James Tobin replies to me:

>>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.

Ahem, let's read it this way: ...if every sound is music, then no sound
is music".  Why?.  Because if you have already a concept for "sound",
then the word "music" becomes, emtpy, useless.  Sorry guys, but *defining*
is creating relationships between things by next gender and specific
difference.  You are free to talk about "what music is to me", but that's
not actually a definition.

>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?

As far as I know, birds didn't put these recorded sounds there.  So I must
assume that the responsable of this was Mr. Respighi or Mr. Rautavaara,
or Mr. Schaeffer, or Mr. Pierre Henry, or somebody who was trying to make
(intentionally) something that we, humans, call "music", and that birds
surely don't.  You can't define music merely on the base of individual
reception.  That's precisely why there's not (and there will not ever be)
a satisfactory definition of music.

>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

Perhaps you're right.  The idea of "bird music" is not so bad after all:
it could provide me the opportunity of killing some of my colleagues and
eating them.

Pablo Massa
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