OrganizedSound

Quora Answer : All music may be sound, but are all sounds music?

Oct 31, 2019

The best way to understand "music" is that there is an intention behind it. Someone has organized these sounds to be listened to. In order to express or communicate something.

Any sound can be organized to express or communicate something. That's why there's Musique Concr\xc3\xa8te and music made by field recordings.

But not all sounds are intentionally organized. Some sounds are just the sounds of processes unfolding, or coincidences of sounds happening at the same time. These aren't music. Although if someone captures them on tape and decides to present them, then they immediately become organizations of sound. And therefore they become music.

It's not the shape of the sound-waves that determines if something is music. It's the contextual factor of someone organizing it for a purpose.

This may seem odd, but consider the property of "being a moon". Not all planetoids are moons. But some are. And it's got nothing to do with the shape of the body that makes them a moon. It's the context, that they are in orbit around a planet.

Musical sounds are music, not because of what they sound like, but because of the role they play in the context of human music-making.