what is music?

What is music? How do we know what’s musical and what’s not? Why is music music to some ears and noise to others? Everyone thinks they know music when they hear it, but few can say exactly what it is and why. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a command like “turn down that noise,” you know how slippery ideas about music can be. Few have succeeded in truly defining music. Imposing a single definition on all of the world’s music is difficult because people’s opinions differ about what music is and what is musical. Many scholars of “world music” study behaviors and sounds that are not considered to be “music” by the people who make it the chanting of church music, for instance. It’s our job to figure out a way of studying music that makes sense to the people who make it. Rather than trying to come up with a definition of music, we look for a concept of music that works for the culture we study.