What is Music? Solving a Scientific Mystery is the title of my new book (which is currently out of print, but is still available as a free download) at http://whatismusic.info).
You might look at the main title – What is Music? – and wonder why anyone would ask that question. I could point you to Chapter2: What is Music? , which happens to explain why it is that we must consider this to be a question that has not yet been answered. Or I could just assume that you got to this page by searching for "what is music?" in a search engine, in which case you must be someone who has asked that question and is searching for the answer. And we can move on to the book's sub-title.
Even if you agree that music is a mystery, is it a scientific mystery? Shouldn't it perhaps be a musical mystery, or some other sort of mystery? After all, science is something that scientists do, and music is something that musicians do. Scientists have their scientific theories, and musicians have their music theory. Music is part of the arts, and the divide between science and the arts is one of those great divides in the landscape of human intellectual endeavour.
There is an extreme point of view, called scientism, which says that it is the proper job of science to study and explain everything in the world around us, including even music. This extreme point of view is precisely the point of view adopted in my book. It is the point of view which has informed my own attempts to understand what music is, and if I was not a subscriber to this scientistic religion (if we can call it that) then most likely I would never have made the theoretical breakthroughs that I made.
Most of us think of music as being a certain type of sound. From this we might conclude that the scientific study of music is part of the scientific study of sound, which is itself part of physics.
But music does not exist just as a type of sound – it is a type of sound which people respond to in a certain way. Because the characterisation of certain sounds as musical cannot be separated from the response that people have to music, music science must really be classified as part of the science of people. And the science of people (or, as we might prefer to say, the science of human beings) is actually part of biology. Because people are living organisms, and biology is the study of living organisms.
There is a second reason why we might say that music science is part of the science of people. I've said that music is something that people respond to, but of course it is also something that people do. In particular they compose music, and they perform music. If scientists study how people compose music and how they perform music, then they are necessarily studying people. But this is not by itself sufficient reason to consider the study of music to be part of biology.
A second point of view adopted in my book is that we must be prepared to consider the making of music as an inevitable consequence of the fact that people like listening to music, and to treat the response to music as being the fundamental mystery. We could ask an analogous question about aeroplanes: is the science of aeroplanes part of the science of people? Certainly people make aeroplanes, and people fly aeroplanes, and people fly in aeroplanes. Yet, even though aeroplaces are entirely a human-made artifact, and the study of aeroplanes is usually thought of as engineering rather than science, we would normally consider the "science" of aeroplanes to be part of physics. What goes on inside a pilot when they fly an aeroplance cannot be completely ignored, and is indeed fundamental to the building of aeroplanes that can be flown safely and effectively, but we still regard this as a secondary aspect of our understanding of aeroplanes.
This distinction between studying the creation of music and studying our response to music might seem rather obvious, yet it has important consequences when we start exploring the theoretical biology of music.
In modern biology all explanations are grounded in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. It is not possible for any explanation in biology to be considered a scientific explanation unless it falls within the requirements of evolutionary theory.
This might seem a bit extreme – science must always allow some possibility for any theory to be wrong, and perhaps when we are studying a particular biological phenomenon we should just develop whatever theories seem to fit the immediate facts, and worry later about whether our theory happens to fit in with Darwin's theory.
But the theory of evolution by natural selection does more than just unify different facts about biology – it also unifies our understanding of biology with our understanding of everything else in the universe. The reason for this, which I explain in some detail in my book, is that biological explanations tend to involve purposeful causality, which is a type of reverse causality (what will happen explains what is happening now), and the only way to reconcile this with the forward causality of all other scientific explanations is to apply the logic of natural selection. The alternative is to assume the existence of some magical principle that applies only to biology, the so-called "vital force". This is what was believed in before Darwin, but Darwin's theory removed the need for it, and the mainstream of modern biology has never looked back (although a few other things like DNA and protein had to be discovered for scientists to be really sure that they didn't need the vital force in their explanations).
Applying this insight to the study of music, and adding the assumption that the response to music is the primary mystery, we arrive at a fundamental question:
What is the selective pressure that has resulted in the evolution of the human response to music?
