I think it may be more helpful to stop labeling, categorizing, and defining things.
Yes I was going to consult my dictionary. 
Fair enough. So then we disagree with the dictionary as to what music is.
Neither do I…
No,
True. Because country music has a melody that can be quantified, it fits my definition (which falls under My Humble Opinion) of music.
It just so happens there’s rap playing on the TV as I write this (I’m not the one watching it).
How is that any different than my interpretation?
If a chainsaw is music, and (as has been said before in this thread), speech is music :rolleyes:, then so is rap. :rolleyes:[sup]2[/sup]
Are you saying that music is an absolute, and that it includes anything that somebody somewhere finds pleasing? In contrast to my application of the dictionary, namely that since rap doesn’t appeal to me, I don’t consider it music?
I think we should have the freedom to choose where we draw the line!
I don’t think that’s true at all.
Well, that depends on whether music by definition requires a melody.
Okay, so you don’t hear a melody in Hotel California. Whereas I think that’s one of the best songs ever recored. Just means we have different tastes.
Umm, hello! The dictionary defines a melody as being pleasing or agreeable. How can anybody misapply that?
Agreed. It’s pointless to try to continue the discussion, because there’s no way to come to an agreement.
Let me summarize. There is a continuum of sounds ranging from unambiguously music to unambiguously not music. We each have the freedom to draw the line between what we consider music and what we don’t. It doesn’t need logical criteria, partly because logic and music don’t even involve the same hemisphere of the brain :smack: so rationalizing the issue is useless.
Oops:
All that time writing and previewing a long response, and i didn’t even bother to clarify that. What I mean is, yes let’s either like rap or hate it. I will stop trying to define it. And no, it doesn’t threaten me.
You’ve had a few posts along these lines (arguing that one can successfully arrange sound “without having any knowledge or appreciation whatsoever of music”), and each time I’ve thought the same thing, though I don’t think I’ve properly communicated it yet.
I find that someone who has “knowledge or appreciation… of music” will be most successful at creating music (and I don’t necessarily mean formal training), whether with an instrument or using .wav files or whatever. Knowing what sounds work together, how dynamics work, etc. will greatly advantage a musical composer, even if that composing consists of sticking .wav files together. Sure, it’s possible that you could stick the sounds together at random, and create something that sounds alright, but teach someone a few chords on the guitar and after an hour or so, they’ll be able to create something agreeable, even without any musical knowledge.
Also, I’m wondering whether you classify Kraftwerk as musicians - they seem to perfectly illustrate what I’m saying. All their music is made by machines, but they undoubtedly have a very good idea of music theory (whether through formal training or not), and that’s why their music works. They aren’t just getting lucky when they tell their machines to make music, they’re composing with certain ideas in mind.
And finally, would you consider Michael Stipe, singer for R.E.M. a musician? He most certainly makes music, but cannot play any instrument. He has played guitar on maybe one or two R.E.M. songs - and those songs were written 20 years into the bands career - and before the recording had to be shown how to make the chords.
I consider both these artists to be musicians. Under your definition, I’m not sure whether you would.
If the definition results in the situation where only songs the listener finds pleasing have melody, the application of the definition is flawed. Whether the arrangement of sounds is “pleasing or agreeable” is obviously not meant to mean “pleasing or agreeable to a specific person.”
It’s already shown that rap has melody (check the sheet music and midi links on the previous page). Therefore, under your definition (you seem to have a few, and will switch to whichever definition you can twist to support your argument) rap is music.
You seem to be bent on defining everything. When I hear rap, I do not hear a melody. If you do, great! But melody as I understand it just doesn’t exist there. All the sheet music and MIDIs in the world won’t change the sounds that reach my ears.
Fine. If it is so dang important to define music, I will settle on one definition. Just thought of it this morning, and it’s perfect. In order for me to call it music, if it contains any vocals it must contain singing. (I won’t get into instrumentals since nobody is arguing them.)
