What makes a sound a “music note” vs being just a regular sound?
In: 5
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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