability towards conformity in most cultures, yes? And personal laziness and the invisibility of ruling paradigms is in there too.

But if we try and separate the judgement of music in time from the development of musical materials in time...well, let's not try. Musical materials, then, draw on physics, psychoacoustics, culture (history) (perhaps "society" is better), personality, materials...what else?

John I like your definition.

Derek, do you mean that your preferences in music contain both the subjective and objective? Or what?

Interesting post Derek. I've recently picked up the biased opinion that almost everything in the world is objective. Even the definition of subjective is objective.

Everything we can think of is defined entirely by it's relationship with other things. And these other things are defined entirely by their relationship with other things. Eventually, things start to be defined by other things which, ironically, are defined by the things we were originally trying to define. At this point, we realize that nothing is certain and that any subjectivity is founded on bold assumptions.

I think that music is relative. It appears absolute because human beings are wired similar and therefore are affected similarly. I think that an interesting question is: If all humans were wired the same, would music be absolute (all cultural and acquired differences aside)?

The definition of music must be based entirely on how humans perceive it. Why is all music sound, but all sound isn't necessarily music? Each individual human mind makes the distinction between sound and music, and that is why it is relative - because no two people are the same.

Hi Jacob, I meant semi-tonal.

"But who came up with this stuff? Individuals singing their own folk music, sure, you find variation, but who in a culture first decided what was and wasn't allowed? If anyone?"

I think that the consonance, or lack of tension, in octaves and fifths may represent a number of positive things to people, as opposed to the triatone, which was thought to be evil even in the 16th or 17th centuries. If I was a primitive man 5000 years ago, I would choose to endorse the former. This is over simplistic but I have to go now.

Of course it is quite reasonable to use the word "music" metaphorically or poetically. Such as: "The music of the wind in the trees."

However this does not change the objective truth that there exists a large category of sound created by humans, for humans, with devices crafted by humans or the human voice. Whether or not some sounds ARE music, it seems to me, is objective.

I think that the consonance, or lack of tension, in octaves and fifths may represent a number of positive things to people, as opposed to the triatone, which was thought to be evil even in the 16th or 17th centuries. If I was a primitive man 5000 years ago, I would choose to endorse the former. This is over simplistic but I have to go now.

But context, context, context. The tritone (triatone?) was considered evil in that sort of Christian-theology way in the context of counterpoint amongst (primarily) voices. (Also, thanks to circle-of-fifths dominance, theory didn't allow for 5:7, a just tritone or even the harmonic seventh (4:7), save a few theorists like Mersenne and Tartini. Wondeful intervals, those. It's a pity western culture doesn't really get them directly, though if you think 7 is an evil number, you may disagree.)

John, are you mixing up the terms "subjective" and "objective"? And are you doing it to prove your very point?

I look at the musics of the world and I see diversity of what is considered important in and to music. Unity and diversity, but the diversity and seeing how and why people ended up different interests me more than finding similarities and toting them as human universals.

Surely there is a lot of cultural variation in reaction to music, think of boogie woogie. Tritones and 7th chords are anything but evil in this style. Pieces even END on 7th chords, which is considered to sound "unstable" in Western classical theory.

I wish I could convince everyone here to make the important distinction between our opinions and reactions and our senses.

I don't think anyone can deny the universalism of hearing dissonant intervals. Whether a culture chooses to associate positive or negative things with dissonance, major or minor is the arbitrary, subjective part.

Oddly, we seem to restrict our discussion to harmony. What about rhythm? Rhythm can drastically change our reactions to music.

Personally I think rhythm is much more important to how music sounds than harmony...because as I and many others have pointed out, harmony is just the set of colors available to us as composers. It is finite. Rhythm on the other hand is infinite. Especially in musics that do not rely entirely on easily notatable rhythms. This includes most non Western musics.