The Sound of Music?

It seems strange, I guess, that I haven't really addressed music yet in my posts. A couple of comments I received from our peer review session touched on this, and asked different versions of a really good question: how would I differentiate music from sound? For example, asked one person, "does music wafting out of an open window become a city sound, or is it still firmly music?" Another person wondered about the possibility of defining more sound typologies, like pet sounds. It seems to me that these two ideas have something to do with each other, so I'll try to discuss them together here (the sound typology idea is something I'd like to expand on further in other ways too).

From what I've read about sound in urban environments, it seems like the words "noise" and "music" are most often used to denote (pun intended) types of sound; sound seems to be the umbrella term under which noise and music reside. Sound seems like a reasonably neutral term, but music and noise usually come attached to value judgments. Whereas noise is pejorative or negative (as in "noise pollution," which, as of the time of writing, pulls in 1 660 000 hits on Google versus 140 000 for "sound pollution"), music is usually used to describe something pleasing--hence "music to my ears."

Of course, the music wafting out of your neighbour's window--or, as I experienced a few months ago, pounding so loudly in an adjacent apartment that it rattles the dishes in your cupboard--could provide you with a highly unpleasant experience. Here, though, music becomes reinterpreted as noise; you don't file a "music complaint" with your landlord or the city bureaucracy.

Music is associated with control, order, purposeful creation. As an art, as a creative pursuit, it's assumed to be premeditated to some degree. Even improvised jazz usually occurs within some kind of structural framework (a key, a mode, a time signature). But as I outlined in my previous post, sound in cities, and noise in particular is often presented as something uncontrolled, an inevitable fallout of urban life that has to be muzzled through regulations based on quantitative measures.

In a privately printed publication called The Book of Noise, Murray Schafer writes: “The modern city has become a sonic battleground. Man is losing” (1970, p. 2). But city sound is made by people. People make music, people make noise ... the connection may be more or less direct depending on the situation, but ultimately it's people that drive cars, operate machinery, turn on sirens, or what have you. So where does that leave us? I'm not sure. It seems as though we pin down our ideas about sound to suit our purposes in a given situation. Like so many systems of categorization, the sound --> music/noise framework is constructed in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, and it shows its seams when it's considered in terms of urban environments--hence the uncertain status of music drifting out of a neighbour's window. It's music, but it's also sound--and it could very well be noise, depending on who you talk to.