Objectively speaking, I don’t believe that this is noise since everyone is humming and following some sort of beat or rhythm. There is clear consistency in the tones and the flows are evenly distributed without any major irritations and distractions. This type of artistic expression is quite similar to people playing multiple songs all at once in the same room on loudspeakers. Although subjectively, it may sound like noises at first because it is harder to decipher and separate each frame to its individual channels. But what they are actually doing is just following their own individual music notation or scores. So if we separate the channels, or room so to speak in this analogy, the beats of each individual person will become more concise and the isolation will provide much more clarity to the rhythms. Therefore, my definition of music is really just any musical notations that follow some sort of rhythmic pattern without any distracting ambient sounds and are free from annoyances. Likewise, my definition of annoyances is any musical notations that sound like a metal spoon scraping an aluminum bowl.

Responses to the professor or other students for my original post above:

Response 1: Yes, that is exactly right, it is a measure of quality. To me, personally, I believe that a listener’s emotional response can be treated as a grading rubric of the overall standard of quality to a piece of art, regardless of whether it’s a movie, a song, a painting on display, or a piece of antique. To put it simply, every art or piece of artwork is essentially a storybook. Everything has a story to be told, a lesson to be learned, and an emotional struggle that the author succumbs to. Therefore, in essence, the audiences’ emotional response can basically be treated as to how well the story is being conveyed, understood, and felt.

Response 2: To answer your question, yes, I will consider it as music. Although, I have to admit that it would a piece of artistic expression that I couldn’t really subjectively enjoy. But objectively, it is still a musical expression as there is a pattern to be discovered. For example, in the last forum, I really wanted to reply to Ryan’s choice of music. However, as I listened to it again and again while placing it on repeat about four to five times. I found myself confused because I wasn’t able to understand the story behind the song. When I was looking back at the forum late last night, I was genuinely impressed by your ability to actually understand the song. This just goes to prove that it has one, a very clear one in fact. It was one that I simply wasn’t able to comprehend. Ultimately, in the end, I wasn’t able to form a non-objective and unbiased opinion of the song. Therefore, I had to skip it for this reason, because it wouldn’t be fair to form my opinion based solely on a subjective point of view.

Responses to the professor or other students for other student posts:

Response 1: Indeed, that makes plenty of sense, and I totally agree with your assessment. The lack of musical accompaniment should not serve as the sole and definite indicator when trying to determine whether something is worthy of being categorized as music. It ought to come from its lyrical context and the broader metaphorical melodies.

Response 2: Indeed, I agree with you. In my own analysis of that video. I mentioned that in order for it to qualify as music, it will have to follow some sort of rhythmic order. I like how you mentioned that it took a while for your brain to recognize and accept it as music. It’s not until the third and fourth beat for our brains to catch on to the “fluidness” of the beats and the symmetrical pattern and repetitions of the chords. Although, I would add that I believe that the reason why our brains reacted slower to the beats was that the four gentlemen were humming at their own individual music sheets. Hence, creating a manmade distortion in the audio frequency in the atmosphere. Also, since they are humming to their own notes, there is also a lack of correlation between them, further distorting, confusing, and tricking our brains into treating it as noise, rather than beats. My analogy for this was to picture that there were multiple songs playing in the same room. And because their musical tones are not related in any way, we would usually assume the atmosphere as “noisy”, and therefore, we would treat it as noise and leave the room.

Response 3: I really like that perspective from you where you said that “…being manipulated to the point where we question if this even is music.” This is actually extremely on point in my opinion. Because, basically, if a tone is able to entangle our feelings and stir up our thought process, it should be considered music. Although, personally, I would also like to hear some sort of pattern in the melodies, which these gentlemen clearly demonstrate.

Resources