Therefore, I must concede that OMC’s How Bizarre is music, since there is singing there. So is Do You Like The Way, by Santana with Lauryn Hill and Cee-Lo (believe it or not, I have the CD this one is on). So is Maxi Priest’s Close To You, which, if I recall correctly, has both rapping and singing in it.
You’d be interested to know that I used All Music Guide to track down that info.
Ah, the thread that wouldn’t die:)
I don’t really have any disagreement with any of this. My question/point in the statement you quoted is this. Just because someone can sit down and manipulate files and arrange them through a program like Acid, does that make them a musician?
I’ll give you an example. I had a roommate that liked to watch me compose music. One day, I was playing with Acid and he was watching me work. He thought the program was interesting and asked if I would mind if he played with it a little. He had a large assortment of commercially available loops available to him from CD’s that I had purchased. He took a drum loop or to and created a track. He then proceeded to add a couple of other tracks of other loops, which Acid faithfully lined up for him and corrected any tempo discrepancies. He thought it was kind of cool that it was so easy to layer these sounds together. What he created wasn’t awful because the loops are pretty high quality and they sounded “interesting” together. It wasn’t a masterpiece by any means but it wasn’t unpleasant to listen to (at least the first 30 times or so 
).
But in the end, he didn’t consider himself a musician, any more than I consider myself an accountant when I balance a checkbook. I think the musician part comes with the knowledge that you speak of, to know what sounds good together, and how to arrange the parts in relation to dynamics, etc. Also, had it not been for the wonderful playing of the musicians that created the loops in the first place, there wouldn’t really be any tools at his disposal to have done what he did. His piece sounded ok, not because of anything he necessarily did, but because the loops were played and recorded by people that did have a knowledge of music. He was basically creating in a paint-by-numbers sense.
Yes I would. I’m not trying to imply that we should all go back to exclusively using acoustic instruments or anything. I think the technology can be very powerful when used by people that have a musical background. Although I do have to add that most musicians are going to dig deeper into the machinery to get it to do what they are trying to accomplish. They are going to tweak and refine. A novice might be more inclined to just call up some factory settings or loops and leave it at that because they may not understand what the technology can really do for them. Not in all cases, but I think you see my point. In my thinking, correct or not, the reason why Kraftwerk would be considered musicians is because of the skills that you attribute to them, not what equipment they choose to work with.
I don’t think that I have ever implied that only instrumentalists are musicians. I consider a singer to be a musician. They are providing the melody.
*Disclaimer: Concerning this next part, I’m sincerely hoping not to sound elitist in any way. I’m just adding my thoughts to what I think is an interesting sub-topic in this thread. *
Whether or not a rap is a melody is a matter that I feel is still up for debate. I think I understand your position and here is mine. In my mind, a melody is made up of musical notes, notes that could be played on another instrument, for example. Hopefully we can agree that something that is spoken is not necessarily singing a note, so to speak. Yes, it is rhythmic, but could one actually hum the melody of a rap song? Would someone else be able to tell which one it was, without having the words there, even if it was rhythmically correct?
You might despise Hotel California, but if I hum the melody, you could probably tell pretty quickly what song it is that I’m humming (and perhaps throw something at me for doing so). In fact, there are probably thousands of songs that I could hum that you would recognize. With rap, it would seem to be a much more difficult feat. I’m not going to go so far as to say impossible, because I surely haven’t heard everything out there. I would imagine that there are certainly exceptions.
That doesn’t mean that I am trying to imply that rap isn’t music because of this fact. Overall there seem to be enough musical elements present to override that fact. It is lacking something though in my ears because I do enjoy when melody plays a more significant role. I also find a good portion of the rap that I have heard to be a little musically simplistic for my tastes. But luckily, there are many styles of music for us to choose from. We all have our personal preferences. Like I’ve said before, you might not like everything I like to listen to either. There is room for all of it though.
