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http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/729

It seems to me that 'music' and 'noise' are being used in two different senses here. First, an 'objective' sense, as types of things whose properties can be enumerated. Second, as values: 'I like this', 'this is important', 'this is what music should be' and so forth. Here as in so many cases, distinguishing these senses and keeping them separate is very difficult, perhaps impossible.

It may be possible to give a fully objective description of some types of noise (e.g. 'white noise') but otherwise the term is applied in a value-laden fashion: what is noise to one person is joyfully raucous to another; even to the same person at a different time. Moreover, music is not a thing, it is a cultural production and a cultural reception, and any definition will have to rely upon cultural norms and histories. So, a piece of contemporary music that appears as noise at first may 'resolve' itself into something meaningful for me simply because I become aware of the cultural traditions within which it rests.

The problem you identify is a real one, but it is not a problem of definitions or establishing a divide. Rather, the issue is understanding the processes of cultural production and both cultural and individual reception.

It's an intriguing phenomenon. And it turns out, so I gather, that it's not confined to humans. Various animals differ in their responses to what we label consonant and dissonant intervals. Why this should be isn't something that a philosopher, as such, is in a good position to say. It clearly has some physiological basis and seems to have something to do with the phenomenon of "beats" (something you can actually experience as pulses when two high-pitched notes that differ slightly in pitch are played together.) One study I discovered (by Jonatan Fishman et al. of Albert Einstein medical college) looks at the neural correlates of dissonance in macaques and in humans. If you're able to follow the neurophysiological details (I'm not) you can have a look at the link. There are also references to earlier work.

There are still some things left over that a philosopher might want to puzzle about. One is the sort of thing that physiology might straightfowardly help us understand: why is it that intervals we identify as dissonant are also perceived as unpleasant when we hear them in isolation? Another is famously hard to get a handle on: suppose that Fishman and his colleagues are right and that perception of dissonance has to do with "oscillatory neuronal ensemble responses phase-locked to the amplitude-modulated temporal envelope of complex sounds" -- whatever exactly that means. How do we get from that to "what it's like" to experience dissonance? Of course, that's of a piece with a much more general question: how do we get from physiological accounts of perception and sensation to the way that we experience things? This is a question that divides philosophers deeply; they are nowhere near agreeing on what would count as an answer, nor even on whether the question is a good one to begin with.

Fishman et al point out that there's a distinction we need to keep in mind: the dissonance of intervals (such as the minor 2nd or the augmented 4th) vs. musical dissonance and consonance. Dissonant intervals occur all the time in music that we find quite pleasing (as I'm sure you're already more than well aware.) And it's not just that the alternation between dissonant and consonant chords adds musical interest; whereas a major 7th (e.g, C-B) sounds dissonant by itself, when we add notes to form a major 7th chord (as in C-E-G-B) the result sounds pleasant to most people, even in isolation. One suspects that there's a complex combination of cultural and physiological factors at work here; this is clearly an area for fruitful collaboration among aestheticians, psychologists and physiologists.

I won't comment on Vaughan Williams's music in particular, but I certainly think music that evokes and celebrates a certain nationality can accurately be described as 'nationalistic'. And I don't see that such a description is any more metaphorical than many of the other descriptions we employ with music: 'sad', 'anguished', 'triumphant', 'relaxing' and also 'spiritual'--though I won't say anything more about what might make music spiritual.

One way--though perhaps not the only way--for music to be nationalistic would be for it centrally to include certain melodic, rhythmic, harmonic or intrumental elements that are unique to a given nation. If a composer includes such elements because they will be recognized as deriving from that region, and she moreover uses them in an approving or celebratory fashion, then I think her music is nationalistic. And I don't see that describing it this way is any more metaphorical than rooting for that nation's soccer team, or pridefully ordering its beer.

As opposed, I suppose you mean, to affective or emotional content? Yes, both in the lyrics or librettos of various musical compositions and in the web work of meanings that have come to be attached to various sounds. Like most, if not all, artforms, music exists in an historical context, and within any context music relates to other music. So rhythms, harmonies, instrumentation, chord progressions, intonation, etc. evoke symbols, social ideas, abstract ideas concerning music theory, social criticism, human relationships, the divine, etc. Musical compositions themselves are associated with cultural movements (modernism, tradition, militancy, rebellion), fashion, politics, even entire civilizations (the Europe, Africa, India). When we listen to a song, we listen to a history and to a society.

What a fascinating question. I hope that some of my co-panelists can give you the answer this question deserves. For myself, I would briefly and cautiously answer this way: What makes a series of sounds (or even a single sound or even a silence) music is our agreement to consider it as music. Just as John Cage invites people to consider the silence and random sounds that occur during a 4 minute and 33 second period music (his piece is called, 4' 33") and Marcel Duchamp invites people to consider a urinal as sculpture (he called the piece Fountain), we make something music when we interpret it as music.

