Philosophy of music

Philosophy of music is the study of "fundamental questions about the nature of music and our experience of it". The philosophical study of music has many connections with philosophical questions in metaphysics and aesthetics. The expression was born in the 19th century and has been used especially as the name of a discipline since the 1980s. Some basic questions in the philosophy of music are: What is the definition of music? (what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for classifying something as music?) What is the relationship between music and mind? What is the relationship between music and language? What does music history reveal to us about the world? What is the connection between music and emotions? (in the 19th century a debate began over whether purely instrumental music could convey emotions and depict imaginary scenes) What is meaning in relation to music? Contributions to music philosophy have been made by philosophers, music critics, musicologists, music theorists, and other scholars. Definition of music "Explications of the concept of music usually begin with the idea that music is organized sound. They go on to note that this characterization is too broad, since there are many examples of organized sound that are not music, such as human speech, and the sounds non-human animals and machines make." There are many different ways of denoting the fundamental aspects of music which are more specific than "sound": popular aspects include melody (pitches that occur consecutively), harmony (pitches regarded as groups—not necessarily sounding at the same time—to form chords), rhythm, meter and timbre (also known as a sound's "color"). However, noise music may consist mainly of noise. Musique concrète often consists only of sound samples of non-musical nature, sometimes in random juxtaposition. Ambient music may consist of recordings of wildlife or nature. The arrival of these avant-garde forms of music in the 20th century have been a major challenge to traditional views of music as being based around melodies and rhythms, leading to calls for broader characterizations.