Noise and Music

What's the difference between baby cries and your favourite song? Both are just made up of sound waves - but why do we hate one and love the other?

I reflected on these thoughts when I was watching a live orchestra the other day. It was one of the best orchestral performance I've seen, probably because they played a number of familiar songs that I listen to everyday when I get to work. There were at least three Tchaikovsky's, thank you maestro!

Anyway, we all get high from listening to our favourite songs, don't we? But aren't these songs just noise essentially (except for John Cage's "4'33", of course!), especially to others who don't enjoy them as much as we do.

When a musician says, "Let's agree on this sound, shall we? And let's give this song a name." 

If the responder says, "Yes, I'll accept that." Then, it becomes music to both of them.

However, if the responder says, "No, I don't like that sound." Then, the musician's song becomes noise to the the responder.

When we get annoyed by a certain sound, we call it noise. In reality, noise is no different from music, but our subjective experience perceive one sound wave as noise, while another as music. We make the value judgement to categorise things we hear into noise or music for ourselves, and in turn, we are the ones who would experience these sounds as noise or music based on our own judgement!

"Of course there is a difference to our ears, between noise and music," you might say. But don't you see my point? It is that we are responsible for our own experience of listening. If we can change our subjective evaluation of a certain sound wave, we can turn it from noise into music - and vice versa!

So don't blame the radio for playing the songs you hate most. Turn it off. And accept that it wasn't the radio's or the singer's fault that we hate their song. Blame it on ourselves. 

...

Meanwhile, let's enjoy this beautiful piece of music that the orchestra played that night.