What makes a sound a “music note” vs being just a regular sound?
In: 5
A frequency. If I tap my finger against the table once a second, it’s not going to sound like a note, it’s going to sound like I’m tapping my finger against the table. However, if I tap my finger 440 times a second, it’s not going to sound like tapping anymore, it’s going to sound like the note A4. There’s a great demonstration of this, where someone plays E on the piano faster and faster, and as he gets to playing it more than 20 times a second (20Hz, the lower limit of human hearing), it begins to sound more and more like a sine wave of whatever frequency the note is being played at.
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A consistent, repeated frequency. All sounds are vibrations, a musical note consistently vibrates at the same frequency.
The notes on a piano range in frequency from ~~16.5 Hz~~ 27.5 Hz on the low end to 7900 Hz on the high end
Every sound has a frequency. Some sounds within the range of human hearing mention their frequency and compliment each other.
[This is a famous area of research with many complicated factors.](http://www.philomel.com/phantom_words/pages.php?i=1014) Repetition matters, as does just purely deciding to interpret a sound as “music” — something many people miss about John Cage’s 4’33”.
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A perfect single tone is a homogenous sound called a sin wave. Whether its a subwoofer bass tone or an annoying long beep its still a sin wave.
Now , you can match that high and low note on a trombone by pulling the slide towards you slow or fast. But what makes a trombone or anything else sound special is that when they are played they also vibrate at the double, triple, quadruple and up of the initial frequency in their own way. We call those the overtones.
A regular sound has a lots of frequencies that don’t double so they are perceived as less musical.
Context, but also culture and human perception. Somewhere between noise and notes played from musical instruments is the gray area. This is a not-ELI5 take on the philosophy of music: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_music is a general overview of the topic that includes links to discussions of noise vs music.
It gets really complicated but here are some questions that might help you find your line for “you know it when you hear it”:
A [pure 1000 Hz sine wave](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1000Hz.ogg) is a single frequency (and thus pitch) It doesn’t match a musical note in frequency though. At [440 Hz](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sine_wave_440.ogg) it matches A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A440_(pitch_standard)
Are either of these musical notes? What about a tuning fork used to tune a musical instrument? It’s closer to a pure sine wave but mechanical. Are the synthesized tones of the 8-bit Mario theme musical notes? A car horn? How do you consider percussion, between bells or xylophone, drums like bongos, and a cymbal crash?
It also depends on what you’ve been exposed to and consider music. As you’re on reddit and asking in English, I’ll assume western music theory (also because I don’t know much about others). The links above touch on that more than I could.
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