velasmar7

I believe that music is more felt more with a musician. I sing and there's definitely a huge difference when you sing with minus one and with a musician. Having a musician allows you to emphasize more emotionally. There's so many effects you can do when a musician is involved like having the music prolong, more staccato like, or have it increase in an intense part.
But then again, music without a musician is also music as well. When we sit and reflect by ourselves with the sound of our music, we are fully engaged in it. The same emotions and the same thoughts appear.

Henry.Fatih

That's a good question. For a period of time at the beginning of this century just about anything qualified as music. Meaning car horns, screeches, door bell ringing.

They called this Avant Garde. To me this is a step back for music even Plain Chant sounds better than this music--plant chant is Medieval music without melody purely harmony.

Now, I am glad music is moving back towards what it should be sounds of melody and harmony. I was even opposed to Jazz at one time until I heard some good Jazz such Miles Davis.

So for me, music has infinite possibilities which are limited by creativity. Nothing beats something that can make you dance, think and sing along in my opinion.

__________________
http://antiyehweh.blogspot.com/

ohsen12

I believe that the definition of music depends on the person, and is extremely subjective. One person might argue that for something to be considered music one must have instruments and an artist performing the sounds. Others might argue that something as subtle as a bird chirp on a mountain top tree is music. Personally, music for me means what others have stated already, organized sound. If birds get together and chirp in organization, that can be music as well. Listening to a track of various birds chirping in synchronization can be soothing and amusing, therefore being music to me.

Janszoon

Would you consider speech music? It is organized sound after all.

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

ohsen12

Not at all, for me at least. Like I said, the definition is purely subjective. At times speech can be deemed music and at other times not. Depends on the lyrical content as well. This is just way too complex to define in a few words.

Freebase Dali

I'm going to quote the OP simply because I don't want to devolve into semantics and definitions. I want to address the essence of what I think music is and why.

First, I want to perform a thought experiment.
Imagine that there are many humans who could very well consider natural phenomenon as musical. Birdsong, pitched whistling of wind through trees, rhythmic beats of a boulder tumbling down a mountainside. Imagine that humans could arrange these types of sound in their minds and extract a musical phrase or episode from them. I'm sure we all can, and have done so many times.
Now, Imagine that suddenly, all human beings disappeared from the face of the earth, yet all these natural things remained. The birds, the wind, the rocks.
Would it still be music?

Like the cliche' riddle poses, "If a tree fell in the woods and there was no one around to hear it, would it still make a sound?"
Personally, I firmly believe that the tree would make a sound, because there is a physicality behind the phenomenon of sound. The tree hitting the ground would still cause vibration in the air, forming sound waves, which is sound.
But the crux of the question is hidden from plain sight.
Would the tree make a "sound", as we can perceive it?
Would the birds, the wind, and the rocks make "music", as we can perceive it?
Could, in some distant future where all humans become extinct, but record players remain playing their songs to no discerning ears be playing "music", or just ordered sound with no more meaning to the birds than their call's intent is to us?

Having waxed philosophical, I end with this:
I believe music is, or at least started, the perception of its strict definition. I believe music is our cultural and emotional understanding of ordered sound. I believe that, without us, ordered sound would have never had any propensity to become more than that...

And, as such, I believe that as long as we're around, music strictly exists in us. Otherwise, it's just another birdsong. Wind. Rocks.

mr dave

"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again."

- Eric Dolphy

The dude apparently used to open his window so he could blow his flute along with nature and jam with the birds and the sound of the wind in the trees.

__________________
i am the universe

jvwhite12

Music is a therapy. A therapy of removing stress. xD

Geekoid

Well said. I agree. I think that music is all in perception- how we as humans understand and respond to sound. If you don't understand something to be music, then to you, how could it be considered music? It's like when you don't know the word for a concept. Before you know what rain is, it's that wet something falling from the sky. It makes more sense when you call it rain, and even more sense when you know where rain comes from, and what it means to you- how you experience it. You still have the senses to allow you to feel it, but it only becomes something meaningful when you understand it to be something of meaning. Before it's math, it's random numbers. Before it's written language, it's scribbles on paper.

This brings a couple of questions to mind: When do humans first differentiate between what we experience as sound and what we experience as "music"? Babies learn to speak by copying sounds; and at some point, they begin to sing songs or hum melodies. Do they realize what they are creating is "music?" or to them, is it just organized sounds that they remembered and then reproduced? How emotional is this experience? Is one's true concrete and abstract understanding of music diminished as we are educated logically on the topic?

A lot of factors dictate what we believe to be music. Some people draw inspiration from ambient sound, and consider its rearrangement music, in a similar way as a collage or found art is considered art. Others come to identify the components of music theory like melody, harmony, rhythm etc. as music. There's planning, improvisation.... it's all as complex as the human mind itself. At the end of the day, it's just sound waves (actually, even more than just that!), and how you as a human, being capable of complex cognitive understanding, can understand the sensation of sound.

Another thing that comes to mind is that music is not only heard, but felt (physically and emotionally). There are many people who are deaf that create, experience and enjoy music. In a way, they are able to experience some aspects of music better than hearing people can. I can only imagine what it would be like to enjoy music without hearing it.

So basically, I understand music to be an experience of sound- something that can be felt, that creates a response in a person that understands the experience as being something called "music". It's really a relationship we have with the outside world. Because it fits into all the cracks of who we are as people, a true art form, it's about as difficult to truly understand music as it is to understand humanity as a whole.

Freebase Dali

^

Seeing how babies respond to music from a very early age leads me to believe there's an actual emotional response to it that's ingrained in humans. Babies obviously don't conceptualize music in the way that older children do, but I think humans are equipped with the capacity to recognize music as something more than white noise, for lack of a better term, from the outset.
I think that as a child grows, he or she then begins to attribute meaning to it in a cultural sense, which keeps the emotional relevance evolving in a more intellectual way.

All that is to say that I don't think the appreciation of music is learned. I think there's an inherent capacity for recognizing it in a basic, emotional way from very early on. I think the only thing that's learned is how we build upon that foundation as we grow.