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A definition of music endeavors to give an accurate and concise explanation of music's basic attributes or essential nature and it involves a process of defining what is meant by the term music. Many authorities have suggested definitions, but defining music turns out to be more difficult than might first be imagined, and there is ongoing debate.
Music that makes heavy use of randomness and chance is called aleatoric music, [75] and is associated with contemporary composers active in the 20th century, such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Witold Lutosławski. A commonly known example of chance-based music is the sound of wind chimes jingling in a breeze.
Music can be divided into genres in numerous ways, sometimes broadly and with polarity, such as for popular music, as opposed to art music or folk music; or, as another example, religious music and secular music. The artistic nature of music means that these classifications are often subjective and controversial, and some genres may overlap.
Musicology (from Greek μουσική mousikē 'music' and -λογια-logia, 'domain of study') is the scholarly study of music.Musicology research combines and intersects with many fields, including psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology, natural sciences, formal sciences and computer science.
Some forms of music use recorded sounds of nature as part of the music, for example new-age music uses the nature sounds as backgrounds for various musical soundscapes, and ambient music sometimes uses nature sounds modified with reverbs and delay units to make spacey versions of the nature sounds as part of the ambience.
Philosophy of music is the study of "fundamental questions about the nature and value of music and our experience of it". [1] 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 ...
Apart from technical and structural aspects, ancient Chinese music theory also discusses topics such as the nature and functions of music. The Yueji ("Record of music", c1st and 2nd centuries BCE), for example, manifests Confucian moral theories of understanding music in its social context. Studied and implemented by Confucian scholar-officials ...
Some definitions refer to music as a score, or a composition: [18] [7] [19] music can be read as well as heard, and a piece of music written but never played is a piece of music notwithstanding. According to Edward E. Gordon the process of reading music , at least for trained musicians, involves a process, called "inner hearing" or "audiation ...