Hopefully, I’ve answered this for you and I look forward to your take on my remarks.
Well, there isn’t much to say musicguy, because I pretty much agree.
I wouldn’t call this guy a musician, either, just as I wouldn’t call myself a saxophonist if I picked up a saxophone up and started blowing into it. I think, for me to consider your friend a musician, there’d have to be some intent to the way he was arranging the samples. I think I’m casting the net wide enough so that I do not base musicianship too much on talent, but to restrict those of us playing around, like your friend on the computer or me with the saxophone.
Of course, to become a musician of any skill, your friend would have to gain understanding of the skills we’ve discussed in our previous posts.
I agree that someone has to make the loops in the first place, but I don’t place that much value in the skill - though of course, to become a musician of that calibre is a very difficult thing to do that takes years of training and dedication. I guess I can admire their proficiency from a technical viewpoint, but I’ll always admire Johnny Rotten more than a session musician, because there’s only one person who could have written Pretty Vacant, whereas there’s no shortage of session musos in the world.
That said, I doubt the actual playing of traditional musical instruments is going to decline any time soon. I play guitar and compose music electronically, and while I get a lot of enjoyment out of doing both things, they are very different processes. I could never imagine there would come a time when people don’t get pleasure out of picking up a guitar and wringing sound from it.
I think that one of the most melodic raps I’ve heard in a while would be Eminem’s The Way I Am. It’s main musical feature is its rhythm, but I think one could quite easily transpose it to piano or hum it, and it would be immediately recognisable to those who know the song. Yet, the rap doesn’t sound strikingly different to other Eminem raps, some of which are much less melodic. It seems to me then, that all (or virtually all) raps have melody, but often not so prominent as in a song such as The Way I Am.
Certainly, I don’t deny that the melody isn’t the central focus of a rap. It may even be incidental, created as a byproduct of the rapper’s flow. But it’s still there.
This is an interesting definition. It means that, according to you, much rap is music, and particularly the common form of commercial rap whereby the chorus is sung but the verses are rapped (Jay-Z’s '03 Bonnie and Clyde and Fabolous’ Into You are recent examples). Indeed, it be could argued that this form of rap, that you call musical, makes up much of the lesser examples of the genre (although many good rap songs have been created using this template).
It also results in a circumstance where on Jurassic 5’s latest album, there are rap songs that are music, and rap songs that aren’t, and on The Roots’ latest album, rap songs that aren’t music, even though the members of The Roots play the instruments on them.
And, most interestingly, it results in the circumstance where on R.E.M.'s seminal 1991 album Out of Time, every single song but one is music, where the exception is a track where the only vocal is Michael Stipe’s speaking voice. Incredible! A rock song that isn’t music!
It sounds like we are pretty much on the same page then. I really only saw one thing that I wanted to take brief exception to.
While I will agree that there is only one Johnny Rotten and only he can do what he does, I think you sell studio musicians short. There might not be a shortage of studio musicians, but there are a select few that are incredible artists in their own right. They can play with just as much inspiration, creativity, and soul, as any other artist and have distinctive voices of their own. They have the ability to go from a jazz session to a country session to a pop session and provide exactly what the song requires from them, even while possibly hearing and sightreading it for the first time. The ones that can do this flawlessly, time after time, are very in demand and not exactly a dime a dozen. Many have solo careers on the side where they put out original music, some of which is quite beautiful.
An example would be a man named James Jamerson, who was the session bassist on almost all of the motown stuff. Listen to what he adds to each track he plays on and the improvisational skill and feel he contributes. There is only one Johnny Rotten but there was also only one James Jamerson. Nobody else could have accomplished what he did in the same way. His contributions to that music were incredible.
I just bring this up because there seems to be some negative vibe towards studio musicians that really isn’t fair. They have just as much commitment, originality, and expressiveness, as anyone else, and are in some cases, far more versatile than your average musician in a band.