Aesthetic appreciation means well-informed, skilled and close attention to a work of art, all of which can be improved by various types of education. It may be that philosophers of aesthetics tend to not use the word 'appreciation', but the constituent ideas are certainly important. Have a look at previous answers on this site under the heading of 'art': quite a few of them concern context, culture or knowledge.

I'm not sure the Moonlight Sonata is perceived as sad by every person in every culture. This is an empirical question: our perception of music's expressive features has some dependence on the musical culture(s) with which we're familiar, though I gather there's greater cross-cultural uniformity than one might think. The question of how animals or aliens might hear music is also empirical, though I gather there's little evidence that animals respond to music in the ways we do.

The philosphical question is why we perceive music as having expressive featues like sadness in the first place. This is puzzling because there's no comfortable place to situate the sadness: listeners don't always or even typically feel sad when perceiving sad music, and music isn't a phenomenon that seems capable of emotions.

I wish I had a good account to offer you. One possibility is that we hear music as having an expressive feature when it resembles in some way the vocal quality, body-language or other behavior in which humans typically express a given emotion. This might go some way towards exaplning why a slow rhythm or drooping melody can express lament or reflection. But it doesn't, in my view, go very far towards explaining the emotive properties we percieve in a minor tonality.

It is surely possible that a person's music reflects his or her personality and self, and possible that, by listening to this music, you gain insight and understanding of him or her as a person. But I would be very reluctant simply to assume that this is so. Here are three reasons why.

First, the inference from artwork to artist's personality is hardly straightforward. It is rarely true that only a very specific kind of person could possibly have produced a certain set of artworks. And there is little reason to believe that we are good at tracing whatever such connections there may be. I have often been stunned at seeing an artist I greatly admired say silly things in interviews, often including silly things about his or her own artworks.

Second, we live in a world of commerialized art, where a single popular song can pull in millions of dollars. A great deal of money is therefore spent on fine-tuning songs to fit a certain free-spending segment of the audience. To put it bluntly, many an artist is "designed" by marketing specialists who try to manage every tiny aspect of her or his public persona (including appearance, of course, but also little missteps, scandals, and all this) for maximum sales impact. Singers are (also) commercial actors, playing roles for a paying public.

Third, the claim or belief that you know and love this musician as a person is of no real value to you. Imagine, for example, that you have an opportunity to meet him. He does not know you; and for any sort of meaningful relationship (including love) to develop between you, you would need to spend time together, walking, talking, dancing, dining, and such. As he would get to know you, you would have ample opportunity to test and perhaps revise your earlier hunches about his personality. It's just so much better for two people to fall in love with each other than for one of them to do it all by herself... . -- In other words, there's no good reason to gamble on the assumption that you understand him.

There is no uncontroversial definition of a language. However, a requirement that is often cited is that there should be rules on how different elements of a language are composed together (syntax). Another requirement is that the elements of a language should have representational content (semantics).

Music arguably passes the first requirement: notes cannot be strung together in any way one likes to make music. But it appears to fail the second requirement: it is not obvious that individual musical notes represent anything at all. One might argue that sometimes there are phrases in music that do represent: for example, different instrumental lines in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf represent the activities of different animals. But these tend to be rather isolated cases of representation; they are not as widespread and systematic as one would expect from a language (e.g. flutes in music do not always represent birds, or indeed anything at all).

Even if music is not a language in the above sense, that does not mean that there aren't interesting connections between language and music, or that our linguistic and musical abilities aren't related.

You're right that a work of music can't literally feel sad. It's also true that we, the listeners, often (perhaps even typically) don't feel sad when we hear a sad piece of music. In fact, we might feel exhiliration or awe in the presence of a wonderful performance of a sad piece--a slow one in a minor key, for example. (If sad music typically made us sad we probably wouldn't choose to listen to as much of it as we do.) There's no reason to think that the composer or performer(s) of a sad piece of music need to feel sad. So who or what is the subject of the emotions we seem to perceive in music?

And come to think of it, unlike garden variety emotions, the emotions that we perceive in music don't have clear objects either. What is the sadness of the music about?

Even though the emotions we seem to hear in music have no clear subjects or objects, it often (though not always) seems right to describe music in emotional terms. Saying how this can be is one of the central problems--if not the central problem--in the philosophy of music. And there's still significant disagreement because sorting it out touches on broader issues such as the nature of artistic expression and interpretation, as well as the nature of emotions and moods. I won't sketch the options here, but instead recommend Peter Kivy's recent book An Introduction to a Philosophy of Music, which provides a nice account of these issues.