What Is Music?

This is something that has always fascinated me, almost more than anything else. Music is something that is so essential to my life, and when aasked the question, 'Would you rather be blind or deaf?' I would respond with, 'Blind. Then I'd listen to music to get over it.'

Yet, what is it? How did it begin? I'm personally a fan of these two ideas.

Or this one.

But however it started, it has certainly caught on and is evidence in any culture throughout recent history. Whether or not it is a form of entertainment, or a type of communication as it is in parts of Africa, music is solidified in our society just as much as religion is. But how can one define it?

According to Phillip Dorrell's book, 'What is Music' it can be described as something called Super-Stimulus theory. Dorrell believes that music is all about a process of storing and perceiving information.  He takes music and stripes it down to it's bare level, such as how the brain interprets different wave patterns and how it effects different areas of the brain's anatomy. I did not know before, but there is an entire field of philosophers and theorists out there who spend years trying to classify and analyze it's structure and simply the meaning behind the word 'music.'

 Marcel Cobussen describes it as,

"Music. In the first place a word. As a word, it has meaning. As a word, it gives meaning. Take sounds for example: this sound is music. Which actually conveys: ‘we’ consider this sound as music. Music – as word – frames, delimits, opens up, encloses. To call (‘consecrate’ as Pierre Bourdieu would say) something music is a political decision-making process. As a grammatical concept, ‘music’ is useful: using this concept, we differentiate between various sounds. We divide, classify, categorize, name, delimit: not every sound is music. Although, since Cage, no single sound is by definition banned from the musical domain. The word ‘music’ brings (necessary) structure and order into the (audible) world."

But for me, personally, I think it is something much more simple than that. Music is whatever the listener wants it to be. Sure, one could spend hours upon hours, analyzing how a brain interprets signals, or how the delta wave patterns and the receptors in your ears interact according to the temperature outside and the current phase of the moon in the month of January after a blizzard, but let's be honest; we don't care. Really, because at the end of the day, we go home, turn on the radio (or nowadays an ipod dock) and just relax to whatever makes us feel good at the time. Somedays that could be Beethoven, Miles Davis, or maybe Led Zepplin.

The important aspect of music is not what it is, or why it is, but what we like. You have to know what your taste is, and when that changes, pay attention to it so you dont' get miserable.

Now, I don't say this to just casually dismiss the scientists and philosophers that have devoted massive amounts of time to this subject, but merely to put in my two cents on it that maybe, just maybe, the scientists should leave a few things to the mysteries of life. Because if we figure everything out, then what's the point?

 

Sources:
1. http://www.ramstrum.com/music125/AfricanDrummingCommunication.html
2. http://whatismusic.info/
3. http://cobussen.com/teaching/what-is-music/