Where does music reside within the broader category of sound? Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this question is how rarely it is asked, as the qualities that make certain subsets ofsounds "musical" are so often pre- sumed to be self-evident. In a comprehensive survey for the New Grove Dic- tionary ofMusic and Musicians, Bruno Nettl referenced the entry for "Music, Art of" in two editions of the Britannica and observed: "neither article begins with an explicit definition, [instead] assuming that readers know what music is" (2001: 427).

One ofthe most ubiquitous definitions ofmusic, as "organized sound," came from an experimental composer, Edgard Varèse, and was chal- lenged by another, John Cage, who famously highlighted the arbitrariness of the boundaries between music, noise, and silence in his compositions and writings (Cage 2 0 n [1961]). Anthropologist John Blacking grounded Varèse's definition in human behavior, describing the relationship of sound structure and social structure as one between "humanly organized sound" and "soundly organized humanity" (1973: 89-n6). Butwith music, there are always more questions and qualifications. When does "orga- nized" sound become "disorganized" and who are the arbiters of organi- zation? Who orwhat classifies as a "musician" when humans interactwith computers and improvising machines? Where does the cry of the muni bird reside in the domain ofmusic?

The realm of sound demarcated as music, which has struck so many as an inviolable and inevitable aspect of human societies, was concep- tualized gradually over thousands of years. The association of music with beauty, organization, and intentionality dates at least to antiquity, and studies ofmusic continued to overshadow and envelop studies of sound and hearing until the age of Enlightenment. AlI throughout the long formalization of Western sciences and aesthetics, it was primar- ily music (and, to a lesser extent, speech) that provided the grounds

for experimentation, analysis, and interpretation in sound. If we ac- cept the premise that there is a field of "music studies," we would have to first recognize that it provided a foundation for the emergence of sound studies, and then ask how these two fields can most productively inform one another.

At this juncture, the core methodologies of music studies-style and repertoire, aesthetic appreciation, and biography-have kept its inqui- ries relatively isolated from those of sound studies, and nonspecialists are often alienated by the proprietary tools developed to analyze musical texts. Sound studies also came of age after relativism, multiculturalism, and popular culture studies had begun to dismantle the canons and hier- archies that music studies had helped construct. Music studies is a par- ticular and partial discipline, and a disproportionate share of its efforts have been directed at Western culture's most celebrated contribution to global music, variously called "classical," "art," or "serious" music or, in a brutally exclusive shorthand, simply "music." Critiques lodged at this pre- sumption ofaesthetic superiority-including the philosophical and socio- logical studies that situate Western music in the everyday negotiations of bourgeois identity (e.g. Adorno 1978 [1938]; Bourdieu 1987); the ethnomu- sicological research that weighs the universality and specificity of music making (e.g. Lomax I968; Feld 1984); the materialist theories of politi- cal economy and cultural production (e.g. Adorno and Horkheimer 2002 [1944]; Attali 198s)--scratch the surface of an unruly terrain upon which epistemologies ofmusic and sound have grown as relatively discrete areas.

Music is an idea, not just a form, and like any other idea, music is a problem. Yet the omnipresence and widespread recognizability ofmusic, as a set of performative acts and objects of inscription that invite partic- ular modes of listening, can work to elevate its conceptual status above scrutiny. This entry highlights how music has been naturalized in three principal ways: as science, as art, and as performance. This selective ge- nealogy is aimed at defamiliarizing music rather than deconstructing it: scientific, aesthetic, and social qualities have been attributed to music, and subjecting these ideas to critical analysis is meant to highlight rather than diminish their significance. From a constructivist perspective, the long lineage of music studies has already accomplished much fruitful analysis in advance ofsound studies. In turn, sound studies has produc- tively challenged music studies by developing new questions that do not assume a privileged status for music as a formation ofsound.

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Music as the Science ofSound

In antiquity, music belonged to the quadrivium of mathematica-as fun- damental to the education ofvirtuous men as arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy-and Aristotle and Plato's works are often cited to demon- strate the generative role of music in the earliest philosophies of West- ern aesthetics. Music was also integral to the systematization of science: sonically, pitches were identified, standardized, and differentiated, while textually they were named, assigned visual symbols, and inscribed in a graphical system of notation. Performers and theorists developed laws governing how pitches were classified into modes and ordered consecu- tivelyas melody, simultaneouslyas harmony, durationally as rhythm, and periodically within a given structural form.