Restated in plainer English, the question can be asked as:
Why do people who respond to music have more grandchildren.
Natural selection is all about long-term reproductive success, and "more grandchildren" is a simple approximation to this technical concept. (If you have lots of children, but raise them so badly that they are unable to cope with life and have their own children, then that is only short-term reproductive success. If you get as far as having more grandchildren, then whatever you are doing right to make that happen is probably going to continue indefinitely, i.e. you will successfuly reproduce in the long term.)
It might seem that we have happily settled all the philosophical questions of what we should be studying when we study music, and we can now head off to the "lab" and start doing experiments, observations and analyses of human response to music.
But our ignorance of music is actually two-pronged. The evolutionary question just stated can be understood as a "why" question, similar to other "why" questions like "Why do birds have wings?", or "Why do we have lungs?". The subtle difficulty with music, and the corresponding question "Why do we respond to music?", is that our only description of music is a purely subjective one. That is, music is characterised as music because of our response to it.
We might be tempted to work around this difficulty by giving a formal description of music according to the "rules" of music. These rules would include all the content of music "theory", with descriptions of concepts such as scales, timbre, tempo, time signatures, melody, harmony, chords and bass. All of these concepts are certainly relevant to any scientific attempt to understand what music is. But we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that the music theory as commonly taught provided a complete description of what music is.
This is another issue that I consider in detail in my book. The difficulty is highlighted by considering what makes some music better than other music. On the one hand the notion of "better" music invites controversy, because the appreciation of music is subject to both individual and cultural variation, and my "better" is probably different to your "better". On the other hand, we can consider anything that follows known "rules" of music to be somewhat musical, and if we are not prepared to limit our consideration of music to "really good" music, then we will fail to discover the incompleteness of our alleged "rules". We must negotiate the swamp of relativity of music taste, and my best attempt to do this is something like the following:
If one person really likes a given item of music, almost certainly there will be a large number of other people who also like that item of music (even though not everyone may like it), and it is severely non-trivial to discover new music that has this property.
If the "rules" of music were complete, then they would tell us exactly how to find music with such properties. But they don't, which means that they are not complete.
Of course some people don't like the idea of music being limited by rules, and as far as they are concerned, if the rules of music are not enough to make great music, then that is because music is something too mysterious and wonderful for there to be rules telling us what is musical.
But as I have already said, I subscribe to scientism, and such an answer is not acceptable to me. Music is something that our brains respond to, and our brains operate according to physical laws, and the evolution of our brains has occurred as a result of processes governed by physical laws, and therefore music itself must be a lawful phenomenon. But I have to acknowledge that a complete formal description of music is currently lacking. We have some rules, but not all of them.
We decided that the fundamental question of music science is the following:
What is the selective pressure that has resulted in the evolution of the human response to music?
The previous discussion shows the need to clarify the question by including a precise definition of music. If we had a complete set of rules, then we would write those rules out and include them as a mini "appendix" to the question.
But, unfortunately, what rules we do have are not complete. They are not enough to make the question as precise as it should be.
There is only one solution to this difficulty:
We must define "music" by actually giving a list of all known "really good" music (where "really good" means that a "large" group of people think that it is really good).
That is, our question about music (and any other scientific question about music in general) must be followed by a definition of music which includes a list that looks something like "Top of the Pops" for all human cultures and all of human history.
And even this definition is not complete. After all, new music is being composed all the time, and most of us would expect that some of those new items are going to be items that we will particularly like. But, given the limitations of our formal characterisations of what is and isn't musical, it is the best that we can currently do.
So there we have it. We have asked the question "What is Music?".
You might feel a bit cheated, because we haven't even started to answer it. For that you will have to buy my book (or you can download it).
But you shouldn't feel too cheated, because "What is Music?" is a difficult question, and sometimes the most important step with really difficult questions is just to ask them properly. I have explained here how I think the question should be asked. If you think you have some better idea about how to ask it, you might like to send me an email and tell me about it.