Beyond that though, I think, as you said earlier, that we have come to as much of an agreement as we are likely to. This has been an interesting debate.
Jimmy Page put in a lot of time as a studio musician.
BTW, if anyone is interested in what turntablists do, I highly recommend the documentary Scratch. Whether or not you like the music they produce, you have to appreciate the skill they have. They can do amazing things with a couple of turntables & a mixer. They are musicians.
No, it means that I must concede (and have already with specific examples) that there are (a great many?) works of rap that are music. It does not mean that rap by definition is music. I am not calling rap per se musical.
hehe. A number of Moody Blues songs feature spoken words, as does Guess Who’s Friends Of Mine. Of course those have singing too but what about Hudson & Landry’s Ajax Liquor Store?
I know I’m chiming in a bit late but here are my two cents.
As I have allready thrown my two cents in, and they would make a salior blush please read here.
I’ve been vaguely following this thread and although I disagree with musicguy’s definition of music, I think this is a very important question.
This is where I introduce a fellow by the name of Pierre Schaeffer. He was probably the first person, back in the 40s, to use pre-recorded sounds to make music. Of course, a lot of people back then, and now still, didn’t consider his stuff music. However, he also wrote a massive tome titled Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects.) Although, because it was never translated into English, very few people have actually read the thing, it did have a very big influence on avant-garde music.
In this book, Schaeffer talks about four kinds of listening. The first kind, which I would call biological, is simply the unconscious process of sounds entering your mind. This is something you do 24 hours a day. If a loud sound wakes you up, you obviously heard it in your sleep, even though you weren’t conscious of it.
The second type of listening is causal listening. When you ask people “what’s that sound?” most of the time they’ll tell you what the source of that sound is. “I hear guitar”, “I hear someone’s voice”, “I hear my girlfriend’s voice”. This is the type of listening we use to get information from our environment.
The third type is semantic listening. This is the area of speech. When you make arbitrary, or indirect associations between a sound and an idea, you are practicing semantic listening. You hear the sound of the word “tree” and you think of a tree. You hear the doorbell, and you think “someone’s at the door”.
The last kind of listening is paying attention to the characteristics of the sounds themselves, not their causes or meaning. Just in the same way as you talk about a shape being “round”, or “small”, you talk about a sound being “loud”, or “high-pitched”, or having a noisy spectrum.
Music, according to Schaeffer’s thought, is the art of arranging sounds in time based primarily on the last type of listening. Music can have semantic elements, for instance songs with lyrics, or to a lesser extent programatic music, but the backbone for organisation is not meaning, but sound itself.
When a foley artists edits sounds together, his main worry is creating the illusion of causal relationship, thus what he does is not music. When a train operator blows a whistle, his main intent is sending out a message, thus he is not making music.
However, if you are putting together a chord progression, your main interest is frequency, which is a characteristic of the sound itself. When you are beat juggling, your main interest is duration, another aspect of sound. Hence, in both cases you are making music.
If you were to blow a boat horn because you liked the sound of it, then blew it again in some sort of organized fashion, you’d be making music. Now, you might argue that it’s not good music, but that’s another discussion.
I like what jovan says. His ideas are intriguing and I’d like to subscribe, etc.
I think this is true, at least because of this:
That sort of thing never usually happens to me!
jovan,
Thanks for contributing that. Very interesting food for thought. I will probably have to refine my definition even more after reading what you wrote.
It is a shame that an english translation of his writing isn’t available.
I’ve been turning this question around in my head since you posted it, and I have found that it is not so easy to answer. Being the computer savvy individual that I am, I turned to google to see what the internet (which knows everything there is to know) had to say about this issue. I plugged in “What is Music?” into the search engine, and I have been reading a tremendous amount of very interesting essays as a result. This is a fascinating issue and some great thinkers have put some serious thought into these questions. If no one minds, I’d like to share some of what I found before I get around to answering your question directly.
