Quote:
Originally Posted by Frownland
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.
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?
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I don't know whether my niece had seen people dancing before, but it's certainly possible, be it in real life or in a cartoon. Nor do I know whether she would have danced to a more esoteric and experimental track such as the piece you suggested.
I agree, as you allude to, that as we are introduced to and experience music in our life, it influences and shapes what we define personally as music. But I also feel that before we are exposed to music, there's something inside of us lying dormant waiting to react to it, that acknowledges it, even if it's only on a very basic level.