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Originally Posted by Mr. Charlie
Good John Cage video, very interesting.
I wanna point out I wasn't talking about music being good or bad. I've never heard a released piece of music and thought to myself 'that's not music'. Whether I hear music I like or music I don't like, I identify it as music and I think we all do. And it's precisely that which I find strange - that the whole human species has an inbuilt music detector.
I'll give you an example. I spent some time with my 20 month old niece recently and one day, on hearing Mumford and Sons on the radio, she broke into dance. Nobody showed her how to dance, nobody encouraged her to dance, I doubt she has any idea what music is or what a tune is or what the notion of being in tune means. But the point is she didn't dance earlier in the day to the sound of rainfall, or the sound of the soup bubbling in the pan, or the sound of the vacuum cleaner, or the sound of clanging plates and dishes during the washing up. She only reacted to the music, not to the hundreds of other noises she encountered. It was as if she had an innate ability, knowledge even, to distinguish music from noise and appreciate it. And I think we all do.
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I was thinking of an example where the audience may not identify the sounds as music but the artist does. I'm not sure about what exactly differentiates music from noise anymore, a lot of avant-garde artists have bridged the gap I think. I think that your niece may have already known what music was by being familiar with music by having heard it before, and possibly seeing her mother dancing? Do you think that your niece would have danced to something like this or even call it music?
But I'm sure as an adult, she may hear this as we would and call it ****e or great music. So I guess what I'm saying is our intellect tells us, but it feels natural since we've been exposed to it for all of our lives. I'm not sure about the mechanics of the brain, but I'm sure that there is also a nature element to this situation that coincides with nurture.
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Originally Posted by Mr. Charlie
So would you consider, say, the sound of a river trickling over rocks, or the sound of the wind through a grove of trees in their natural environment (ie you're there listening to it live) as music? Or does it only become music to you when someone records it?
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Well, I think that lies more in opinion than fact because someone with a liberal definition of music would say yes and a conventional listener would say no (supposedly). I personally would say that it's on a case by case basis, tbh. There will be times where I listen to the world from a musical perspective and at surprised at how well the sounds of wherever I am mesh together (in most cases I'm doing this on campus, so there's a lot going on). There's this hallway at my school that makes footsteps sound like an electronic bass drum that I enjoy quite a bit, and I definitely would call it music. Recording the sounds does make it easier for someone to decifer it, but I don't think it invalidates that it exists without recording it. One reason for this could be that most people listen to their world more passively than actively, because if you don't intentionally listen for something how are you going to find it?