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considered a musical instrument. After all, it
pummels the street with a very regular frequency. And
if noise consists of loud sounds, which are unpleasant
to listen to, then the cymbals used to punctuate the
performance of the marching band might be
considered noise. I suppose we all define the point
where music becomes noise a bit differently. Perhaps
it’s based on what we listen to most or on the
generation we grow up in or … make a break from.
But we need to be careful about being cavalier as I
was just now when I talked about “pleasing” sounds.
John Bertles of Bash the Trash® (a company dedicated
to the construction and performance of musical
instruments from recycled materials:
http://www.bashthetrash.com/) was quick to caution
me when I used the word “pleasing” to describe
musical sound. Music that is pleasing to one person
may not be pleasing to others. Bertles uses the
definition of intent rather than pleasing when
discussing musical sound. He gives the example of a
number of cars all blaring their horns chaotically at
an intersection. The sound would be considered noise
to most anyone. But the reason for the noise is not so
much the origin of the sound, but the lack of intent
to organize the sounds of the horns. If someone at the
intersection were to direct the car horns to beep at
particular times and for specific periods, the noise
would evolve into something more closely related to
music. And no one can dispute that whether it’s
Eminem, Buddy Holly, Lawrence Welk, or Bob
Dylan, they all create(d) their particular recorded
sounds with intent.
“There are two means of refuge from
the miseries of life: music and cats.”
– Albert Schweitzer
BEGINNING TO DEFINE MUSIC
Music makes us feel good, it whisks us back in
time to incidents and people from our lives; it rescues
us from monotony and stress. Its tempo and pace jive
with the natural rhythm of our psyche.
The simplest musical sound is some type of
rhythmical beating. The enormous popularity of the
stage show Stomp http://www.stomponline.com/ and
the large screen Omnimax movie, Pulse
http://www.Pulsethemovie.com/ gives evidence for
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the vast appreciation of this type of music. Defining
the very earliest music and still prominent in many
cultures, this musical sound stresses beat over
melody, and may in fact include no melody at all.
One of the reasons for the popularity of rhythm-only
music is that anyone can immediately play it at some
level, even with no training. Kids do it all the time,
naturally. The fact that I often catch myself
spontaneously tapping my foot to an unknown beat
or lie in bed just a bit longer listening contentedly to
my heartbeat is a testament to the close connection
between life and rhythm.
Another aspect of music is associated with more
or less pure tones – sounds with a constant pitch.
Whistle very gently and it sounds like a flute playing
a single note. But that single note is hardly a song,
and certainly not a melody or harmony. No, to make
the single tone of your whistle into a musical sound
you would have to vary it in some way. So you could
change the way you hold your mouth and whistle
again, this time at a different pitch. Going back and
forth between these two tones would produce a
cadence that others might consider musical. You
could whistle one pitch in one second pulses for three
seconds and follow that with a one second pulse of
the other pitch. Repeating this pattern over and over
would make your tune more interesting. And you
could add more pitches for even more sophistication.
You could even have a friend whistle with you, but
with a different pitch that sounded good with the one
you were whistling.
If you wanted to move beyond whistling to
making music with other physical systems, you
could bang on a length of wood or pluck a taut fiber
or blow across an open bamboo tube. Adding more
pieces with different lengths (and tensions, in the case
of the fiber) would give additional tones. To add more
complexity you could play your instrument along
with other musicians. It might be nice to have the
sound of your instrument combine nicely with the
sound of other instruments and have the ability to
play the tunes that others come up with. But to do
this, you would have to agree on a collection of
common pitches. There exist several combinations of
common pitches. These are the musical scales.
Here we have to stop and describe what the pitch
of a sound is and also discuss the various
characteristics of sound. Since sound is a type of
wave, it’s additionally necessary to go even further
back and introduce the idea of a wave.