When do our brains stop/start perceiving something as music?

Question

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?**

In: Other

Answer 1

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.