Pablo Massa:

>If a bird song is music, then every sound in the universe is music, and
>so...music is nothing.

Neither of your inferences holds.  You would at least agree that music
is sound, right? So it wouldn't be nothing.  You want to restrict music
to human produced sound, I assume.  Would you exclude--as music--the parts
of musical works by Respighi and Rautavaara which feature recorded bird
sounds, or would you accept these because humans put those natural sounds
into music otherwise performed by humans? Beyond that, anybody could say of
any sound, "That's music to my ears." You can regard this as metaphorical,
but the speaker might mean it literally.  And finally, who is to say that
birds do not delight in the beautiful sounds they make and hear it as what
we would call music?

Jim Tobin