What is music?
- Almost all of us listen to music daily by using a CD, type, radio, TV, movies,.... They are many that even play some kind
of musical instrument. Many people live and die with or for it. Some thing so power full that no other human qualities
could be compared with it. There is no idea, philosophy, religions, ideology, social movements, …that have such
qualities that music has. But what is the answer of this easy question. WHAT IS MUSIC?
There are very little study and discussion about this subject. When at the same time it is one of the most popular art in
this world. It is impossible to live a day without it. We listen to it, we use it in our simplest phrases while talking, we get
happy, sad or even we cry with it. We spend lots of money to buy it. We use it for each social events, we use it to
agitate, harmonize, redirect social movements. We use it in politics, in religions, in birthday and for our last goodbyes,
…some times we just dance with it like a crazy. What it is his origin and how he effects our lives, we just love it.
For making some kind of hypothesis we can say: The music like all other human’s qualities was formed during
millions of years. Single and disparate voices found each other from all over the caves and farms or mountains.
Surpassing the borders and blocks, got together creating simple songs. He changed the form and became more and
more concentrated melody composed of human feelings. It was created step by step when our species were trying to
survive. The “mother nature” was trying her best to eliminate us. Being surrounded with all kind of enemies, with such
a weak and fragile bodies, we should be distinct millions years ago. The creator as we may call him God, nature, Allah,
…(I call him LIFE) gave us a unique power of “how to”. We survived and echo we here, talking about those days. Our
number one enemy “mother nature” made it harder and harder for us, we had to fight her back for surviving. We start to
change what she was creating. It was cold, we warm it up, no food out there we learn agriculture and start to produce
foods,.. We created some thing that “mother nature” never wanted us to do so. We had to learn her rules for using it in
our favor, which is completely different than destroying the nature resources for profits.
We were the subject of changing each time that we forced these changes to surrounding environments. Hard group
works were the only our chances to survive and from there we became what we are now. Living as a group forced us
to find the ways to transmitted vital messages to others. Other than our body, we used our voices for longer distance
transmissions. First we started with “danger”, “food”, “bad”, “good” signals. Working together for survival was the most
important factor for progressing in communication sounds. One example can be like: They find out that when ever they
want to do some thing together, as a group, they have to be in harmony with each other. If no, for raising a heavy piece
of stone each person could push it in wrong direction or with wrong action timing.
We started to make some sounds to regulate our movements for doing some work. They were very simple sound, but
with a certain intensity and time properties. Sounds for starting, for stopping, for pushing together, for raising together.
As the civilization was growing step by step, work was getting more and more complex, we start to add the sounds of
pain, patient ,anger, enjoyment, ...Actually what we did was codifying a feeling or a message in one sound. There are
many micro pieces of these codified feeling in any person’s brain. Memorized in our genes for our survival. These
micro pieces are controlling the power of our speech and talking, they are stimulated by music. We transmit our
feeling and our wells with these good known codified sound.
The power of any word that we use depends to qualities of these codes mixed with that word. We can transmit to
some one with same words different feeling, changing these micro pieces. There were many other sounds produced
during all kind of different stage of the life, but they were not a nice, motivated, happy sounds. They couldn’t give us
hopes for our hard lives. The pattern of sounds that could give us motivation for living, happiness, survival powers,..
Were gathered together to what we know it as music. Any time that we listen to music, we are stimulating these micro
coded memory In our brain. For long time in our evolution It was the only and most effective anti-depression existed
(even today).
Then we made instrument to produce these codes, the father of all kinds of music that we have to day. Then we
started to make wealth and accumulate them, so came wars to own them .We made war musical instruments, was
used them for agitating people. Many other kind of feeling was developed during our progress toward civilization. We
start to use these instruments for all other scopes also. Specially when every we couldn't talk (because of social
condition, or ..) we used them as well. For me a piece of music is sad, when ever it agitate my sad micro memories
which I have from pass. When we listen to a certain sound, it take us back to our millions years of pass experiments
and evolution events. It turns on all our basic memories, we feel our history by our body, it stimulate all those pass
emotions and feeling which is accumulated in our basic memories.
