We want to study music, so first we have to …
There is a presumption that if we want to study music seriously, then first we need to define the word, so that we know what it is that we are studying.
The problem is, there is no good definition of the word “music”.
Music is something that most of us experience in our daily lives (unless you are one of those 2.5% of people uninterested in music). From a personal point of view, we “know” what music is.
Yet, there is no good definition of the word “music” that can be written down in a few words as a dictionary definition.
One would think that if everyone “knows” what music is, then surely we can find a satisfactory definition?
Unfortunately, that doesn’t follow.
The main reasons that we can’t define the word “music” are:
- Our knowledge and understanding of music is pre-scientific.
- That is, music scientists cannot tell us in any scientific fashion what music actually is.
- Our practical understanding of the meaning of the word “music” is entirely dependent on our own personal subjective experience of music, based on actual examples that other people label as “music”.
- Scientists do not know what the biological function of music is and they do not know if music even has a biological function. If it doesn’t have a biological function, then they don’t know any reason why it should exist at all as a thing.
Do we actually need to define “music” ?
If we can’t define the word “music”, does that mean that we can’t seriously study music?
The idea of defining “music”, is that having defined it, we then know before we start which things are music, that we want to study, and which things are not music, so that we don’t have to study those.
By defining “music”, we hope to avoid getting confused or distracted by non-musical things, and at the same time we can be sure that we haven’t unnecessarily excluded anything from the set of musical items that we wish to study.
However, to study music, we don’t actually have to identify the full set of all things that are “music”.
It is actually sufficient to identify a subset of the full set of all musical items, and only study that subset.
In particular, we are free to choose the subset of musical items which only contains those items that we ourselves find to be musical.
And we can test hypotheses and do experiments and make observations against that set of items.
The only downside of this approach is that the exact set of musical items for one person may not be the same as the set of musical items for another person. Potentially this could make it difficult for researchers to share the results of their research into the nature of music.
However, most of the time, there will be quite a lot of overlap between what different people consider “music”, and this should be sufficient for the purpose of sharing research results.
(Indeed if there wasn’t quite a lot of inter-subjectivity in our perception of music and the musical quality of musical items, then even the informal definition of the word “music” would be uncertain, in the sense that we would not necessarily know what other people were talking about when using that word.)
Algorithmic complexity and available data
One theoretical way to characterise the problem of answering the question “What is music?” is that we want to find an algorithm which can predict, based on relevant inputs, how much a given person will like listening to a given candidate musical item, or whether they would consider that item to be musical at all.
We want the algorithm to be as small as possible, and we definitely want it to be small relative to the size of the dataset that we are verifying it against.
Of course just finding such an algorithm doesn’t fully solve all the scientific questions – in particular just finding a musical evaluation algorithm doesn’t necessarily tell us anything at all about the biological function (if any) of music.
But it would still be significant progress in the search for a scientific theory of music.
The main point is that there is no need to have available all possible music in our dataset in order to do scientific research about music – it is quite sufficient to have all the music that one person has listened to and that they actually like.
And of course if that one person is yourself as the person doing the research, then this amounts to only doing your research on the music that you actually listen to because you like it.
The Final Conclusion
So the final conclusion is:
- For the purposes of doing serious research into the nature of music, there is no need to objectively define the word “music” a priori – it is sufficient to have a definition based entirely on your own personal subjective experience of music, ie “it’s music if I think that it’s music”.