Music

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The art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody, harmony, form. The word music comes from the Greek mousike by way of the Latin adaptation musica. The Greek word is itself derived from mousa, "muse," and hence was applied to all branches of art over which the Muses were supposed to preside. Music is the science and art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity; vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony.

Music is an orderly succession of sounds of definite pitch, whose constituents are melody, harmony, and rhythm. Almost as fundamental to a perception of the nature of music, however, is articulation, which embraces not only the phrasing, dynamics, etc that breathe life into a musical performance, but also the composer's creative use of silence.

Music is an art that is concerned with combining sounds - particularly pitches - to produce an artifact that has aesthetics, that expresses something, that conveys emotion, that follows some kind of internal logic and exhibits intelligible structure, and that requires special skill on the part of its creator. Indefinite border areas exist, however, between music and other sound phenomena such as speech, and the cultures of the world differ in their opinion of the musicality of various sounds.

Rhythm involves time--the duration, or length, of musical sounds. A rhythmic pulse marks off divisions of time. Pulses may be stressed or unstressed. Tempo, the speed at which a piece is played, is sometimes associated with rhythm.

Harmony concerns the building of chords--tones played together-- derived from the scale on which the music is based. Groups of tones sounded together create harmony. It also involves the order in which successions of chords accompany a melody.

Melody probably derives from the inflections of the human voice. A melody is a succession of tones in rhythm. It involves pitch, or the relative highness or lowness of tone. When pitches are musically organized, they are referred to as scales.

Form results from the way in which rhythm, melody, and harmony are put together. Form is the architectural structure of music -- the process through which principal ideas are developed and expanded into a convincing, complete musical statement. Good music has unity to satisfy a listener's ear and variety to maintain interest.

Musical elements also include counterpoint, tone, timbre (tone colour), texture (instrumentation), and dynamics (variations in loudness).

Music, even when it is imagined silently without an interpreter, exists in time, which means that, except for certain types of composition in which words are paramount (such as operatic recitative and some plainchant), virtually all musical structures entail a degree of audible repetition, even if this cannot always be fully grasped at a first hearing.

Music is therefore a kind of aural patterning rather than aural painting - abstract rather than representational. This is not to deny its capacity to elicit a strong emotional response, mainly by creating and eventually resolving harmonic and rhythmic tensions which somehow mirror those of the human body and mind, but the essential nature of music is possibly closer to mathematics than to any of its sister arts. Music is both the most mathematical and the most abstract of the arts. Unlike words, pictorial images, or bodily movements, however, musical tones in themselves have no concrete associations, and only gain meaning when they are combined into musical patterns.

Although music involves sounds of all kinds and although there are no sounds that can be described as inherently unmusical, musicians in each culture have tended to restrict the range of sounds that they will admit.

Western music is one of several separate, highly developed musical cultures, each of which has its own specific theoretical base that encompasses, among other things, its own system of tunings and scales, its preferred timbres (tone colors), its particular approach to musical form, and its characteristic musical textures. As such, Western music stands alongside other major musical systems, notably those of India, Indonesia, Islamic culture, China, and Japan.

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