We see that the exact meaning of music is open and refers to variable properties which varies from person to person.
At the same time they are many properties which are in commune between all different kind of music. May be the most
important one is that it effects and changes the status of the person who is under this energy. It is hard to find another
type of energy that can produce these kind of effect. Words that we use have the same properties but they come after
music. First there was sound, sound s got power with feeling which was accumulated with it. They get longer and
more complicated, they got the character of basic music. The words are the same sounds but normally with out their
loaded energy. With word we started to make phrase, to transfer meanings. When it is a musical sound, even single,
it has meaning. With word to gain a meaning for any word we have to use it in original form, with musical tones.
First Type of Answer: Don't Know
Because we are all familiar with the experience of music, we are inclined to think that we truly know what music is. But
having an experience is not the same thing as fully understanding how that experience occurs or even what it
represents. Seeing is not the same thing as understanding the physics of light, and hearing is not the same thing as
understand about sound and acoustics. Everyone knows what consciousness is, but scientifically no one knows what
consciousness is. (There are various theories, but no one really knows that any of those theories is correct.).
This comes down to a distinction between objective and subjective. There are some phenomena where our
knowledge of the objective correlate of our subjective experience is quite advanced. For example, we understand that
words like “hot” and “cold” are correlated with an objective physical measurement of temperature. There is a quite
mathematically complex theory of temperature and heat. There is also quite a detailed understanding of the biology of
our perception of hot and cold, of how, for example, our perception of temperature is actually a perception of
temperature difference between receptors close to the surface and receptors further inside our body.
There is also a very good understanding of why we perceive temperature, and most people would not find it not too
difficult to understand that we perceive hot and cold because too much hot or too much cold is bad for your health.
Second Type of Answer: Music Theory
In the case of music, there is a substantial descriptive theory of music, which corresponds to a large degree to what is
called “music theory” which is almost like a scientific theory, but not quite. Anyone who learns to play an instrument or
learns to read music notation will learn some of this descriptive theory. It includes concepts like frequency and tempo,
and all the components of music such as melody, scales, chords and rhythm. Although music theory tells us
something about what music is, there is still quite a lot that it doesn't tell us: Firstly, music theory is not complete.
Music theory defines what is effectively a set of constraints on what music can be, for example the constraint that pitch
values in a melody come from a finite set of values in a musical scale.
But the set of constraints is not complete, and to further complicate things, some constraints only seem to apply to
some kinds of music. This incompleteness implies that music theory is not fully predictive, in the sense that it cannot
completely predict the musicality or “strength” of an item of music from its description. Because music theorists do not
traditionally think of themselves as doing scientific theory, the incompleteness of music theory is often regarded as
some kind of ineffable mystery which is intrinsic to the very nature of music. Actually it is unable to explain “what is
Music” but has certain rules for how to register and how to transfer it .
Music theory does not say anything about what music is for. If you asked most people why they listen to music, they
would probably answer that they listen to it because they like it. This doesn't really explain anything, because most
things we do because we like them, or because they have some relationship to getting something that we like. The
real question is why do we like music?
Music theory does not say anything at all about what is going on inside the human brain when we listen to music.
What goes on inside the human brain (or any brain for that matter) is quite mysterious anyway, so it should perhaps
not surprise us that what goes on inside the human brain when we listen to music is mysterious. But because music
does not have any existence independently of its human perception, we cannot consider any theory of music to be
complete until it does explain the detailed mechanics of how our brains respond to music. This is different to, say,
temperature, where we can understand what “hot” and “cold” are, even if we don't understand the physiology of the
perception of hot and cold.
