What is music?

Since Wikipedia always seems to get referenced sooner or later when it comes to online discussions, let me open this one with Wikipedia's definition of music:

Music is an art form consisting of sound and silence expressed through time. Elements of sound as used in music are pitch (including melody and harmony), rhythm (including tempo and meter), and sonic qualities of tirabre, articulation, dynamics, and texture.

Basically, the reason I ask this question is because I seem to have been getting into a lot of arguments about it lately (with people in real life, gasp!) Basically, what I want to know is how far can a musician stray from the conventional idioms associated with music before what he has created stops being music. Is music, for instance, that relies solely on texture and dynamics and neglects tempo and pitch, still music? This ranges from free improv like AMM to drone like Boris (dronevil) and Sunn 0))) to noise. And then, of course, we have something like Cage's infamous piece, 4'33", which consists of a pianist sitting in front of his piano for 4 and a half minutes without playing anything.

So what do you think? Are chorRAB necessary to make music, is melody, harmony? Can silence be music? Is it even possible to define music?
 
You can't write a guitar part without emotion. Even if the sound created was completely dischordant, your brain told you to make it that way to back up the fact. A machine can be emotionless. A human being is incapable of not showing emotion. Whether that emotion is never recognised by anyone else, it is still emotion. A machine runs on a linear scale. A human mind does not. All music that WE create is music, whether another human appreciates it or not.This thought process is emotional.
 
To bad shes completely wrong in my opinion.

Music is organised sound. Thats it, its a very un-romantic, aloof definition. But thats what it is. It has nothing to do with emotions or "feeling".
 
It dosent have to be compromised to be organised, even in improv the musicians have complete control of the sounRAB that are being produced. If someone has control over the sounRAB being produced, it is music.

If I were to do the melody of Blister in the Sun with my right arm pit, then yes, it is still music.
 
In my opinion minimalist music or drone or whatever can often be just as powerful (if not more so) than more traditional "fully formed" music, simply because it deconstructs music to its barest elements. I've always approached noise music as the logical conclusion of punk rock, in that it takes the most cathartic and visceral part of punk or just rock n' roll in general, the distortion and feedback, and strips everything else away. I don't really feel like there is any "true" form of music, different forms of music simply seek to evoke different responses.
 
Not at all really.

I can write a guitar part with no emotion attached to it, its still a melody, so its still music.

Thing is, an emotional reaction is like a fingerprint, they're different with everybody. Anybody can be moved by just about any kind of music.
 
Actually, that is a very good point. It all depenRAB on how you define emotion really.



No.

Now I expect you to retort with "what about loop machines? they make their own sounRAB" but the thing is someone programed it to make those specific sounRAB, and those sounRAB serve a musical purpose. So it is music. Its not like an industrial machine, like say a trencher, where the noise being made are just a by product of the machines actual job, it wasn't specifically what the machine was made to do.

And please don't give me a bunch of BS about telephones, alarm clocks and bull horns, that dosen't qualify as music either. Those sounRAB don't serve a musical purpose, so its not music, its just getting someones attention with really annoying sounRAB, like Michael Angelo Batio.
 
So, if I find a machine noise rhythmical is it not music? I've worked in a few factorys and I have often found myself bopping around to a machines repeditive sound. or am I just "Noise Jumping"
 
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