As a subject ofinquiry and a catalyst for innovation, music instrumen- talized science. The Pythagorean quest for universal scientific rational- ity relied on experiments with a monochord, leading to the discovery of mathematical ratios that were later interpreted as praof that, "the very being of the whole universe [is] bound together by music" as Athenaeus of Naucratis wrote around 192 AD (quoted in Levin 2009: 5). The Pla- tonic concept ofharmonia and Pythagorean theories ofarithmetic and as- tronomy conjoined in the scientific study of music, which developed, as Adriana Cavarera writes, into "a realm that lends itself to be regulated by forms and norms" (2005: 156). Vibrating strings could unlock the myster- ies of the universe only when their sounds were determinable as intervals and classifiable into sets; in other words, when sound was imbued with the properties ofmusic.

Hellenic experimentation set in motion a process of detaching music from sound, amplifying its value, in part, by electing it most suitable for the scientific study of sound. According to Jonathan Sterne, "speech or music had been the general [overarching] categories thraugh which sound was understood," but much later, during the scientific revolution, there was "an inversion of the general and specifie in philosophies of sound," with speech and music now downgraded to "special cases" (2003: 23). Music was no longer a science that could explain human and celestial bodies but was itself partially explainable by research in the "superior" sciences. By the eighteenth century, music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau tested his laws governing harmonywith theories developed in the emerging fields of audiology and acoustics, including mathematician Joseph Sauveur's stud-

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ies ofvibrational üequency as a measurement ofmusical pitch, an indica- tor ofmusic's diminished status as subsidiary to sound.

The science ofsystematizing music as sound material reached critical mass with Hermann Helmholtz's work On the Sensations oJTone as a Physi- oIogicai Basis Jar the Theory oJ Music in r863' The book's achievement is its interdisciplinarity, integrating the study of "physical and physiological acoustics on the one hand and of musical science and esthetics on the other" (1885: 1). The yin and yang of science and aesthetics allowed for taxonomies of music, noise, and silence to be distinguished within the larger category ofsound. Music was set offas a thing apart-systematized aesthetically, extrapolated scientifically, and philosophically endowed with inherent powers-by scientists from Pythagoras to Helmholtz.

Music as the Aesthetics ofSound

Although the art and science of music are historically entangled (Palisca 1961; Jackson 2006; Hui 2012), Western philosophies of aesthetics have privileged expressive practices of performance, composition, listening, and embodied movement. If the sciences were capable ofidentifying and standardizing the properties of music that distinguished it from other sounds, it was in the humanities that music was isolated as a distinctive aesthetic object of beauty and organization, and as a human behavioral activity. Whether evaluated as art, as popular culture, as ritual folklore, as individual or collective expression, or as other forms of sociality, music has been considered meaningful because its aesthetic properties convey human emotion.

Throughout the legacy ofmusic studies there has been a ceaseless fas- cination with the communicative nature of music, which shares the so- norous and expressive qualities of speech but not the supposedly stable referentiality oflanguage (see LANGUAGE). Oral poets, including Homer, were condemned by Plato because their sung vocalizations were a seduc- tive distraction for "those who love sounds," and wind instruments such as Marsyas's aulos were morally suspect because they impeded speech (Ca- varero 2005: 84). For much ofthe history ofthe Catholic Church, a similar tension characterized the relationship ofliturgy and music: "when it be- falls me to be more moved with the voice than the words sung," wrote Au- gustine in his Confessions, "1 confess to have sinned penally, and then had rather not hear music." In the sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation,

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the Church deliberated over musical reforms that prioritized the intel- ligibility of the word of God over the aesthetic beauty of musical sound (Lockwood 1984; Monson 2006).

Attempts to translate sound into visual icons can be found in many cultures, such as ancient Sumerian scripts for notating melodies played by the lyre or guqin tablature from the time of Confucius. The system of Western staffnotation, an arrangement ofvertical lines and dots spread across five horizontallines, developed as the most elaborately organized, slavishly adhered to, widely disseminated, and zealously contested tech- nique for entextualizing sound (Ellingson 1992). An intellectual tradi- tion ofanalyzing musical texts as an autonomous language-eventually named "music theory" and for centuries directed almost exclusively at Western art music~relies on separating notes from "extramusical" con- texts (performance, discourse, biography, etc.), to the extent that the sensory domain ofsound is wholly abandoned in favor ofthe textual do- main of musical notation. Since the Romantic period, music theory has congealed into an elaborate and proprietary semiotic system, analogous to grammatical, syntactic, and other abstractions oflanguage (cf. Meyer 1957). Formalism reaches its apex in analyses ofentirely instrumental, or "absolute" music, which, Susan McClary writes, is "purported to operate on the basis of pure configurations, untainted by words, stories, or even affect" (1993: 326).