Firstly, no matter what we might find in our dictionary, the question “What is music?” is not one that has a definitive answer. Sorry, cityboy916, but it looks like your semantic search for a perfect definition of music is destined to be fruitless. Attempts to get a verbal “checkmate” in such a manner are doomed to fail. It turns out coming up with a definition of music is anything but clear cut. To point to a single dictionary entry and declare victory is to oversimplify this issue greatly. Earlier musicguy said " I took the traditional route of learning the instruments to the best of my ability, the theory aspect of trying to figure out why certain notes sound better than others. . ." Italics mine. He may know which notes tend to sound good together as a result of formal training, but I highly doubt he knows why they sound good. As it turns out the answer to the question “WHY does music have the effect that it does?” is a great unsolved mystery. As a matter of fact, there is an entire field of study that has sprung up around that question. The field is called Music Cognition.
This brings me to the first page I would like to share. In my search, I came across the Ohio State University’s Music Cognition page, which relates their available courses and such: “Graduate education, research, post-doctoral fellowships, visiting scholars, and occasional workshops and symposiums”. As the thought provoking list of questions on the OSU web page illustrates, achieving the answers to the questions in this thread will require much more research and study. The field of Music Cognition brings together “psychologists, music theorists, systematic musicologists, ethnomusicologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers interested in comprehending human music-making and musicality.” These are questions that will need to enlist the talents of people from many different disciplines if we are ever to truly understand the reason music has such power over us hairless apes. It is far more complex then simple arbitrary definitions. We must consider human perception, chemistry, physical makeup, spirituality, potential, culture and wiring as well as the technical nature of music if we are to ever hope to get the full picture. Understanding the mechanics of music perception will require an understanding of neuroscience that we have not yet achieved. Advances are made daily, however, and the reverse engineering of the human brain is one of the great projects mankind is working on right now. I would say that the questions being researched by advanced neuroscience are the most important as far as coming to an understanding of human emotions, reactions, preferences, and desires.
Music speaks to us in a most powerful way. It can make us sad, energetic, happy, angry, amused, and a whole other range of emotions. It can lull us to sleep and it can help us to wake up. It adds to the quality of life of the musician and the listener. But why? Truth is, we really don’t understand. The point is that the most important part of music is how it makes people feel. Whether or not a musical piece fits into a certain notation or conforms to traditional music theory is an interesting discussion, but it’s not a deal breaker when it comes to the question “What makes something musical?” It is the listening that makes it music, just as the viewer is what makes Michalangelo’s David art. Now, it isn’t simply (actually, nothing is simple about defining music) this feature which makes music music; that would pretty much be conforming to the subjective “agreeable music” definition. I would argue, however, that it is the most important feature. If people can dance to it, or more importantly DO dance to it, or use it as music, then I would have to say that it is music. It may not be good music, it may not be music that I like, but the fact that someone somewhere does goes a long way to making it music as far as I am concerned. The more people who feel it as music, the more convinced one should be that it is safe to call it music.
Check out this page: The $64,000 question, what is music? The page breaks music down into “Tempo & Rhythm”, “Pitch, Melody & Harmony”, " Pattern Recognition", & “Cultural Aspects”. In the conclusion section I find a great disclaimer and summation:
These are some interesting thoughts on the subject. Music is an experience, and need not necessarily fit into a pre-defined set of mathematic equations, nor must it be culturally relevant, nor must it really have a melody, but all of these things CAN be important factors. It seems that something about the way we are built is responsible for us being so effected by music. If a group of sounds tend to speak to this part of us (or this part of some of us), it should probably be referred to as music.
The above is from this very interesting page They make a great point: it is neither the instrument nor the man that is the music, but the outcome of the interaction between the two. Music is not static. It is constantly evolving and expanding. As it does, so must our definitions. The more people try to classify music or define music the more it becomes obvious that we should be going the other way. Our definition of music should not be getting more concise over time, but rather it should become broader so that we may allow for the further evolution of music and the ideas and emotions conveyed.
