Sounds vs. Music

Factual Questions
1

How do I ask this? If a sound is just vibration at a frequency (or, multiple frequencies superimposed over each other), then why don’t we hear music…even if grossly out of tune, like random notes being slammed on a piano keyboard? On the other hand, why isn’t music just jibberish sounds like the ambient and random sounds constantly around us.

Granted, an instrument is fine-tuned to optimize the fidelity of a tone (or tones), but why aren’t the sounds in our daily lives seemingly more…musical (but not necessarily harmonious)?

2

Music is sound systematically organized. You CAN play music on non-dedicated objects, but they’re rarely as melodious as playing it on an actual instrument. Tuned instruments are designed to play more than just the pure tone. The only instrument that’s actually optimized to play a pure tone is a synthesizer, and that’s usually tweaked to add harmonics so it doesn’t sound too artificial. Most tuned instruments actually play a series of harmonics for each note. The combination of harmonics that an instrument plays contributes to the distinctive sound of that instrument. A piano sounds different from a trumpet sounds different from a clarinet sounds different from a tympanum, because of the harmonics.

And random sounds aren’t music because they’re random. Even the parts of music that ARE noise (non-tuned instruments like snare drums or woodblocks) are organized rhythmically.

3

We are conditioned to hear certain intervals in pitch as music. In Western music, we use 8 note scales from a 12 note chromatic pallet. In Indian music, they use a different system. so it may sound discordant or something to Westerners.

4

It still sounds like music rather than noise, though.

In a musical tone, most of the frequencies you are hearing are a fundamental (sine wave) tone, plus various harmonics of it, i.e., tones of frequencies that are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. In noise (and other non-musical sound) you are hearing a lot of frequencies mixed together that are mostly not harmonics of one another.

5

Harmonics are a portion of it, IMHO, think cymbal vs garbage can lid (never mind the sustain).

Check the book This is Your Brain on Music for some interesting reading on neuroscience and music.

6

Random tones in the environment can be harmonious; for an example look up machine harmonics (someone discovered that the electrical whines given off by machines like computers and printers can form chords that will in turn affect the mood of workers in the office).

However, this is very unlikely. The idea of the background environment spontaneously producing music is similar to the idea of a piece of food or a rock formation or a cloud spontaneously forming a picture. It can happen - there is nothing stopping it - but it isn’t very likely.

7

Back when I was playing LPs, my cats were exposed to many genres of music, and pretty much ignored it. But when there was a small scratch on the record, or any kind of non-musical artifice, they pricked up their ears. They knew that certain sounds weren’t musical.

8

Aw, so you mean this guy actually had to expend effort and didn’t just have his camera out at the right time? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht96HJ01SE4 :smiley:

9

You assume that the sound isn’t music. Going quickly into a café society discussion, but the boundary between noise and music is pretty blurred in contemporary music.

Found sounds have been used for decades, ambient sounds, processed, looped, and so on. A big thing is the use of rhythmic devices to control the presentation of the sound, which can transform apparently random bits of found sounds into something that the brain can latch onto and interpret as music. In here is a clue as to the answer to the OP.

A few favourites at the moment. Lustmord. Ben Frost. Demdike Stare. Listen on headphones and loud.

As to the more mainstream forms of contemporary music - many people considered serialism, atonality and a great swag of now accepted music as little more than noise. Indeed one of the best books on the subject is Ales Ross’s The Rest is Noise.

10

Yes, and not only that, Russolo and his noise boxes, 20th century comtemporary classical composers like Stockhausen and Cage, the rise of pop-music, punk spirit, availability of instruments and their rapid evolution and possibility for anyone to create and record music on a budget, we got noise music, a blanket term for a whole lot of different music with noise as the primary aesthetic.

I’ve been involved with the Oslo noise-scene for some years now, and it’s a very interesting scene, with basically zero restrictions on expression, composition or performance, and where basically anything can happen, for better or worse.

11

There’s a few things at play here. First, generally, we define music as organized sounds. This means someone chose the tones, durations, and timbres of the sounds rather than just being random or ambient. As such, by definition, hearing people chatting, typing keyboards, lawnmowers, traffic, or whatever just isn’t music. That said, these things don’t have to be what we’re used to, we can use different scales, unusual timings, and anything that makes a sound as an instrument.

Specifically when it comes to notes, we’re used to having it broken down into certain scales. Without getting too into the theory, the idea is that there are certain ratios of frequencies that have a pleasant sound to the human ear. For instance, two of the most common are 2:1, or a perfect octave, and 3:2, a perfect fifth. The common 12-note is based on an even temperment that mostly maintains that. Particularly in some modern music, you’ll see musicians experimenting with different tunings to get ratios not in or near that tuning, but that’s really something else. Either way, this is sort of what we expect when we’re hearing music, and random noise is unlikely to have any sort of structure in the frequencies of the sounds that mimics these ratios, so we just won’t process it as music.