Third Type of Answer: Subjective
The incompleteness of any existing formal descriptive theory of music implies that the only way that you can explain to
another person the meaning of the word “music”; is by example. In other words, if you were teaching some person
English, and you didn't know any word for “music” in their language, you would be forced to play some music to them,
and then tell them that that's what music is. There is one apparent problem with a subjective answer to the question,
which is that there is variation in what different people consider to be music, especially if they come from different
cultural backgrounds. This can lead to an extreme relativism, where it is claimed that anything at all is music if
someone says that it is.
For example, according to well-known composer John Cage, his work 4 minutes 33 seconds of pure silence is
actually music. The problem with phenomena which are only known subjectively is that people can support relativist
points of view by simply lying about their own perceptions. For example, different men disagree about what is “sexy”,
and I could pick some woman that most other men find not very attractive, and claim that she looks sexy to me. Anyone
accusing me of lying would be implicitly insulting the woman in question. But most people know that there is quite a lot
of agreement about what men consider to be sexy or not in a woman, and most scientists would presume that this
agreement is a function of a common genetically determined instinct.
Similarly, we know that there is quite a lot of agreement about what is musical. Much of the music industry is “hit-
driven”, which implies that if one person likes a particular musical item a lot, probably a lot of other people will also like
it a lot. Also, we still recognize an item as musical even if it is not our favorite kind of music, and even if it comes from
another culture.
Fourth Type of Answer: Poetic
Given the difficulty of finding a scientific answer to the question of what music is, and the disinclination of many people
to think scientifically about human desires and feelings, one way to answer the question is to give an answer that
doesn't even pretend to be scientific. Instead of trying to find an answer that makes specific statements about what is
music and what is not music, and what is going on inside the human brain of someone enjoying music, and why
music perception is an evolved adaptation, just say something that doesn't really mean anything at all, but it sounds
good. Like: Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which doesn't know that it is counting. (Gottfried Leibniz)I
copied this from “Definitions of Music” in wiki quote, and there's plenty more at that site. Another music quote site that
includes a few poetic “definitions” is http://home.att.net/~quotations/music.html.
Fifth Type of Answer: Scientific.
Although regardless of all attempts done by many experts, there is no widely accepted scientific theory of music. There
have been plenty of attempts to formulate theories of music, and these could be considered possible answers to the
question. In most cases the scientists who have stated the theories would not themselves claim that their theories
can be known with certainty to be true, but if you wanted to make a statement about what music was from a scientific
view, you could quote one of these theories and make it sound more definite than it really was. Some popular scientific
explanations of music include: It helps members of a society bond with each other. Men use it to attract women (or vice
versa).It evolved either from or into language. Most of these theories have an element of “just so” story about them, and
you will notice that none of them say very much about why music has exactly the properties that it has (i.e. all the
properties described by descriptive music theory), and certainly none of them explain why particular items of music are
regarded as very musical by large numbers of people.
Conclusion:
A Best Answer : A best possible answer to the question, given our current knowledge and ignorance of what music is,
must be something as follows: There exist certain patterns of sound which people create, which have certain
emotional and pleasurable effects on the listener. These patterns of sound are subject to certain constraints, some of
which can be described with some degree of mathematical precision, and these descriptions form the content of
“music theory” which is traditionally taught to those learning about musical composition and performance. However,
these descriptions do not fully distinguish between what is music and what is not music. Some conclusion may
retrieve from discussion that: Given the incompleteness of the descriptions of music provided by music theory, and
our ignorance about the biological mechanics of the effect that music has on the listener, the only satisfactory
definition of music is a subjective definition, which means providing a list of specific examples, and then saying:
“music is anything like that”.
But we know some starting points for a good start to defined it:
It is those patterns of sound that people create (not in close, air-conditioned offices, by ….headed feminists)
It will stimulated power of life in listener.
It will create deeper feeling regard any targeted subject .
It will make us more unite.
It will increase human qualities.
It will motivate us to do positive things.
It will help us in hard situations.
It is beautiful.
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