We do seem to be talking past one another here. I was talking sounds as well as music in the whole. There is an implicit assumption in your stance - that the nature of a musical sound is intrinsic - and not a part of the individual human’s perception. I don’t believe this to be true.
For example. Generally accepted musical instruments have a wide range of tonal qualities. From a flute which is very close to a pure sine wave, to instruments with a strong harmonic content - bowed stings, woodwinds, right up brass. Which is fine for acoustic instruments, but the area of electronic music see a lot more interesting stuff. In particular there is a lot of noise - from overdriven electric guitar to a lot of synthesised sounds, and here you find a lot of processed noise. Indeed a staple of a lot of electronica is filtered noise - where there is no really clear tonal frequency, but there is band passed noise that is modulated in frequency. Analysis would not find a clear cut fundamental nor any sort of harmonic series. Then you get entire genres of sampled found sounds - especially industrial sounds. These can vary from factory noises, motors, mechanical devices and so on. Sometimes there is some clear tonal element, sometimes not. A saw cutting metal can sound a lot like a distorting electric guitar (and vise versa.) If you abstract the sound of an overdriven electric guitar from context, and playing a single note may be indistinguishable from some machine roaring away - so which is musical?
Some of the industrial music guys would walk into a factory and hear the most amazing sounds, fantastic noises, and make music from them. Curiously I find what happens to be interesting in a negative respect. The harmonics of simple devices are mostly pretty simple - you don’'t get minor chords in a circular saw buzzing. So there is a lack of harmonic sophistication. But there are amazing sounds.
The point is that there is if often some underpinning tonality, but it can be vastly less clear cut than analysis of conventional instruments would have one believe is necessary for a musical sound. And again, some of this comes from listening to earlier music. Just as hearing a complex chord or a serialist composition may at first sound like random notes being banged on a piano, later listening can yield an ear attuned to the musical qualities of a noise.
Id have to agree that what constitutes ‘musicality’ is subjective. I have difficulties understanding how can sounds used in a musical manner cannot be not musical?
BBC Radio 4 is addressing this very question in a series of programmes by Robert Winston (or more formally The Right Honourable Professor The Lord Winston FMedSci FRSA FRCP FRCOG FIBiol REng(Hon)). Link. The first one doesn’t air until a day after this post, and BBC iPlayer content is usually only up for a week. iPlayer is a stream, but programmes can be unofficially saved to .mp3 using the very excellent Radio Downloader.
I believe iPlayer radio can be accessed anywhere in the world with an Interwebs, it’s just the BBC TV content that’s restricted to the UK.
The same holds true for light. How can we tell the diffence between snow on a mistuned TV from a TV show?
Because the TV show isn’t random, though the attempts at humor may be.
In any case, a lot of natural sounds are quite musical. A babbling brook waterfall is a great example, having lots of nice “notes” but still being too random to be considered “playing a song”. When a bubble bursts, it has a strong fundamental, and an array of nearly harmonic overtones, which makes each bubble burst a lot like a note played on a musical instrument. Not very rhythmic, though.
The essential elements of classical music (whether Eastern or Western) are melody, harmony, and rhythm. Many naturally occuring sounds have one or two of these elements, but few have all three. Of course, there are musical pieces – especially modern classical and some avante garde jazz – where it’s difficult or impossible to identify one or more of these classical elements. At this point the discussion devolves into basically the same unanswerable question as “what is art?”
We’ve evolved to seek out dynamic patterns - our eyes seek out what is moving against a static background. For sound, clearly, being able to hear patterned / organized structure against an ambient background helped us.
We see colors because they help us survive - and paintings exploit that sensory ability to trigger our brains with visual stimuli. As for music, we perceive rhythm, melody, harmony and timbre because doing so has helped us pick out threats and food out of background noise. It has helped us survive. Music exploits that sensory ability to fire our neurons.
So we hear it because our brains seek out patterns and even seek to impose patterns on incoming data to test it for importance.