Also mentioned is harmonics and timbre, which relates to frequencies. Most common musical instruments have become common because they have certain properties like this. A given instrument doesn’t produce just a single frequency, but has a few others that fit those pleasing ratios and add “depth” to the sound. Pure frequencies are essentially non-existent in nature, so most sounds have other frequencies in them, but they don’t fit in those ratios. Though, of course, you can find music where pretty much any sound can be used to create musical tones. In fact, there’s artists who have made their careers out of using every day sounds to create music, tapping pencils, car horns, weed whackers, etc.

But really, it just comes down to the idea that random noise is precisely that, random. It doesn’t carry any information, and our brains are very well tuned at identifying patterns and selecting for signals that have information, even if we don’t necessarily know what it means. That all said, as a muscian myself, it’s not terribly uncommon for me to find brief moments where some sounds will line up into a brief rhythm or melody or whatever, but that’s not really any different that looking at snow on a TV and picking out an image; sometimes even in randomness, we’ll see a pattern that isn’t really there.

12

This definition excludes quite a lot of music, though, like chance-composition, improvised music, sound sculpting etc. An improvised harsh-noise set won’t necessarily sound organized, it may very well appear random, but it is still the direct result of conscious desicions made by a performer/composer, influenced by his/hers experience, instrumentation and preferences. It is still music, even though many would probably not refer to it as such.

13

Well, on an electric organ you can hold down a key to create a tone that sounds beautiful. But if you just hold that note for hours on end… it won’t be considered music.

Similarly, you can have a bunch of machines which create a combination of white noise (unstructured static) and tones that create a please drone. But if it just goes on like that for hours on end… it won’t be considered music.

Similarly, natural sounds like a waterfall or seashore waves crashing can be pleasing and rhythmic… but won’t be mistaken for music.

You can program a computer to generate tones and beats randomly which may sound, at first, like music. But after a while when you don’t hear any noticeable melody or chordal ‘lines’ or any repetition of motifs, it will just sound random and not music.

Music is an organized system of tones and percussive sounds which a human brain can pick up and discern that organization. This is why defining what is music can be somewhat subjective because discerning the organization in a piece of music might be difficult if one is not accustomed to a particular type of music.

E.g., as mentioned above, some Asian music is based on quarter-step tones which may sound dissonant and ‘non-musicky’ to Westerners, at least, at first. After a while, a Westerner may learn to hear the organization in the music which they weren’t accustomed to at first. Similarly, it may take a very developed ‘ear’ to appreciate music with very loose organization (e.g., some rock genres with a lot of distortion, or 12-tone scales). Remember, when jazz and rock first came out, there were many in an older generation which simply regarded it as ‘noise’ because they couldn’t discern the new style of chordal structures (jazz) or get past the fuzzy electronic music of electric guitars (rock). Similarly, I can’t discern anything musical about Death Metal because as an old guy, all I hear is banging and someone shouting in a gravelly voice.

14

OK, I am a musical imbecile. When I first heard Ornette Coleman, I was just baffled. But after listening for not all that long, I could get completely into it. Parts of “Lonely Woman” came to seem perfectly inevitable.

I was listening to Ravi Shankar with a friend who played jazz piano, and he was disturbed by it, saying, “It just doesn’t feel right. There’s something off.” And I, the happy idiot, was just grooving. “Oh, then in the next part it goes ‘dyr-te-dyr-dyr-dyr-dyrannng,’ cool.”

I’m wondering if it was easier for me to be absorbed by that music because I don’t understand what’s ‘musical’ about straight western music. If there was an Indian PDQ Bach, I might like it as much as the real thing.

15

Well, this is true, but the OP was asking about musical sounds rather than music as such. He explicitly asked

So I think that your organ note counts as an example of what he was talking about (and free jazz, and Asian music, even before one “understands” it). He asked what distinguishes “random notes being slammed on a piano” from mere environmental noise. I think your prolonged organ note, and some of your other examples, count as “musical”, in this sense, even if they are not music. (On the other hand, I would argue that some of the stuff alluded to by Plumpudding and others may not be musical in the relevant sense, even if there is a sense in which it can rightly be regarded as music. Some modernist music, so far as I can tell, is deliberately unmusical, and/or deliberately trying to subvert standard notions of musicality.)

16

Seriously, listening to Coleman, and even knowing who PDQ Bach is, makes you not even vaguely a musical imbecile. Indeed the idea that you need a formal education in musical to not be, is itself imbecilic. It is like wine, you can find a plethora of idiots that pontificate about the qualities of wine, and use all sorts of stupid words, when the only thing that matters is whether you like it.

That said, any human individual’s appreciation of music is definitely an evolving thing. You are not the same person you were, once you hear a piece of music. Indeed a lot of music depends upon you having heard other music in order to really appreciate it. In this sense it is much more like the written word - whether read, in plays, film or poetry. Music can quote itself, but more importantly, it can use the absence or modification of the expected - where the expected comes from being familiar with earlier music. We can develop a sense of melody early in life, and simple, strong melodies form a big part of growing up. As we listen to more complex music we may find the melodies become more complex, but we follow them building upon our earlier experience as a guide. Then the music might deliberately break the expected melody - it can leave out notes, or deliberately permute the melody - both things leading to tension or rhythmic devices (or both.) Advanced forms might juxtapose melodic lines together - where disentangling the mess comes more easily with experience listening to music. After this, your brain learns skills at working through more complex structures. Composers can leverage this to generate music that impart the joy your brain finds in doing this. Furthermore, the melodies might also become vastly more simple. The composer looking to other devices to lead our brains.

