Articles: What Is Music? | What Are Notes? | Sharps And Flats | Half Steps And Whole Steps | What Is A Scale? | The Major Scale | What Is A Key?

What is music?

I’ve heard much debate about what is music and what is NOT music. These debates usually involve very broad, inaccurate, opinion based statements like "rap isn’t music - there’s no melody." Or, "metal isn’t music, it’s just noise". Rather than go into the importance of open-mindedness, I’d like to present a tangible definition of what music actually is. Music is organized sound. This could be any sound(s), organized in any way (even a random way in some cases). Thus, while rap and metal ARE music, the sounds of nature or urban noise pollution are not. Although the latter may sound musical at times, they are naturally occurring and therefore not organized.

While the "organized sound" definition covers all music, most common kinds of music are even more refined. Music typically has three main components:

Rhythm is the organization of musical sounds in time. It is also the glue that keeps musicians "together".

Melody is the organization of pitches (aka. Notes) - musical sounds - into a series. An easier way to think of it is that the melody is the part of a song that you hum (the part that gets stuck in your head and won’t stop).

Harmony is the organization of pitches that sound at the same time, like when a guitarist strums all the strings on a guitar at once, or a pianist presses multiple keys on the piano at the same time, or when a group of singers are all singing at the same time.