Wikipedia says music is "an art form whose medium is sound", defining it as a performance art with the elements of pitch, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, and texture (much as visual art has color, light, shape, etc.).
Dictionary.com defines music as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color."
Urban Dictionary definitions include, "Ruined by MTV", "Mankind's greatest achievement", "Something the world would be lost without", "the one language spoken by all cultures,sex's,races,and anything else that at one time or another in history has had a hard time purely because of belief", "Indefinable by words alone. It is not only something you hear but what you feel. It is something your soul can reach out and touch. It originates from all over the world since time began. Complex or simple, fast or slow, loud or soft. It is what you feel, or it could be your method of escape or it could just keep you alive."
But does that really get it all? Music, like any art, is hard to define. Is a doodle on a napkin "art"? I think that depends on the intention of the doodle. Is a few random notes played on the piano "music"? I think that depends on the intention of the music.
Music is sound. Sound organized in to a way that makes sense to our ear, that is (theoretically) pleasing. People pick up instruments, and tap, hit, pick, or pluck them to make noise. Sometimes music involves lyrics, too. But what are lyrics but a bunch of words?
Music is made of sound and nothing else. But it's not just something that we listen to; music can infect our whole lives. A musical artist can change the way you look at yourself, music, or even the world.
This semester, I took a class called "Art in the Mind and Brain". For this class, I read and wrote papers about how the brain "interprets"/understands literature, music, and visual art (on a side note- I was fascinated by the material, but ended up with a low B in the class. Figures.). In the paper I wrote about visual art, I included different images, using them as examples of pieces of visual art that demonstrate the "laws" of what our brain finds pleasing in art (for example, contrast). But apparently, the cover of Twilight isn't art; it's a book cover, which means that the image doesn't qualify as visual "art".
B- (the grade I got on the art paper) aside, it got me thinking. Okay, so if a book cover (even neglecting the text, I'm talking about the image here) isn't "art" (because the symbolic meaning is "obvious", then is a theme song that's written for a TV show "not music"? Is a song "not music" if it's been written as the theme song for a TV show or if it's been written specifically for a certain movie? I don't think so. If you ask me, a song is music, whether it's been written as a theme song or jingle, or if it's just a song on an album.
Music is pretty amazing. I don't know about you, but out of all of the arts, music connects with me the most. I connect a lot more emotionally with music than I do with literature, poems, visual art, theater, or dance. There have been songs that made me cry, songs that give me the chills, and songs that give me (both mental and physical) energy.
And yet... music, in all technicality, is just some organized sounds. Whoa.
How do YOU define music? What makes a certain sound or group of sounds "music", as opposed to just random sound? Does a song written specifically as a theme song count as "music"? What does music mean to you? Got anything else you want to say, or any musicians you think Cold Fusion should start covering? Leave a comment!
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