At my university, my lecturer's opinion is that music is "organised sound".

If you go to Africa or Indonesia for example, they may use only percussion, or may just use their voices to yodel.

Music is one of those difficult concepts to define. You can have someone clap, is that music? I think it depends on several factors: context, culture, purpose.

As for "good" music... well that's subjective :)

JvK

Quote: Original post by jvk
At my university, my lecturer's opinion is that music is "organised sound".

Sound design is intensly organised but it isn't music so i'd disagree with that.

There is only one solution to the problem of trying to defining music: don't. 'Tis a fool's game.

This leaves you with two choices:

* deny the existence of music altogether and admit that there is only sound

or

* accept that music and sound are the same thing

Any other definition is easily invalidated by exceptions to the rule, hence the hen-pecking in this thread.

But this is totally impractical when communicating with other people about the minutia of sound. The most important thing is that you and the people you work with have a shared understanding of what music is - you don't reach this understanding by discussing "what is music?" but by working together over a period of time and creating a common language. This happens quite naturally and is most evident when someone new enters into the working relationship and totally misunderstands the words you use. So, I would conclude that "music" is whatever it needs to be to assist you in communicating with other people about sound or, indeed, as an allegory for other phenomena (religion, death, sex - the human condition).

Music is designed sound with the intent of affecting the audience.
Good music is one that fulfills it's purpose.

Does this end the non-endable discussion?

Maybe we can have many definitions for it, each taking in and out of sound.. But that's just choice.. We're defining terms, so don't expect them to have meaning before you give them one.

I'm sure I recall reading that there is no definition of what sound constitutes music, which is why genres like music concrète and noise music are considered to be music.

My own personal subjective definition of music, is any sound that is intended to be music. Otherwise, I think it's very hard to categorise what is music and what isn't. It's easy for people to dismiss genres like noise music outright, but not all noise music sounds like TV static, a lot of it is very nice to listen to, how would you objectively decide which pieces are music and which aren't?