Sound=Music?

What is music? Music is considered as an aesthetic art form that made of sound. Common elements of music are pitch, rhythm and etc. Music is the strictly organized composition and presents the emotion of the musician and artists. Music is always ordered and pleasant to hear. It is considered as an artificial interaction between audiences and sound.

Why not leave music away from the purely scientific definition? As John Cage said that sound is the music itself, everything we do is music. There is no noise, just music.

Actually, we cannot define music as a single and intercultural universal concept. We just expect it as sound through time.

John Cage 4'33"

“In 1948, Cage joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, where he regularly worked on collaborations with Merce Cunningham. Around this time, he visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. (An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally soundproofed.) Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound, yet sound was nevertheless discernible. He stated "until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The realization as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of his most notorious piece, 4′33″, in which the audience sits in the concert hall for 4 minutes and 33 seconds listening to creaking chairs, sneezes and coughs, or whatever other spontaneous sound may arise.”

－John Cage, Wikipedia.com

John Cage about silence

John Cage’s words in the video:” When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. It is talking about his feeling and talking about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear the traffics here when it is 6, 7pm. I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting.

And I love the activity of the sound, what it does id getting louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all the things that I completely satisfy; I don’t need sound to talk to me.

We don’t see much difference between time and space. We don’t know what begins and the other stops. So most of art we think of is being in time, and most art we think of art is being in space. That is called as time art and space art…

Different sound come from different spaces and lasting, producing a sculpture which is sound art and which remains. People expect listening to be more listening…”

“I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.”—John Cage The Future of Music: Credo (1937)

Reference:

1. John Cage, The Future of Music: Credo (1937) in Silence: Lectures and Writings (1973) by John Cage, Wesleyan University Press