Finding music in everyday sound does not take a big leap from here. Famously John Cage’s 4’33" is not about the silence, it is about listening to the world intently for that time. The background noises, the people around you, our world is filled with noises, which we are mostly oblivious to - tuning it out. Cage was an early proponent of the value in finding music in any sound.

The OP’s question is probably more about the nature of the journey from very simple tonal music to these limits. Most people get tired of nothing but simple major melodies. Curiously most folk music is more complex than this, and the history of western classical music sees as much music written in minor keys as major (with perhaps Mozart with only 2 minor key works out of 41 symphonies being the exception that underlines the general rule.) Jazz broke free melodically, and was a big influence on more contemporary music. The atonal music movements did explicitly avoid conventional melody, and there was a very real sense where much contemporary music tried to avoid any trace of older movements. That mostly died out about decade or so ago, and now most modern composers feel free to use just about anything, yielding something of a golden age in modern music. Listening to Webern’s tragically small set of short but amazing perfectly formed pieces can be something of a revelation.

But even mainstream music is not just about melody and harmony. A drum kit is little more than a machine that creates atonal noise. Brushes on a snare are close to pure noise. Yet no-one would deny the musicality of something like Steve Gadd on brushes. What you do hear in this clip is the stark difference of the tuned drumskins played at the end. Something that you would otherwise often not perceive. Rhythm is a core part of all music, whether it be 4/4 rock and roll, or the slowly developing patterns of drones in some modern ambient genres, the developing patterns are something we latch on to. Even Alvin Lucier’s Music on a long thing wire develops rhythms and patterns.

17

That may be a question that interests you, but it is quite apparent that it is not what the OP is asking. To repeat myself (from the post just above yours) the OP makes it quite explicit that, in the sense with which he is concerned, “random notes being slammed on a piano keyboard” and stuff that is “grossly out of tune” is musical, and he is drawing a distinction between this and “the ambient and random sounds constantly around us”. He then goes on to talk about tones, and sounds that are not tones (which covers a huge range, from a motorcycle revving, to the wind in the trees, to human speech, and most points between and beyond). He is clearly asking what is the difference between a musical tone and non-tonal noise, a question which (although I do not claim to be any sort of expert) I believe I answered adequately in post #4.

No doubt the OP will also readily agree that rhythmic non-tonal noise can also be musical (so long as the rhythmic pattern is neither too simple and repetitive, nor to complex to follow). At any rate, it certainly does not take any significant degree of musical sophistication to recognize this. Whether the productions of “modern” composers, such as Cage, are really music or not is a different and quite orthogonal question. “Atonal” music, for instance, despite the name, still uses tones, and is thus unequivocally music in the OP’s sense, however “unmusical” some people (perhaps even the OP himself) may find it. By the same token, however, 4’33" is not musical in the OP’s sense, because it contains neither tones nor rhythms, and this remains true however much we might be convinced that it is music in the sense of being a worthwhile artistic statement capable of opening our ears to distinct aesthetic pleasures or insights.

18

What I mean by the journey is that different people find a boundary at different points on this range. The OP may find his limit much earlier than a modern noise enthusiast might. But the range is there to explore. Somewhere in the continuum there is a point where the music stops. If you look at the history of contemporary music you may find your limit. However, and this is a key point. Your limits can change, and simply listening to some more challenging work may irrevocably change your perception of these limits. The OP could take the time to listen to a range of the works pointed out, and on reflection have a different notion of what he defines as musical. Now comes the core point - it is in analysing how that boundary comes about in terms of the nature of the sounds on either side of the boundary that the OP’s question is answered. I don’t believe that a simple answer is possible - it is a moving target in each of us. The fact that it does move, and the mechanisms by which it moves are where the key to the answer lies.

19

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. once wrote of taking a Physics of Music course in college. The prof. came in with a box of wooden blocks. He hurled one against a wall and it made a clunking noise. “That was noise.” The prof. then hurled a succession of different size blocks against the all. They made the first few notes of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. “That was music.”

It’s music if you perceive it to be music. <Insert slam against current pop star here.>

20

Sigh.

Yes, this is an interesting issue, and very possibly a more interesting issue than the one the OP is asking about; possibly the OP even wishes he had asked about it, but it is not the issue he actually asked about, and the question he did ask was a perfectly legitimate one. His question was not about “works” at all, it was about sounds: why are some sorts of sounds “musical” whereas others are not? This question can be (and was) asked, quite regardless of whether any of the sounds in question occur in anything claimed to be a musical work, and, indeed, the OP makes it clear that he is primarily thinking of “ambient and random sounds” that are not part of any musical work (and are not claimed, by anyone, to be so).