What is called music?

[tripleblessed]

Well said, and on the money.

[Bugbear]

Well said, and on the money.

Ehh, thankfully I didn't have to write a paper like CMcG.

[OC Richard]

The question is "what is called music?" which of course is a very different question than "what is music?"

To me it seems to be a linguistic question rather than a philosophical question, and the answers would vary from language to language (because there are never exact cognates between languages).

And much easier to answer. You simply need to play various sounds for native speakers of a particular language and have them declare whether the sound should be labelled with that language's word for "music" or not.

(Of course you might encounter languages which don't have a word meaning more or less what our word "music" does.)

[CMcG]

A drum begins to entrain the brains of the hearers within eight seconds <snip>

I'm rather interested in entrainment as a bio-psychi phenomenon. Do you have a source for the 8 second timeframe?

<snip>
If you need citations for my supporting sources, I could probably cough them up.

An interesting aspect of this paper is that my prof told me to cut out 3/4 of the sources I was going to use. He then told me to try and think through it on my own

I'm curious about the title you put on your post "Our Shadows Taller than Our Soul..." Could you elaborate on that?

As you specifically mention Pythagoras, I'll post a quibble with the definition
as requiring human manipulation. <snip>

For Pythagoras, there are two types of human music: instrumental and body. Both of them are based on the ratios you mentioned in your post but only instrumental is actually audible. While the ratios themselves are considered to be eternal, the sound of instrumental music definitely requires human manipulation to come into being. The ideal, in this case, is to produce music that is in harmony with the numerical organization of the universe, aka the music of the spheres.

I'm sure Pythagoras would have been mortified by other cultures embrace of "dissonant" ratios, let alone modern experimental music!

<snip>My answer to your question would then be: music is a form of cultural expression that may reflect common activities (do we see this represented in modern 'gangsta rap'?); may reinforce cultural values, norms, mores which would include religion, warnings of what to avoid doing, and songs of praise for what is to be encouraged; may reflect social standing (how many people today consider orchestral music to be 'high class'?); and, in more recent times, music may simply be yet another commodity, just a product for sale.

The question is "what is called music?" which of course is a very different question than "what is music?"

To me it seems to be a linguistic question rather than a philosophical question, and the answers would vary from language to language (because there are never exact cognates between languages).

This being a philosophy course, a linguistic or sociological answer would not suffice. Framing the question as "what is called music" is basically a recognition of the fact that "what is music" will be discussed using language.

One of the tools that I used is called a phenomenological reduction or epoché. The idea is to first gather up a lot of assumptions about whatever is being studied and then temporarily withhold them in order to rethink the issue. In looking at a cross-cultural perspective on what is called music, I considered the fullest range of musical events. This would go anywhere from a "silent" piece like John Cage's 4'33 (not actually silent because the world always has sound, even if it's just one's own heartbeat), to full orchestra, from ambient drones to African drums, and everything in between. Reducing all those things down from their surface qualities, I arrived at a more inclusive definition to work with: sound in time that beings listen to and are affected by.

Point three is sound is one of the senses that can influence how we think or feel but the influence is not the same for everyone or even for one person at different times.

If we assume we are talking about man made music <snip>

I rejected any assumption about musical sounds needing to be man-made because birds are said to "sing" and there are soundscape compositions that use only natural sounds. The point that music is not the same for everyone or for the same person all the time is very important...

<snip>
To CMcG, any question like this, in my philosophy of life, begins and ends with this. The world a person knows is being put together in that person's mind or brain; it is a very limmited model of "the real world," not a direct experience of it.

I agree that the mind is integral in the "worlding" of brute matter and that our experience is coloured by many factors. The height of this type of thought would be Descartes cogito ergo sum or "I think therefor I am." The danger of this type of philosophy is that it too easily leads to solipsism. I'm inclined to embrace a couple of things to mediate that risk.

The first is intersubjectivity because we don't live in a vacuum but instead are constantly influenced by other humans. Even someone who has chosen to isolate themselves still has the heritage of language to connect them back to other subjects.

Second is the fact that our own mind is not actually separate from the objects around us. An example that Merleau-Ponty uses is the touch. Our hand can touch an object but this is contingent on the hand itself being touchable. We can think about the world but this is based on the world being able to think about us. While we can make a distinction between self and other, in practice one cannot exist without the other. We are helplessly intertwined with the world and whether or not our perception is "real" is less important than the facts of our experience. While this facticity might be a limited model, it is always in relationship with everything else and not purely constructed in the mind.

Coming back to music, there is sound in time and there are beings who listen to it. There is no music without sound, time, beings, and listening, but none can truly take precedence over the other. What separates this experience from simply hearing any given sound is that music affects us. The result is an ecstasis, which means music puts us outside ourselves. I think this way of thinking accounts for the many culturally determined varieties of human music, musical experience of non-human sounds, and the fact that people (or the same person at different times) experience the same thing in different ways.

Now we'll see what my prof thinks