Does music actually have rules?
 

I'm at a music class. we are being taught about the diffrent rules of music etc.

But, are they really rules? does art actually have rules or are they boundaries that our society creates?
After all, music is the art of creating vibrations in the air.... I dont think there are really rules of how it should be done.

There are rules and then there are rules. Some notes will create harmonies together, others won't. There's not that much you can do to change that "rule".

Then you can have rules for making certain kinds of music just like there's a rule on how to write a haiku poem. If you don't follow the rules with the syllables, it's not a haiku .. but it could still be a poem. So it depends.

When it comes to making music in general, a lot of people like to break what they perceive as rules while still making what people would generally call music. So in those cases, I guess they are more like guidelines.

You can do a lot of different stuff, you just have to make it sound good. But some notes just don't go together, so yes, there is a rule saying "the notes have to harmonize or it'll sound like ****".

Tore said it well. There are rules that we have created by observing the way music works. Such as which notes and chords work best together, etc. They are more like guidelines, though. Just because there is a specific C major scale and there are specific notes and chords that go in that scale doesn't mean you can't go out of the scale and still find something that sounds good, I do it all the time. You have some experimental artists to break all rules and boundaries to make their music. I guess it depends on how you define music.

why do so many of the new members come in with these overly pretentious threads about the meaning of life, exchanging the last word with the term music, in an attempt to sound profound.

Why does there need to be a deeper meaning. Why do we need do delve into the subconscious mind in an attempt to better understand why we like a certain chord progression, why must we ponder whether or not the government conspires via radio-friendly songs in an attempt to get us to buy into foreign invasions?

This ain't a psychology forum. why do people give time to these threads and neglect to talk about, y'know...actually music?

Why are you so aggressive all the time?

It is a decent question, maybe he is not trying to "sound profound" but actually have people contribute to something that he is trying to figure out in his head.

WHY THE **** NOT


He is talking about music. Just not about a particular band or genre. It is still relevant.






And now to reply to the opening post.

Are you referring to technical western rules in music, as in keys and progressions or different rules? Like unsaid rules, like what is right and wrong as a collective? I think that society does create boundaries, and in many cases they are bad ones, and I don't just mean musically speaking, it is present in art and in architecture as well(one of the ones that society has affected for the worse and vice versa)

I like the idea of music being something that is fun for people to create and for people to listen to. From my experience the most talented musicians that I have met were the ones open minded enough to embrace new things, and make mistakes.For instance, I have a friend who has a music studio(his band is linked in my sig) and he was given an old piano for the studio, the guy asked him would he like him to tune the piano, and my friend said no. The piano doesn't sound perfect, but playing on it adds an ethereal and spooky quality to the music. Once a musician accepts that there is no rules in music, he/she is free to explore more exciting territory.

Rule # 1.
Must have sound of some kind.

Rule # 2.
?

I'm not sure if you're asking why NEW members do this, or why ANY member does it. In the case of the first, well, I assume they're looking around for something that hasn't yet been a topic, and a lot of the more popular ones are gone now. It's surely an attempt to avoid falling into the trap of opening with a "X vs Y" thread or "What's your favourite single" type of thing. At least it shows some thought has been put into the idea, so I have no problem with it. And as Po says, it's a valid question.

If you're talking about the topic itself being questionable, I'd say that music infuses, influences and directs most of the things I do, and probably a lot others here too, so whether it's politics, love, collecting CDs or even making lists, it's all linked together by music. Different if the OP had said "Does life have rules?" That's also a valid question, but belongs in the subforum for such discussions.

Haha you took the words right out of my mouth. Why the **** not?

Here are some rules:

Find your own voice - don't try to imitate someone else.
Don't sing too high or you won't sound good.
Don't try to do things you aren't good at, while performing.
Don't perform junk - perform music people will want to hear.
Have the microphone positioned so you can keep your mouth right on it, while playing your musical instrument and looking at your music.
Get your mouth away from a directional mike when singing loud, and close to the mike when singing soft.
Don't let musical instruments drown out vocals.

Also:

Sing your consonants. (It isn't "Prai the Lor," it's "Praise the Lord.")

Make sure all singers sing the consonant at the same moment at the end of the line. (It isn't "Praise the Lord d d d d d d d," it's "Praise the Lord.")

