4 ms·
If you found that interesting, make sure to have a look at the list of other articles on that blog. It's all written by the same author, a trained mathematician
by _Microft 5y ago
If you found that interesting, make sure to have a look at the list of other articles on that blog. It's all written by the same author, a trained mathematician - now software dev, on the quest to figure out what music actually is. You can see it as a sort of log of his efforts, ideas, dead-ends...
https://whatismusic.info/blog/index.html https://whatismusic.info/blog/index.html
- akomtu 5y agoMy favorite definition of music is the one given by Schopenhauer: "Absolutely direct experience of the will is impossible, because it will always be mediated by time, but in first-personal experience of volition and the experience of music the thing in itself is no longer veiled by our other forms of cognitive conditioning." There's also a less poetic, but I believe a more accurate definition in the blog you've linked: "Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which doesn't know that it is counting." (Gottfried Leibniz)
- analog31 5y agoI prefer a pragmatic definition: Music is any remunerative activity involving a bass player.
- pjdorrell 5y agoAll definitions of the word "music" that anyone has ever come up with are wrong. We only know what the word "music" means from our own subjective experience of listening to specific examples of music. At most we can observe common features of musical items, and include a description of those features in a definition. But such a definition will fall way short of accurately separating what is music from what is not music. There are other subjective phenomena that we have words for, but for most subjective phenomena we have _some_ objective understanding of what is going on. Music seems to win the prize for being both very familiar _and_ very mysterious.