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Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content. [1] [2] [3] Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all human societies. [4]
We cannot all speak the same tongue, but we can understand the emotions a song is telling us.
Although definitions of music vary wildly throughout the world, every known culture partakes in it, and it is thus considered a cultural universal.The origins of music remain highly contentious; commentators often relate it to the origin of language, with much disagreement surrounding whether music arose before, after or simultaneously with language.
Musica universalis—which had existed as a metaphysical concept since the time of the Greeks—was often taught in quadrivium, [8] and this intriguing connection between music and astronomy stimulated the imagination of Johannes Kepler as he devoted much of his time after publishing the Mysterium Cosmographicum (Mystery of the Cosmos), looking over tables and trying to fit the data to what he ...
Nettl asserts that music is not the universal language, but types of music are not as mutually unintelligible as languages. One should study the music of each society in its own terms and learn it individually, referred to as music's dialects rather than music's languages.
"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."
Recognizable strands in the contemporary ideas on universal languages took form only in Early Modern Europe. In the early 17th century, some believed that a universal language would facilitate greater unity among mankind largely due to the subsequent spread of religion, specifically Christianity, as espoused in the works of Comenius.
Many other languages have terms which only partly cover what Western culture typically means by the term music.([9]) The Mapuche of Argentina do not have a word for music, but they do have words for instrumental versus improvised forms (kantun), European and non-Mapuche music (kantun winka), ceremonial songs (öl), and tayil. [10]