What does 'experimental' mean, in 'experimental music'?

[girevik]

I do believe I understand you just fine, zoink. You don't like noise. Period.

All this stuff about "I need to know the artist's intent" just sounds like excuses for why you don't like noise. There's no need for that, really. Just like I don't need to explain why I hate the Paganini Caprices and excessively hoppy beers. Personal taste is personal taste.

[droolmaster0]

And maybe here is your most fundamental confusion. What is music is NOT a matter of consensus. You confuse your own personal taste with the very basic notion of what music is. While the exact definition might be open to debate, what has evolved in the 20th century is that music is really just sounds organized in time by a human being. 'organized' of course, in the loosest sense.

So the sound a small animal makes when you step on its tail, or the sound that a someone makes when he reads your post, etc, are not music in themselves, but if recorded and presented as such, are certainly music. If no other thought goes into it, it likely would be quite horrible music, but the point is that you can't confuse the evaluation of quality with the basic notion of music itself. You could take those recordings of animal noises, and start processing them in various ways, and at some point the piece might start sounding interesting. You can't objectify where exactly that threshold is.

 

Originally Posted by zoink

...Some guy with 31 face piercings, lots of black clothing, and a cigarette-burnt Microkorg might assert that the sound a small animal makes when you step on its tail is 'music.' But that doesn't make it so, just because he says it is. What is defined as 'music' is ALWAYS a product of consensus....

 

[zoink]

 

Originally Posted by droolmaster0

And maybe here is your most fundamental confusion.

 

LOL.

(That's music, btw. Me laughing out loud).