Cant argue with those rules

If you are a singer, use a directional mike unless you are sharing a mike with someone else.

That is, if you are a singer, use a directional mike, unless there are two or more of singing into the mike at the same time.

Just remember this, The rules of harmony you learn in a music theory class were a discovery, not an invention. Harmony is all about how waveforms overlap and even if you don't learn all the rules, or purposely try and break the ones you know, you're still following the rules of harmony because they are really laws of physics.

Rule # 3
Profit

Yeah, rules are necessary in music too. It is not any hard and fast rules but only made to create the music in its originality..:band:

1. Take some chords
2. Put them together
3. ???
4. PROFIT!

(sorry)

I'd say there are no rules, only guidelines for music. However, people have been making music for so long that it isn't a bad idea to heed their advice. But then again, maybe I'm too loose with my definition of music.

I have my own vague personal rules of what is and what isn't music. Let's say a famous, artistic, pretentious dick of an artist releases an album with only one track and that track features only the sound of a rockslide crashing into houses or people being shot with machine guns. That's not music to me. Even though it may require a bit of thinking to sort out all the reasons why that is, it's clear that I have some sort of definition of what I think of as music. If all those rules are broken, I no longer think of what I'm hearing as music.

Pink Floyd used alot of noises as a part of their music.Speak To Me,the beggining of Time and Money, those transition between songs in Wish You Were Here.... and some parts of The Wall too.
Even though all of those songs parts, and the whole song "Speak To Me" are only noises, they are still considered music.

That's what's great about making music. You get to create your own rules

There are no RUles anything goes

Great post.

I guess it could be said that we didn't invent the laws of music, we observed and took note of them.

But then again, I guess the laws were based around what sounded "good" or "right", and that's completely subjective. Or is it?

The sound isn't made with the instruments, no, but John Cage wanted the sound of the music to be in the listener's world around them. In it's original setting, he wanted the audience to hear sounds of the orchestra room. So there.

Yeah, that sounds like pretentious nonsense to me. An interesting experiment, but still, pretentious nonsense.

http://richardlannoy.files.wordpress...dxiht5n-1.jpeg

EDIT: Well... it seems Batlord has beat me to the punch. Well played. You're lucky I'm not the bitter kind of moderator who would lose his shit and ban you.

I personally don't consider 4'33 to be music, even if it is a written piece.

I view it more as a message than as music, but it inevitably devolves into the art semantics debate when the matter is pushed.

I think he wanted to say "There is sound all around us, all of the time. There is no such thing as silence. The sounds can be as beautiful as music." And that's exactly the point he made with 4"33. He has so many more wonderful pieces it's really a shame people latch onto this one and associate him exclusively with it.

Janzsoon always beats me to the punch so don't feel bad about third place. Bitch.

Going into the semantics bit just briefly, if accepting that silence is music or that the "random" sounds from the environment that you can hear when there is no music playing is music - at it's core, that would render the word "music" entirely useless and redundant because it would then be synonymous with sound or even silence. It would have no special meaning of its own anymore.

I guess the rebuttal might be that when hearing silence in a situation where you are supposed to be listening to music creates a certain atmosphere that wouldn't exist in any other situation. Of course, I still think it's pretentious nonsense. I have to wonder if John Cage himself doesn't scratch his head and wonder why people are still going on and on about that "song" after all these years.

The above two posts are pretty much either side of the coin, and I've found myself on both sides at different times. I think I've finally decided to stick to the definition of music that the majority of people adhere to, which I believe is something humans specifically create to be tonally pleasant in some way. Even improvisation is performed with the intent to be enjoyable -- that includes pieces making heavy use of dissonance, as it is still enjoyed by its audience on some level.

Random sounds which occur by accident without the intent to be "music" are just sounds, pleasant thought they may be.

This is pretty much my working definition of music as well.

I'm a little confused. Do y'all consider John cage's work to be music, or don't you?

On the whole I do, but 4"33 isn't technically music by my definition because there isn't a deliberate production of sounds, only an absence of them leading to the audience noticing the ambient sounds created accidentally within the room. Again, it's a thought provoking message, but little else.

I do love his other work, however, and definitely consider it music.

:pimp:

How late were you? Loser. :p:

the the only rule is how you want to structure the song