No. 1

What is music?

• an artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner
• any agreeable (pleasing and harmonious) sounds; "he fell asleep to the music of the wind chimes"
• musical activity (singing or whistling etc.); "his music was his central interest"
• (music) the sounds produced by singers or musical instruments (or reproductions of such sounds)

Definition of music

Music is an art, entertainment, or other human activity that involves organized and audible sound, though definitions may vary.

As a supernormal phenomenon is most impressive when it is independent of séance room conditions and mediums.

 In religious revivals and in some experiences around the beds of the dying we find two distinct groups of its occurrence. See MUSIC.

Maybe you’ve never really considered yourself very musical. Maybe you quit the flute three months after you picked it up. That’s okay. Music is in all of us, and even just by popping a CD into the stereo, you’re tapping into its power.

Table describing types of definitions of music:

(Nattiez 1990, p.46)

Because of this range of definitions, the study of music comes in a wide variety of forms. There is the study of sound and vibration or acoustics, the cognitive study of music, the study of music theory and performance practice or music theory and ethnomusicology and the study of the reception and history of music, generally called musicology.

"My own position can be summarized in the following terms: just as music is whatever people choose to recognize as such, noise is whatever is recognized as disturbing, unpleasant, or both.

No. 2

Music in other languages

The languages of many cultures do not include a word for or that would be translated as music. Inuit and most North American Indian languages do not have a general term for music, and in Africa there is no term for music in Tiv, Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Birom, Hausa, Idoma, Eggon or Jarawa. Many other languages have terms which only partly cover what Europeans mean by the term music (Schafer). The Mapuche of Argentina do not have a word for music, but they do have words for instrumental versus improvised forms (kantun), European and non-Mapuche music (kantun winka), ceremonial songs (öl), and tayil (Robertson 1976: 39).

In Czech, hudba is instrumental music and only by implication vocal music. Some languages in West Africa have no term for music but the speakers do have the concept (Nettl, 1989).

Musiqi is the Persian word for the science and art of music, muzik being the sound and performance of music (Sakata 1983), though some things European influenced listeners would include, such as Koran chanting, are excluded. Actually, there are varying degrees of "musicness"; Koran chanting and Adhan is not considered music, but classical improvised song, classical instrumental metric composition, and popular dance music are. However, from a European influenced musicological analysis, or from the standpoint of a untrained European influenced listener, Koran chanting is structurally similar to classical singing (Nettl, 1989).

 Tuning

In music, tuning is the process of producing or preparing to produce a certain pitch in relation to another, usually at the unison but often at some other interval. When one is out of tune, too high or too low, one is sharp or flat, respectively. Usually tuning is done only for the fundamental of a pitch. Tuning at the unison obviously requires the ability to match pitch, and tuning at other intervals requires relative pitch.

Different methods of sound production require different methods of adjustment:

• Tuning to a pitch with one's voice is called matching pitch and is the most basic skill learned in ear training.
• Turning the pegs on a guitar (on the machine head) or violin to increase or decrease the tension on the strings so as to make them higher or lower in pitch.
• Cutting or otherwise modifying the length or width of the tube of a wind instrument or brass instrument, pipe, or bell or section thereof so as to adjust the fundamental or the harmonics. The tuning of bells is extremely complicated.

 No. 3

Tuning may be done by aurally testing the two pitches in question and adjusting the incorrect one until it sounds the same as (or in the correct relation to) the desired pitch. Sometimes a tuning fork or electronic tuning device may be used as a reference pitch, though often a piano is used. An orchestra tunes to an A provided by the principal oboist.

Interference beats (or dissonance) may be used to objectively check tuning at the unison or other simple intervals. Since the speed or frequency of the "beats" is the difference between the two pitches when they are brought close enough for beating to occur, speed will increase as tonal distance increases, and speed will decrease as distance does, until beating is nonexistent at the exact unison.