What is music?

We are all so familiar with music.
But familiarity is not the same thing as knowing what it is.

What then is Music?

Answer type 1: I don’t know!

Having a musical experience is not the same thing as fully understanding how that experience occurs or even what it represents.
Seeing is not quite the same thing as understanding the physics of light.
Hearing is not the same thing as understanding sound and acoustics.
Everyone “knows” what consciousness is, but scientifically no one knows what consciousness really is.
(There are various theories, but are any of those theories correct? No one is really sure!)

Answer type 2: Music Theory

Anyone who learns to read music notation or play an instrument will learn some of this descriptive theory.
It includes concepts like frequency (सुर) and tempo (लय), and parts such as melody (धुन),
harmony, chords and counterpoint (western musical concepts -- no equivalents in either Hindustani or Carnatic music systems),
keyscales (पट्टी) and rhythm (ठेका).
But there is still a huge amount that music theory doesn’t tell us.

a) Music theory is not complete

We know the constraint that pitch values in a melody come from a finite set of values in a musical scale.
But the set of constraints is not complete. And some constraints only apply to some kinds of music.
Thus, music theory cannot fully predict the musicality or “strength” of an item of music from its description.

Music theorists are afraid to call themselves scientists.
So, the incompleteness of music theory is often regarded as some kind of mystery beyond description, intrinsic to the very nature of music.
Such anti-scientific ideas of impossible, are a general feature of how people think about the existence of the human “soul”.
Most people easily jump to the conclusion, that it should also apply to music.

b) What goes on inside the human brain when we listen to music? Music theory has no idea!

That is mysterious.
Music does not have any existence independently of its human perception, so no theory of music can be complete until it explains the detailed mechanics of how our brains respond to music.

Our ears only send signals through the auditory nerve to the brain stem, to tell our brain that we have heard some sounds.
It is the brain that reassembles the data and interprets the pattern into something we perceive as music.

“If you play someone’s favorite music, different parts of the brain light up. You can see this on fMRI.
That means memories associated with music are emotional memories, which never fade out — even in Alzheimer’s patients.”
~neuroscientist Kiminobu Sugaya at University of Central Florida, Orlando.

c) What is music for.? Music theory does not even begin to address this question!

If you ask most people why they listen to music, they would probably give a vague answer -- “they like it”.
The real question is: why do we like music?
We are truly, profoundly ignorant of the answer to this question.
We connect most of the things we like, with survival and successful reproduction.
But music doesn’t relate in any obvious way to anything else other than music.

Answer type 3: Subjective

Every existing formal descriptive theory of music is incomplete.
So the only way, you can explain to another person the meaning of the word “music” is by example.
In other words, if you were teaching some person a new natural language, and you didn’t know the word for “music” in their language (say Tamil)
[The word is ( இசை ईसइ )]. You would be forced to play some music to them, and then tell them that that’s what music is.

Much of the music industry is “hit-driven”, meaning: if one person likes a particular musical item a lot, it is quite probable, a lot of other people will also like it a lot.
Also, we still recognize an item as musical even if it is not our favourite kind of music, and even if it comes from another culture.

Answer type 4: Poetic

Sometimes people will utter some BS that sounds good, but doesn’t really mean anything sensible.
for example: “Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which doesn’t know that it is counting”. ~Leibniz

Answer type 5: Scientific

Some popular scientific explanations of music include.

• It helps members of a society bond with each other.
• Humans use it to attract the opposite sex.
• It evolved either from, or into language.
• It has something to do with how mothers interact with children.

None of these “theories” say very much about why music has exactly the properties described by descriptive music theory.
Certainly none of them explain why large numbers of people regard particular items of music, as very musical.

Conclusion: A Best Answer

Given our current ignorance of what music is, the answer must be something as follows:

Certain patterns of sound which people create, have certain emotional and pleasurable effects on the listener.
These patterns of sound are subject to certain constraints, some of which can be described with some degree of mathematical precision.
These descriptions form the content of “music theory”, traditionally taught to those learning about musical composition and performance.
However, these descriptions do not fully distinguish between what is music and what is not music.

Given
(1) the incompleteness of the descriptions of music provided by music theory,
(2) our ignorance about the biological mechanics of the effect that music has on the listener,
(3) our ignorance about why it has an effect on the listener,
the only satisfactory definition of music is a subjective definition -- a list of specific examples, and then saying: “music is anything like those examples”.