The Ranting Room

What about bird song? Music or sound?

Well, the composer Ilayaraja said even a dog's bark is music and he has composed nearly 2500 tracks of music, and nearly all of it strictly in the conventional melodic tradition, mind.  Maybe the composers, especially a genius like him, can see possibilities in sound that most listeners cannot.  

Dayvenkirq wrote: ^ So, why would e-cigs be considered just a fad? Aren't they the future?

Dayvenkirq wrote: ^ Nothing wrong with e-cigs.  I have a co-worker who smokes one, and I'm happy for him; it doesn't bother me. He still keeps coming back to actual cigarettes, though, believe it or not. Internet and iPhone were "fads", remember?

*frinspar* wrote: This growing e-cigarette culture is making me grumpy. Not only do people look incredibly foolish sucking on those ridiculous sonic screwdrivers, but they just love talking about the new flavor juice they just found. And it seems like there are more e-cig supply stores popping up than weed stores in Colorado.

Dayvenkirq wrote: ^ In that case may I add trucks that drive in the fast lane? ... You have trucks driving parallel to each other on the fast and the slow lane. I'm not surprised why we in Reno get heavy clogging every morning of a business day.

^ In that case may I add trucks that drive in the fast lane? ... You have trucks driving parallel to each other on the fast and the slow lane. I'm not surprised why we in Reno get heavy clogging every morning of a business day.

Edited by Dayvenkirq - January 29 2015 at 08:07

I suppose one interesting venture would be to try to delineate at what sonic point does sound end and music begin.

I once had a fight with someone over the same issue; he believed any audible sounds could be construed as music, and as adorable a notion as that is, he refused to acknowledge that the two must be different or we wouldn't perceive and define them as different.

So here's a thing that keeps popping up in my head and bugging me.  What is it with the modern culture of including just about everything everywhere?

Example...
I think we can all agree that various genres of music are, in fact, music.  Rock, symphonic, jazz, experimental, rap, prog (of course), metal, etc. etc...
And I can at least somewhat understand the logic of calling things like bird song music.  Okay, sure.  Not music to my ears, but then again neither is most rap.
However... you'll get some overly-fluffy, politically-correct-to-the-extreme person spouting nonsense like, "The sunset is music."  But wait.... he doesn't mean that in a metaphorical sense.  He'll actually argue with you that the sunset itself is, literally, music.  And I know this because several years ago, it happened in a class full of adults on the physics of music.

Since then, I've noticed this sort of ultra-inclusivism all over the place.  It hit me on here a few nights ago and I had to take a lot of deep breaths and shut the computer off to calm down.  Because this one really bugs me: 

"Music is science!"

NO!  No it's not!  Science is science!  And music is music!  And here I am ranting about it relatively calmly because I've had a few days to recover from constant fuming.  This one bugs me a lot because I am both a physicist and a musician, and while I can explain musical principles scientifically, I understand science enough to know that music does not fall into the same category is biology, chemistry, geology, physics and astronomy.  Those things are trying to explain the natural world through a very specific set of procedures.  Music... is more like an attempt to cope with or describe the world in any sound-related way you can.  To me, trying to call music science is no different than calling prose science.  It just doesn't make sense.

Among other, to my mind, insane inclusions in music are:
"Poetry is music" [No, poetry can be part of music but in and of itself it isn't].
"John Cage's 4:33 is music" [No... no it's the equivalent of a blank canvas.... though I know many would argue with me about that, this is a rant right?]
"The world around us is music" [Arrrrgh!  No, it's just the world!  You have to make music out if it!]

Those are only the music ones though.  It's more just this general culture of being so unwilling to exclude anyone or anything from any category that makes everything seem cross-referenced with everything else.  This may be exaggerated for me because I work on a campus, where these notions seem to take flight thanks to the endless head-banging of the philosophy majors.  (One of whom, by the way, once attempted to argue with me that science was less real than philosophy - which I suppose stemmed from "I think therefore I am," meaning to philosophers thoughts are more real than observations of the world around them.  I find that delusional.  Again, rant.  Weirdly, though, that is not a new-age idea at all, that's from way back in Ancient Greece at least... maybe further).

The rant took a turn!