The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines music as "the art of combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion".
[3][4] An often-cited example of the dilemma in defining music is the work 4′33″ (1952) by the American composer John Cage (1912–1992).
Among the Aztecs, the ancient Mexican theory of rhetoric, poetry, dance, and instrumental music used the Nahuatl term In xochitl-in kwikatl to refer to a complex mix of music and other poetic verbal and non-verbal elements, and reserved the word Kwikakayotl (or cuicacayotl) only for the sung expressions.
[8] There is no term for music in Nigerian languages Tiv, Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Birom, Hausa, Idoma, Eggon or Jarawa.
Ben Watson points out that Ludwig van Beethoven's Große Fuge (1825) "sounded like noise" to his audience at the time.
[16] He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization.
Levi R. Bryant defines music not as a language, but as a marked-based, problem-solving method, comparable to mathematics.
[24] This is primarily because other cultures have different understandings in relation to the sounds that English-language writers refer to as music.
This definition distinguishes music, as an end in itself, from compositional technique, and from sounds as purely physical objects."
More precisely, "music is the actualization of the possibility of any sound whatever to present to some human being a meaning which he experiences with his body—that is to say, with his mind, his feelings, his senses, his will, and his metabolism".
[28] Clifton accordingly differentiates music from non-music on the basis of the human behavior involved, rather than on either the nature of compositional technique or of sounds as purely physical objects.
[30] This is not to be understood, however, as a sanctification of extreme relativism, since "it is precisely the 'subjective' aspect of experience which lured many writers earlier in this century down the path of sheer opinion-mongering.
[32]"Music, often an art/entertainment, is a total social fact whose definitions vary according to era and culture", according to Jean Molino.
According to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez: "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be".