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Definition of music
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This article discusses the definition of music. Music is an art, entertainment, or other human activity which involves organized and audible sound, though definitions may vary.

Defining music is as difficult as defining art or any other subjective phenomenon. It is a problem that has been tackled at various times by philosophers, lexicographers, composers, teachers, semioticians or semiologists, linguists and other scientists, students, and various other musicians.

The elements of music often have an implicit concept of time, pitch, and energy. The presence or lack of these elements can be used to classify music. They can be organized into units with interrelated rhythm, harmony, and melody. Organizing musical sound is part of composition and improvisation. Music can invoke or convey a sense of motion in time.

Contents [hide]
1 Etymology
2 Music in other languages
3 Music as organized sound
4 Music as subjective experience
5 Music as social construct
6 Music as a category of perception
7 Music as language
8 Change
9 Tripartite definition
10 Notes
11 Sources
12 See also
13 External links

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Etymology
The word itself comes from the Greek mousikê (tekhnê) by way of the Latin musica. It is ultimately derived from mousa, the Greek word for muse. In ancient Greece, the word mousike was used to mean any of the arts or sciences governed by the Muses.

Later, in Rome, ars musica embraced poetry as well as instrument-oriented music.

In the European Middle Ages, musica was part of the mathematical quadrivium - arithmetics, geometry, astronomy and musica. The concept of musica was split into three major kinds: musica universalis, musica humana, musica instrumentalis. Of those, only the last - musica instrumentalis - referred to music as performed sound.

Musica universalis or musica mundana referred to the order of the universe, as god had created it in "measure, number and weight". The proportions of the spheres of the planets and stars (which at the time were still thought to revolve around the earth) were perceived as a form of music, without necessarily implying that any sound would be heard - music refers strictly to the mathematical proportions. From this concept later resulted the romantic idea of a music of the spheres.

Musica humana designated the proportions of the human body. These were thought to reflect the proportions of the Heavens and as such, to be an expression of god's greatness. To Medieval thinking, all things were connected with each other - a mode of thought that finds its traces today in the occult sciences or esoteric thought - ranging from astrology to believing certain minerals have certain beneficiary effects.

Musica instrumentalis, finally, was the lowliest of the three disciplines and referred to the manifestation of those same mathematical proportions in sound - be it sung or played on instruments. The polyphonic organization of different melodies to sound at the same time was still a relatively new invention then, and it is understandable that the mathematical or physical relationships in frequency that give rise to the musical intervals as we hear them, should be foremost among the preoccupations of Medieval musicians.

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Music in other languages
The languages of many cultures do not include a word for or that would be translated as music. Inuit and most North American Indian languages do not have a general term for music, and in Africa there is no term for music in Tiv, Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Birom, Hausa, Idoma, Eggon or Jarawa. Many other languages have terms which only partly cover what Europeans mean by the term music (Schafer). The Mapuche of Argentina do not have a word for music, but they do have words for instrumental versus improvised forms (kantun), European and non-Mapuche music (kantun winka), ceremonial songs (öl), and tayil (Robertson 1976: 39).

In Czech, hudba is instrumental music and only by implication vocal music. Some languages in West Africa have no term for music but the speakers do have the concept (Nettl, 1989).

Musiqi is the Persian word for the science and art of music, muzik being the sound and performance of music (Sakata 1983), though some things European influenced listeners would include, such as Koran chanting, are excluded. Actually, there are varying degrees of "musicness"; Koran chanting and Adhan is not considered music, but classical improvised song, classical instrumental metric composition, and popular dance music are. However, from a European influenced musicological analysis, or from the standpoint of an untrained European influenced listener, Koran chanting is structurally similar to classical singing (Nettl, 1989).

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Music as organized sound
An oft cited definition of music, made by Wynton Marsalis among others, is that it is "sound organized in time." Apart from objections that "organization" is not required, this definition is seen by many as being too broad. The fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica pinpoints the problem by saying that "while there are no sounds that can be described as inherently unmusical, musicians in each culture have tended to restrict the range of sounds they will admit." Organization would seem to be a crucial restricting criterion in this context, after all.

"Organization" also seems necessary because it implies human organization. This human organizing element seems crucial to the common understanding of music. Sounds produced by non-human agents, such as waterfalls or birds, are often described as "musical", but rarely as "music".

This definition determines music according to the poetic and the neutral levels (it must be composed sonorities), or more aesthetically, 'the artful or pleasing organization of sound and silence', which determines music according to the esthesic. This definition is widely held to from the late 19th century forward, which began to scientifically analyze the relationship between sound and perception.

Additionally, Schaeffer (1968: 284) describes that the sound of classical music "has decays; it is granular; it has attacks; it fluctuates, swollen with impurities—and all this creates a musicality that comes before any 'cultural' musicality." Yet the definition according to the esthesic level does not allow that the sounds of classical music are complex, are noises, rather they are regular, periodic, even, musical sounds. Nattiez (1990, p.47-8): "My own position can be summarized in the following terms: just as music is whatever people choose to recognize as such, noise is whatever is recognized as disturbing, unpleasant, or both." (see "music as social construct" below)

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Music as subjective experience
Another commonly held definition of music holds that music must be 'pleasant' (determined by the esthesic level) or 'melodic' (determined by the neutral and/or esthesic levels). This view is often used to argue that some kinds of organized sound 'are not music', while others are, based on type of organization or its aesthetic effect. Since the range of what is accepted as music varies from culture to culture and from time to time, more elaborate versions of this definition admit some kind of cultural or social evolution of music, granting that definitions may vary but universals hold. This definition was the predominant one in the 18th century, where, for example, Mozart stated that "music must never forget itself, it must never cease to be music." One example of shifts in the music/noise dichotomy, what organization is considered musical, is the emancipation of the dissonance, while Luciano Berio (1976) describes how the Tristan chord was noise in 1859 since it was a sonority unexplainable by contemporary harmonic conventions.

This view of music is most heavily criticized by proponents of the view that music is a social construction (directly below), defined in opposition to "unpleasant" "noise", though this view may be subsumed in the one below in that a listener's idea of pleasant sounds may be considered socially constructed.

A subjective definition of music need not, however, be limited to traditional ideas of music as pleasant or melodious. Luciano Berio defined music as, "everything one listens to with the intention of listening to music." This approach to the definition focuses not on the construction but on the experience of music. Thus, music could include "found" sound structures--produced by natural phenomena or algorithms--as long as they are interpreted by means of the aesthetic cognitive processes involved in music appreciation. This approach permits the boundary between music and noise to change over time as the conventions of musical interpretation evolve within a culture, to be different in different cultures at any given moment, and to vary from person to person according to their experience and proclivities. It is further consistent with the subjective reality that even what would commonly be considered music is experienced as noise if the mind is concentrating on other matters and thus not consuming the sound as music.

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Music as social construct
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_music