For example, if I played a song really, really slowly. Say, one note per hour, I doubt people would be able to recognize it as music and have the same chemical, physical, and emotional response than if it were played “normally”. When does music become just sound and vice versa?
**Have there been any experiments on how slow music can be before we stop “feeling” the music?**
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You can search Adam Neely on Youtube. He covers a lot of music stuff and some of it from an academic perspective as well. One of his videos talks about this particular question and the answer he gave (or the research gave) is 33 BPM, if I am not mistaken.
So if the “music” is slower than one beat every 2 seconds, approximately, it doesn’t connect together like music anymore and is perceived as individual sounds.
Music major here. Defining something as “music” can be considered subjective based on culture/geography. But for most Westerners, when we begin to hear the ratios of frequencies within a monophonic (only one note at a time) phrase, I believe, our brains tell us “this is music”.
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Can I just say sometimes the question is more interesting than the answer. A very thought provoking query.
Experiment or art – you be the judge.
The current performance of [As slow as possible](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible) by John Cage is planned to last 639 years.
Fun(and slightly unrelated) fact: there’s brain injuries that cause sensory issues known as agnosias, in which we lose the ability to process a certain type of sensory input. For example, there’s an agnosia where the people affected can no longer perceive music. Specifically music. This implies that there is a part of our brains that has specifically evolved to perceive music. Music is that important.
More on topic: I think this one depends on the song. If I heard a G sharp, no matter how slow the next note was in coming, i would recognize Welcome To The Black Parade.
You took that question in a different direction than I expected, which made me think of [Sorites Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox).
>A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?
I think it depends on what you think music is.
The composer John Cage made a piece of music entitled 4’33” which is 4 minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. It’s said that he was inspired to create the piece after an experience in a sensory deprivation tank: A special chamber where you float in water and can’t hear or see anything outside your body. Apparently in the chamber you can hear your blood pulsing through your veins. When the piece is performed in front of an audience there’s also naturally going to be some sound from them. So people say the music in that piece is the sound of your blood going through your body or is the sound of the audience. But then a lot of music has pauses of intentional silence that doesn’t have the intention of a person listening to the audience or listening to their blood in their veins.
So if music can be sound and silence we might look and say that it’s organized sound and silence. But then there is music that’s known as generative music which is purposefully random.
And then there’s the idea that music is made by a performer and then heard by a listener. Some music composers want their music to make you feel a certain way or make you think a certain way. Others want their music to tell a story. So I think usually music tells us something about the composer and the performers as well as something about us.
But when we think of who they are and who we are and see that everything is connected, I think any piece of music is really a window and a mirror at which we can look at the whole universe and ourselves. I think that’s really the definition of art. So maybe the best I can say is art with a focus on sound.
But then this is a human definition. Birds and whales sing. It’s their way of communication, but we think of it as song. They have no intention of it being art but we can see it as such.
The simplest answer is when you perceive enough of a pattern to what you are hearing to make what has happened to be familiar and to be able to have some idea of how it will continue. Another post mentioned a performance of “As Slow as Possible” being done on an organ in Germany. This would fit, not because you can perceive the changes in the melodic line as music, but you will hear the ongoing sounds as a drone. Listening to anything that repeats, with or without some variation, will start to sound like music when the makeup of the repeating pattern becomes clear.
RadioLab had an episode where they talked about the premier of “The Rite of Spring” which used chords that didn’t fit in the tonal vocabulary of the day. Most of the audience didn’t enjoy the piece, and legend has it that a duel was fought over whether it could be called music the next day. Polychords are commonly used in music, both classical and popular, today and people don’t have the reaction. They talked about how the unfamiliar sounds caused the tension reaction, but now that it is just another tool, people don’t react the same.
There’s a psychologist, Diana Deutsch, who studies this. You can read her papers, also she was featured on a [segment of Radiolab](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91512-musical-language) that explained her research to mass audiences.
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