Differentiating between Music and Sound

Perhaps the first thing that comes to our mind when asked to differentiate between sound and music is that the physical vibration generated by an instrument is the sound and the structure applied to the sound by the musician is the music. It is usually very easy to tell a good musician by a single note coming from her instrument, and there the differentiating parameter is the sound quality. This view can be argued against in cases like the sound coming from technologically more advanced instruments like the piano (from which one can get a good sound rather easily). However, the fact of the matter is that a musician spends a considerable amount of time and concentration to get a good sound out of the instrument. And this is not a fact that is learned once, but rather is a continuing effort in almost every new piece or performance. We can view that activity as an effort to match the music to the sound of the instrument or match the sound of the instrument to the music. Can we not say that the sound of a single note of a good musician contains music?

We do not need to stop our contemplation of this scenario with the trained musician. A good instrument maker is judged by the sound of the instrument he makes. Many years of training and craftsmanship goes into choosing and shaping the raw material for making the instrument. Can an instrument maker make an instrument that sounds good without thinking about music? If not, should we not call his efforts for creating an instrument which sounds good, part of the music played on that instrument? On the other hand, we can study a musically gifted child who will do something meaningful anytime he takes that instrument in his hand. Due to the isolation of the child's mind from preconceived notions, the music which comes out of that improvisation is largely dependent on the sound that the instrument makes. The more the logical part of the child learns about music, the more distant he gets from the sound. Sound is the most tangible form of music. A good musician is the one who uses this distance as a tool to bring these two opposites together. Once that process is experienced and learned, the farther the distance between the poles are, the more powerful their union becomes.

Music has the interesting property that it can be heard repeatedly. Every music lover has favorite pieces which he or she can hear over and over, and perhaps be drawn to the piece even more with every listening. It is very difficult to decide if such pieces are examples of how one thinks music should sound like, or if it is actually the sound of these pieces which form one's musical perception.

When music is notated, a set of instructions and codes are chosen which, in conjunction with the musical culture, try to communicate a musical structure to the performer. The music heard is not only present in what is notated but also in the subtle conscious or unconscious musical gestures of the musician. A Glenn Gould fan can repeatedly listen to his recording of Bach's French Suites, and find his humming with the music most beautiful. However, if we have a player piano play the piece accurately without any deviation in timing or dynamics, after understanding the structure of the piece, we will start ignoring the auditory information as static sound of the piano.

It seems fair to say that the basic structure of traditional orchestral music is laid out before orchestration; however, the act of orchestration itself (which creates the sound of the music) requires a deep understanding of the preliminary musical structures. The composer writes the music while having the sound of the music in mind. In contrast, orchestration becomes the process of creating sound textures while having the musical structures in mind.

Computers provide us with very powerful and precise control over the physical sound spectrum in time and frequency. Composers are now able to convey musical information through the evolution of timbres (for examples of use of the continuum of timbre see Machover[27] and Saariaho[39]). Such musical structures are conceived with an intention toward creating an abstract sound that the composer might imagine, and the physical sound is created according to the finally-evolved musical structures. Thus, separating the functions of sound and music in today's compositions can be troublesome, both for the listener and the composer.