This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

1. What Is Music?
From Pitch to Timbre
What is music? To many, "music" can only mean the great masters--Beethoven, Debussy, and Mozart. To others, "music" is Busta Rhymes, Dr. Dre, and Moby. To one of my saxophone teachers at Berklee College of Music and to legions of "traditional jazz" aficionados anything made before 1940 or after 1960 isn't really music at all. I had friends when I was a kid in the sixties who used to come over to my house to listen to the Monkees because their parents forbade them to listen to anything but classical music, and others whose parents would only let them listen to and sing religious hymns. When Bob Dylan dared to play an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, people walked out and many of those who stayed, booed. The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God. The church also banned the musical interval of an augmented fourth, the distance between C and F-sharp and also known as a tritone (the interval in Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story when Tony sings the name "Maria"). This interval was considered so dissonant that it must have been the work of Lucifer, and so the church named it Diabolus in musica. It was pitch that had the medieval church in an uproar. And it was timbre that got Dylan booed.

The music of avant-garde composers such as Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, or Pierre Schaeffer stretches the bounds of what most of us think music is. Going beyond the use of melody and harmony, and even beyond the use of instruments, these composers use recordings of found objects in the world such as jackhammers, trains, and waterfalls. They edit the recordings, play with their pitch, and ultimately combine them into an organized collage of sound with the same type of emotional trajectory the same tension and release as traditional music. Composers in this tradition are like the painters who stepped outside of the boundaries of representational and realistic art the cubists, the Dadaists, many of the modern painters from Picasso to Kandinsky to Mondrian.

What do the music of Bach, Depeche Mode, and John Cage fundamentally have in common? On the most basic level, what distinguishes Busta Rhymes's "What's It Gonna Be?!" or Beethoven's "Path--tique" Sonata from, say, the collection of sounds you'd hear standing in the middle of Times Square, or those you'd hear deep in a rainforest? As the composer Edgard Var-se famously defined it, "Music is organized sound."