What is the difference between music and noise? [years-dead slappyfight revived]

[pheeleep]

"Birds gave us melody; the heartbeat gives us rhythm."

Can I use this line in a song some day? I like it a lot..

hibidy, it does run in the family I started the violin at age 7, my aunt plays the piano, my dad played the trumpet, my wife DJ'd for many years.. He's definitely got the music bug already. I am happy Of course I would still love him just as much if he hated music, but this allows us to bond in a very special way

[Perimeter Sound]

Seems like for something to be 'music', or at least 'musical', then it almost has to have or follow some kind of pattern. Rhythmic patterns being most obvious, maybe followed by pitched notes within defined musical scales. But of course either can be called -music-, that is beats, or scales/melodies without beats. Without some kind of defining pattern oriented parameter(s), then at best it's a *sound*, and at worst it's just noise I guess.

[ZenPunkHippy]

Patterns are a big part of this, because the human brain is finely tuned for pattern recognition. But the more one listens to "noise" the more one is likely to find patterns and hence music, as we "tune in" to the (apparent) chaos

Peace,
Andy

[aeron]

And to think that people once considered major thirds to be dissonant, insisting that only perfect fifths and fourths were consonant

I think that even if we could draw the line somewhere, in a century or two it will be obsolete. Who knows, maybe people will get bored of 12-tone et and move on to new frontiers...

[aMUSEd]

I would think in terms of sound rather than noise - noise carries the connotation of being something extraneous (as several people have implied). Sound includes noise, harmonies and beats. To me music is organised or designed sound - organised to produce an emotional and/or intellectual response of some kind. The some kind thing could be simply changing the ambient environment - I am very interested in sonic sculpture and spaces for example - it doesn't have to explicitly "communicate" something, although communication can also be implicit in the sense of sharing an experience or colouring a perception (as in Berger's "Ways of seeing") rather than a specific declarative encoding of a message.

[chj]

Q.What is the difference between music and noise?
A.Pattern
Not all music necessarily has notes/pitches, for example drums, only percussion. Not all music necessarily follows a beat, for example an opera singer. But all music has some sort of pattern that we can recognize as "music". OK so you know some strange piece that follows no discernable pattern. That sh*t is noise!

[Uncle E]

There was a Russian prodigy at my music school who had crazy perfect pitch. He could hear the pitches of cars, airplanes, air conditioning units, and pretty much anything else that most of us hear as noise (it became a routine for our teacher to test him every time a vehicle came within ear shot of our classroom and he was always right). Technically, the definition of white noise is all frequencies but most noises in real life actually have fundamental pitches.

[Ogg Vorbis]

Q.What is the difference between music and noise?
A.Pattern
Not all music necessarily has notes/pitches, for example drums, only percussion. Not all music necessarily follows a beat, for example an opera singer. But all music has some sort of pattern that we can recognize as "music". OK so you know some strange piece that follows no discernable pattern. That sh*t is noise!

Conversely, bird song or rain dripping on a metal pan can be pattern-based. Human speech has pattern. Are all these automatically music?

[Ogg Vorbis]

Noise is music.... But it sucks

A baby banging on piano keys is also making music... And it also sucks Just making that analogy because my 1 1/2 year old son insists on having his time at the keyboard. He gets jealous when he sees me using it... Lol.. So funny. He watches the meters and the visual audio analyzing tools while he plays, with a huge smile on his face. Anyway, I'm getting off topic..

I think maybe then it runs in the family

Ha ha! Thanks for the nasal coffee enema!

[debra1rlo]

ear of the beholder. there will never be 100% agreement. which also means no one's really wrong or right. one person's noise is another person's music. my dad's always loved classical and has said rock music is boring and repetitive and simple. it surprised me many years later when he admitted that he might like to get some early Bob Dylan album one year for Xmas.

to those that have to be wrong or right, I will tell you: 01011010001010000010010

[whyterabbyt]

Intention? If it is intention, then is there no such thing as unintended music?

Or is it in the ear of the beholder...in other words, is music a way of hearing?

read this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Noise-Music-His ... 035&sr=8-1

twice.

[vurt]

me.

[robogone]

42

[palebluedun]

Presentation.

[blueman]

"Birds gave us melody; the heartbeat gives us rhythm."

Can I use this line in a song some day? I like it a lot..

Thanks Feel free to use it. I got the idea about the heartbeat from Native people who describe the drum as a representation of the earth's heartbeat. It also occurred to me that songbirds have been around a looooooong time* and probably gave us our sense of melody. (Some) birds are AMAZING singers ya know

* There is evidence to suggest that songbirds evolved about 50 million years ago in the western part of Gondwana that later became Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea and Antarctica, before spreading around the world.