Turntablists aren’t just using old sounds in clever ways, they are finding, creating, and inventing new sounds. Groups like the Skratch Piklz create music that has me dancing all over my room with sounds that simply have never been produced via any other medium. The failure is ours if our definitions of music do not include the new and groundbreaking. As a matter of fact, there is an entire festival called the What is Music? festival. These new sounds and styles need to be somehow differentiated from just plain noise. jovan’s post is very helpful in understanding the difference between how we hear music and everyday sounds. It does not matter if a sound is not considered musical, it can still be used musically.
To get back to where I started, I would have to say that sound engineers for movies and such are not doing the work of musicians (though they use musicians to create the music). They are, as illustrated in jovan’s post, appealing to a different aspect of human cognition then a musician would. Any one can pick up a guitar and strum the strings. Being a musician requires skill at a given instrument (counting the voice, computers, and samplers as an instrument), and (more importantly) musical intent. An audience that is affected makes it a lock. If someone trys to make music, with the intent of having it perceived as music, and people perceive it as music, then the piece IS music and the creators are musicians.
Finally, here are a couple of links to some interesting pages discussing scientific research into these issues:
The biology of perfect pitch
Music of the Hemispheres
DaLovin’ Dj
Wow, daLovinDJ, it’s really nice to know that my question could provide the catylist for such in-depth research on your part.
And you would be correct. My wording was poor.
I find it amazing that an “I hate rap” thread could become so cerebral. Looking back, I’m actually quite happy that I contributed my antiquated views on the subject. Considering what has developed in this thread, I would consider it well worth it, even at the expense of having to admit how off-base I was in my earliest responses.
I think that the last thing that any artist wants to do is discard the future (or perhaps, even the present, in my case). I spend a lot of time trying to find ways to make my creations fresh. The avenue that I never considered though was redefining my entire definition of music in general. (Talk about getting back to the basics!) If all of this debating helps me to open my mind and therefore be a better artist in the process, then you and the other contributers to this thread have my gratitude.
I think this is what I’ve been trying to say. But you said it so much better.
This was a great post (in an interesting discussion).
I used to ‘hate’ rap. And country, and gospel, and anything that wasn’t the exact shade of music that I happened to like at the time.
But it’s not a competition. Rap doesn’ t have to be compared to Rock or Folk any more than Rock has to be compared to poetry or classical music.
So what if Rap doesn’t have heavy guitars? Neither do Gregorian chants, but no one would argue that they aren’t music.
90% of everything is crap. So the casual listener of rap, or country, or pop, or rock, is going to hear a lot of crap.
Now I just go for quality and keep my mind open. If it happens to be Celtic, or Country, or Folk, or Jazz, or Classical, or Rock, or Heavy Metal, or R&B. It’s all art, worth judging by its own rules.
And Eminem is the shizznit. I watched his video for “Stan”, and was floored by it. He’s a real talent. OutKast is also very good, and many others.
Try it. It’s great. And you rap guys, check out some Bluegrass some time. It’s not all hillbilly dancin’ music. And check out some Radiohead and Warren Zevon while you’re at it.
What the - 90%!?!? Yikes! I must disagree. I listen to a lot pop and rock from the '60s, '70s, and '80s, and IMO no more than about 50% of the Billboard Top 40 from that time period is crap. If you’re an enthusiast of a particular genre, a lot of it sounds good to you.
Also, you mention Celtic - as a fan of Enya and Loreena McKennitt, I’d say that there isn’t any crap in either of their solo careers. YMMV since you may or may not happen to like that style of music.
But to say “90% of everything” is silly.
I was quoting Sturgeon’s law. He was once asked what he thought of Science Fiction, and he said, “Science fiction is 90% crap. But then, 90% of everything is crap.”