Hey, you ever heard of this thing called ‘music’? Apparently humans listen to it or something? Oh, you have? What exactly is it then?

Chances are that if you really sit down and try to define what exactly music is, you’ll have a bit of a struggle. This goes double if you try to account for such strange things as noise rock, Musique concrète, and atonal music. In fact, it kinda seems like almost anything could be music. 

Well struggle no more, my friends, because today we’re gonna try to get to the bottom of this by exploring the reasoning behind different ways of understanding what exactly music is.

Now, first of all when it comes to defining music, one approach is definitely the classic cop-out of ‘anything someone calls music is music to them.’ This is a lot like answering the question of ‘what is art?’ by saying that it’s really just in the eye of the beholder. After all, didn’t Duchamp sign that urinal and make it an artwork? QED, baby.

One can see the appeal of this approach – it does a great job of accommodating the vast variety of different things that we want to call music. But on the other hand it does a pretty terrible job when it comes to telling us anything substantive about what music really is. If we say that it’s really just 100% in the ear of the listener, then have we really defined music, or have we just given up on defining it at all? 

For the rest of this article, I’m gonna focus on less subjective definitions of music, though almost all definitions do include some element of subjectivity. So let’s start with some basics. First off, music is sound. I mean, have you ever smelled some music? If you have, you may want to get that checked out. But music is more than just sound, and here we find the crucial question faced by any definition of music: what makes music different from mere noise?

One answer, as we saw above, was that people like it. But another, less subjective answer, is that music is structured. Most music has a rhythm, a tempo. The pitch of the sound is usually supposed to follow the rules of harmony, and, in the west, these notes are typically chosen from the 12 notes of the scale. 

With this in mind, we can get a pretty decent start on a definition: music is structured sound. More specifically, music is sound structured according to rules of timing and harmony. But this isn’t really enough to isolate the essence of music. After all, the way my microwave beeps when it’s done cooking my frozen burrito is a “sound structured according to rules of timing and harmony” but it hardly seems like it should qualify as music. Though I do sometimes want to dance when I hear that my burrito is ready, so… maybe?

If you think about it, you’ll find that there are actually two kinds of structured sounds – the music ones, and the ones that are just bings and beeps meant to notify us of something. Saying exactly what the difference is between these is a little tricky. After all, it’s not just that we like one and we don’t like the other, since like I said I certainly like hearing my food is ready. 

Alright now get your top hats and stick out your pinkies kiddos, because we’re about to get into some fancy terminology. The difference here is a difference between what philosophers call ‘denotative’ and ‘presentative’ sounds. Denotative sounds denote something; they point beyond themselves to some other facts that they’re trying to express. A car’s beep denotes an unbuckled seat belt, for example. Presentative sounds, on the other hand, don’t necessarily point anywhere else. They just present themselves and are enjoyed in their own right. And while your favorite song may certainly have denotative elements (might describe the singer’s feelings, etc.) it is primarily a presentative creation. When it comes down to it, you’re not listening to Sia’s music because you want to do some research on what Sia’s going through, but rather because of the experience that the music gives you. In fancy philosophy terms, your interest in the music is primarily in the presentative elements, and not in the denotative.

Adding this to what we said before, we could say that music is structured sound enjoyed for its presentative rather than denotative qualities. At this point, we could probably just call it good. But there is still one big question looming: what presentative qualities of a sound can be legitimately called musical?

This is where opinions can diverge pretty strongly, and into three main groups. First, we could fall back on subjectivity, and say that any kind of structured sound that someone is listening to for its own sake should count as music. This is a very open kind of answer, but it’s nice because it takes into account all the different kinds of music. It says something about the essence of music (structured sound, presentative), but also leaves room for subjectivity. 

But maybe it’s not enough to just have one person listening to it. Perhaps it takes a kind of general social acknowledgement for some sound to count as music. This kind of definition would be a lot like the pure subjectivity one, but instead of me and you each deciding what counts as music for ourselves, society as a whole would define music in a way that is dynamic and historically changing. This definition has the benefit of being pretty open, and it also rules out those weirdos who listen to microwave beeps for fun. Microwave beeps aren’t music no matter what you think, Bill, no one else likes ‘em!

Last, you could be much stricter in your definition and define precisely what notes, sounds, and structures music can have. This will be tricky, since different cultures worldwide have developed different scales and different approaches to rhythm. And even if you manage to reconcile all these, in the end you will probably have to be a bit harsh and say that things like found sound and that Avalanches album made entirely of samples are just not music. On the plus side, you could find a definition of music that can claim to be objective and not dependent on what any society or individual thinks. Perhaps that’s worth it?

Which of these options you land on I’ll leave up to you, especially since there a ton of questions left to answer. For example, does music have to be created by people? Does it have to be created for enjoyment, or is it enough just that it is enjoyed? Unfortunately, we don’t have the space to explore all those right now, but if you have any ideas, do share; your insights would be music to my ears (not really though because I’m mostly interested in their denotative, not their presentative side).