The presumed lack of referentiality feared by Plato was celebrated by metaphysicists such as E. T. A. Hoffmann for "tak[ing] us out of the everyday into the realm of the infinite" (1989 [1814]: 237). When the Uni- versity of Vienna hired music critic Eduard Hanslick in 1861 and named him the first professor of music history and aesthetics, they established a precedent for locating music studies squarely within the humanities. Hanslick's successor Guido Adler subdivided music research into what would develop into the standard disciplines of music theory, musicol- ogy, and ethnomusicology (Mugglestone 1981). The impact and solidity ofthis legacy-measurable, perhaps, in the sheer number ofpublications and academic conferences dedicated to any one of"The Three B's" (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms)-can have the effect of alienating those join- ing the new ranks of popular music studies, sound studies, and science and technology studies. Progressive research remains to be done on the magnitude to which music studies was able to construct highly formal- ized systems for entextualizing sound and subjecting it to analysis, and

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for generating descriptive language and technical conceptualizations of sound that have been integral to Western cultural imperialism.

Within the geopolitics ofcapitalist empire, music studies provided the basis for Eurocentric daims of cultural superiority, while music of oth- ers from elsewhere was evaluated in negative relation, as a foil for the Enlightenment project and as fodder for rationalizing colonization. Mat- thew Arnold's Romanticist valorization of "pure music," created by ex- ceptional individuals, as "the best which has been thought and said in the world" (1869: viii) was based on comparisons to religious, ethnie, racial, and nationalist others whose cultural practices were vilified and then de- ployed as justification for racism, enslavement, eugenics, and other forms of structural violence. The sounds of Italian organ grinders in London or of indigenous chanters in the New World could be heard as so much noise, just as the invention of "Affican rhythm" (as metronomic, synco- pated, polyrhythmic, and participatory) could only be conceived against the reciprocal and unmarked construction ofEuropean rhythm, whatever that might be.1

More sympathetic listeners, especially those affiliated with the social sciences, applied the disciplining strategies ofWestern music studies to recuperate "savage" sounds as music. In the United States, early studies ofAmerican Indian music by Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche (1893) and slave spirituals by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison (1867) relied on the entextualization oforally trans- mitted music into Western notation, which then provided the basis for countering daims ofdeculturation. W. E. B. Du Bois began each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk with a quote from a "sorrow song" paired with its melody in musical notation, and he devoted the last chapter to "these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men" (1903: 250; see also Weheliye 2005).

Aesthetic distinctions of music and sound were entangled with West- ern scientific standards that worked in tandem to either affirm or deny the humanity of others. When Alexander Ellis translated Helmholtz's book into English in 1885, he added an appendix that induded analysis ofnon- Western scales using a new metric of measuring intervals in units called cents (Hui 2012). The quantization of pitch also fueled contentious de- bates about tuning, leading to agreement on a fixed reference pitch, A at 440 Hz (Jackson 2006). Music, as rationalized and standardized sound, circulated to far-flung lands via emergent technologies such as musical

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instruments (the piano and the wind instruments of marching bands were especially pervasive) as weIl as scientific instruments (tuning forks, metronomes, etc.). Western standards set sail into a sea ofother cultural standards, asserting the universality ofmusic while attempting to impose order on its many varieties (many of which, at the end of the twentieth century, would be celebrated as "world music").

Systematized analysis was used selectively to support aesthetic pre- sumptions ofelite music as more harmonicaIly complex and emotionaIly subjective than so-caIled folk and popular musics (Becker I986). Starting in the mid-twentieth century, ethnomusicologists began wagering an ex- tended campaign against the presumption that musical complexity can be measured objectively, and when sociologists such as Bourdieu (I987) began "studying up," contextualizing notions of "taste" within negotia- tions ofclass and social status, classical music could be reimagined as the folk music ofEuro-American elites.

Music as the Social Life ofSound

Like aIl sound, music is in the air, out in the world, and thus always so- ciaIly mediated. Music takes on particular social significances because it habitually draws attention to its own mediation, especially its forms of performance, inscription, and reception. That music is not only subject to these forms ofmediation but is constructed by them is a principal con- tention of social scientists and others invested in the comparative study ofmusic in culture or, more pointedly, music as culture (Merriam I977).

