Music

Nowadays, the term “music” is used to refer to a whole range of human activities, arguably as an over-arching classifier which subsumes other possible designations for the same activities (such as song). “ Despite the role of visual media, namely the score, in this development, the impact was in fact to dematerialize music and to portray it as organized sound with no meaning outside of its own form. Further emphasized by social and technological processes—especially the professionalization of musical activity, the cult of musical genius, and the development of sound recording—western discourse around “music” has thus come to emphasize the sonic aspect of music, with listening presented as the primary musical activity. There is no universal linguistic consistency on “music”: music, seen from this perspective, is clearly not a universal language.