What is called music?

[tripleblessed]

"Musick hath Charms to soothe a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks and bend a knotted Oak" Congreve

Your opening premise, Colin, starts from the etymology. For the Greeks, and most cultures since, and in many ways, particularly in indigenous cultures around the world, music is simply NOT a sonic event involving rhythm, time, and listeners. A central element for these people is that it must be leading to harmony within, or healing, and/or bringing the listener/s closer to the Divine
(you mentioned ecstasis). Thereby, much of what is CALLED music actually isn't music, it's sound and rhythm arranged through time. Maybe fun, maybe not, but not music by their definition. My check for running the universe is a little late getting here, so I'm not at this juncture willing to make a ruling. Check back with me when my salary is current.

In many indigenous societies, picking up a drum and playing it could get you shunned or banned. Recognizing it's power for entrainment, it was regarded as the territory of the shaman or priest, and required years of training and spiritual cleansing work before being allowed to play under close supervision.

You ask about a source for the eight second guideline. I began teaching meditation in 1979, an American system built on research of one of my favorite teachers. He designed the circuitry used in most bio-feedback equipment. I hung out with him when I could, got to be part of a 20-year mounting of symposia on healing, science, and spirituality, and their overlying territories. I was a caretaker of and provider to the presenters, so I had converse with well-known, unknown and little available teachers and researchers. Some of what I reference is literally recalled conversations, and I wasn't writing college papers. Some was said in confidence, some was pretty weird, and I won't be bothered to educate the willfully ignorant or pooh-poohers in this or any other arena. For the eager, my door is open. Actually, I will be bothered, but I willingly do it, this isn't the venue.

The amount of research available is astonishing, and it begs the question of what is real and who we are and who is not us. Colin, am sending you a PM link to someone who can probably give you citations. Anyone else, feel free to PM me, or start a thread on related subject.

On binaural beats, the concept arises out the study of ting-shas, the small Tibetan cymbals on a leather string. They have for at least a thousand years been cast from multi-metal alloys in slightly different sizes, creating a difference of approximately 4Hz in resonant frequency. The ear hears both, but fabricates the difference. The resulting "shimmer" in the sound leads us into deep theta. Playing one frequency in one ear and another in the other creates an enhanced version of the ting-sha effect, and with a
4-cycle difference creates that frequency of neuron activity in the brain of the listener.

On third thought, a guy I know in San Francisco, David Gibson, could probably provide citations.

http://www.soundhealingcenter.com/

If it's still there. I haven't spoken with him in awhile. Not one of my teachers, but serious. And, for what it's worth, my teaching partner's doctoral work at Rutgers was cutting-edge research on how the brain processes, stores and retrieves information. He came up with answers to questions his professors seriously thought could not be answered. He and the aforementioned researchers have consistently felt that I can hold my own in their discussions, though admittedly I don't have their credentials.