The study of non-Western musics, and folk or popular musics of the West, began as an offshoot ofboth aestheticism and the physical sciences, but it was primarily in anthropology, comparative musicology and eth- nomusicology that music was recontextualized in spaces of production and reception. Ethnographers dispatched to "the field" reported back with abundant evidence ofmusic's ubiquity: tuneful prayers and luIlabies could be heard the world over, and music was present at weddings and funerals regardless of religious, ethnic, racial, or geographic identifica- tion. From travelers' accounts to commercial sound recordings, compara- tive studies naturalized the idea that music is a universal form ofhuman behavior while simultaneously highlighting its diverse and culturaIly spe- cific evaluations. This dialectic between universalism and relativism, with "salvage ethnography" providing materials for assessing similarity and

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difference, became a guiding principle ofmusic studies in the long twen- tieth century. Music was again codified and used as a tool to accomplish certain ends, now for the comparative study ofculture's relation to human evolution and social organization.

Whether through writing, reading, or other forms ofinscription, musi- cal research was one component ofa larger anthropological imperative to preserve cultural practices deemed to be under threat of disappearance from encroaching modernity (Darne1l200I). Musical traditions were con- structed as valuable residues of proud cultures as they fell victim to the inevitable march ofprogressj efforts to protect and institutionalize these endangered musics inadvertently reaffirmed the power of the "center" (and its signature music) through a paternalistic gesture to the "periph- ery." That music was a critical node ofmediation in this mutuaI construc- tion of the West and the Rest is evidenced in ethnomusicologist Ali Jihad Racy's (1993) reconstruction ofan extraordinary meeting ofWestern and Middle Eastern music scholars at the Congress ofArab Music in Cairo in 1932.

The Congress was called by King Fu'ad ofEgypt as part ofa series of reforms that, in the words of the Academy of Oriental Music director Mustafâ Rida, "will bring the country to a zenith of cultural refinement and lead it to compete in the arena of civilized nations" (Racy 1993: 70). Seven technical committees were formed to address such problems as de- termining a fixed musical scale, adopting notational symbols, building a canon of Arabie compositions, assessing the appropriateness of specific musical instruments, and recording indigenous songs. The Recording Committee (which included Béla Bartôk and two esteemed members of the Berlin school of comparative musicology, Erich von Hornbostel and Robert Lachmann) instructed local performers to avoid "music that does not adhere to Eastern melodies" and "which emulates objectionable Eu- ropean music in its worst form" (72), while the Melodie and Rhythmic Modes Committee condensed what member Ahmad Amïn al-Dïk called a "confusing multiplicity" of Arabic modes, ultimately winnowing down the official number ofEgyptian maqàmàt to fifty-two (74).

There was unrest on the Musical Instruments Committee, where West- ern and Arab members disagreed over the suitability of the piano. Curt Sachs, who along with Hornbostel had developed a global instrument clas- sification scheme (Hornbostel and Sachs 1961 [1914]), was among the Eu- ropeans who objected that the Western instrument would "disfigure the

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beauty ofArab music," while the Egyptians argued that instruments such as the oud and qànün were inadequate in conveying a range ofemotions (Racy I993: 76). Muhammad Fathï appealed to the Westerners by referring back to a time when Europeans modeled their instruments on those of the Middle East: "ifyour instruments had developed from ours, today we would like to develop our instruments trom yours, so do not be stingy toward us" (79). Music, here, served as a laboratory for experiments in modernity, a site where culture's mediating role in power relations and identity formations was pressed into service for postcolonial projects ofstate formation.

By the I950S and 1960s, there was enough comparative data on the music of specifie cultures for Alan Lomax to undertake his ambitious cantometrics project, which took the relativist argument that musical structures are manifestations of social structures to its logical extreme (Lomax 1968; see also Feld I984). In ensuing decades, ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology became increasingly responsive to postcolonial critiques of orientalism and essentialism, questioning the fixity of musi- cal forms and social identities and situating people and their music in relations of power (cf. Askew 2002; Ebron 2002; Weidman 2006). From within the Western classical tradition, sorne of the most effective chal- lenges to the sanctimony of music have come from musicians creating avant-garde compositions, "noise," and "free" improvisation (Kahn I999; see NOISE). But music's identity as one among many farms of sound re- mains underexamined; to recast Bruno Nettl's observation, we largely proceed from the assumption that we know what music is.

Music as Sound

This historical genealogy, with aU its emphasis on the disciplining ofmusic in service of various epistemological orderings, is intended to map out sorne locations where music has taken up residence within the larger do- main ofsound. The question ofmusic's status as a scientific, aesthetic, and social object and practice has been productively raised by those contextual- izing music simply as sound. As a concluding gesture, I turn to three areas ofsound studies that have made a critical intervention into music studies: multilayered soundscapes, recorded sounds in circulation, and sites where music appears to shed many ofthe associations outlined above.

In sorne of the earliest sound studies research, beginning in the 1960s, R. Murray Schafer (I977) developed his theory of the soundscape that sit-

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uated music within an ecological expanse populated with multiple sound sources. Building partly on Schafer, Steven Feld (2012 [1982], 1996) studied the Kaluli in a remote rainforest in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, observing how they evaluated voices (weeping, poetics, and song), environmental sounds (waterfa.lls and bird calls) , and instruments (percussion) within an integrated sensorium. Though Schafer and Feld have created soundscape compositions that can be heard in performance venues and on music de- vices, music is but one resident within the broad territories ofsound they invoke. While the soundscape concept has since been subject to extended critique (see SP ACE), on arrivaI it served as a rejoinder to a much longer his- tory ofdisarticulating music from the general category ofsound.

Music's exceptionalism has been questioned in media studies that position music among many forms of sound, which change through practices ofinscription and circulation. Lisa Gitelman (2006) has shown that Edison imagined his phonograph as an extension ofinscription ma- chines from print media into the domain of sound, invented primarily for the purpose ofdictation in the workplace and then redefined by users as a reproducer of music for domestic entertainment. Jonathan Sterne (2003) shows how machines for musical reproduction were invented in a broader context of sound technologies-the stethoscope, the telegraph, the telephone-and it is with the phonograph that he moves from speech and heartbeats to music as a form ofmass culture that crystallized, ifnot wholly redefined, sound as a commodified object. David Suisman (2010) suggests that even before the talking machine was introduced, the ex- traction, inscription, and commodification of sound already rested on a musical foundation evidenced by the sheet music publishing industry, which signaled music's reproducibility to a rising consumer class, and by the player piano as an early leader in musical inscription and reproduc- tion. Music is the domain of sound that has been most consistently and thoroughly monetized-whether as live performance, textual inscription, phonography, and so on-and in each ofthese formulations, music re- tains a distinct identity but is also refigured as an object of consumer desire entangled in webs ofmedia and technology.

Rapidly developing technologies ofmediation have opened up other pos- sibilities for music to shed its role as a privileged domain of sound. At the massive Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis, a highly orchestrated flow ofprogrammed music creates a background of"muzak" that is heard by shoppers in ways that dissociate from perceived norms ofmusicailistening.

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Over public loudspeaker systems, recorded music "certainly isn't meant for contemplative listening," observes Sterne; "it also isn't always 'heard' in an entirely passive fashion-rather, it tends to pass in and out of the foreground of a listener's consciousness" (1997: 30), to the point where "music exerts effects primarily or solely as sound" (24). In a far more insid- ious example, in U.S. military detention camps, continuous and deafening audio playback is meant to shatter the subjectivities ofdetainees and pro- vide access to actionable intelligence. "It is not at aIl clear that the music aimed at prisoners in detention camps has functioned as music," writes Suzanne Cusick, "Rather, it has more often functioned as sheer sound with which to assault a prisoner's sense ofhearing" (2008). As former prisoner Ruhal Ahmend said of his experience with what interrogators calI "futil- ity music," "It doesn't sound like music at aIl" (quoted in Cusick 2008), and is most productively situated within a larger spectrum of "acoustic violence" (Daughtry 2014).

These examples, as much as Feld's soundscape of human and bird song and Edison's phonograph, underscore music's sounded-ness with- out assuming an implicit musical order. Music is a shifting subset of sounds that assume particular properties depending on one's orienta- tion to them. In recognizing this, sound studies can engage with the ways that music has been naturalized as distinct, while drawing atten- tion to the arbitrariness of the conceptual separation between music and sound.

Note

I. On ltalian organ grinders in Victorian London, see Picker (1999-2000). On the "invention ofAfrican rhythm" see Agawu (1995).

References

Adorno, Theodor W. 1978 [1938]. "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regres- sion ofListening." ln The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, 270-299. New York: Urizen Books.

Agawu, Kofi. 1995. "The Invention ofAfrican Rhythm." Journal ofthe American Musicologi- cal Society 48(3): 380-395.

Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. 1867. Slave Sangs ofthe United States. New York: A. Simpson and Co.

Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in PoHtical and Social Criticism. Lon- don: Smith, EIder and Co.