Music has been defined as generally as "organized sound" and specifically so as to require an entire book to define. A general definition may best be defined as "sounds and pitches organized in time to create a chosen artistic or aestetic statement." Music is both an art and a craft, based on acoustic principles, yet subject to various interpretations, hence its artistic merit. Because of this, we study the craft so that we might better appreciate the art expressed in music.

Music. A definition of music would seem to be necessary, but I will not attempt such a maneuver. However, it is enlightening to discuss problems one might encounter in constructing such a definition.

(1) Many disparate activities may be classified as musical. The two primal sound-generating activities of rhythmic motion of the limbs and melodic outpourings of the voice form a basis for many kinds of music. A whole continuum of instruments in the wind, string, and percussion families derive from, and even refer to, these two fundamental acts. Also, musical activities can appear non-musical in certain contexts, and vice-versa; furthermore, the designation "musical/non-musical" is highly culturally contingent. What passes for non-music (e.g., sine-tone sequences in psychoacoustic experiments) can still be perceived musically, i.e., perceptually organized according to a listener s culturally contingent music-listening strategies. It is not clear where in our perceptual/cognitive systems we would mark the cutoff between sociocultural contingency and psychological fact. Hence, some such experiments may not be as close to measuring cognitive universals of music as some experimenters might believe.

(2) Music possesses different status and roles in different cultures and subcultures. In the west we have many musics associated with various communities: concert music s high-culture spectacle, the colloquial pulsating functionality of an urban hit single, a Hollywood film score s emotional manipulations, the precise environmental design of elevator music. In many such cases it does not make sense to discuss "the musical object" divorced from its context. A full understanding of the perception and cognition of music must include these disparate functions of music. For one rarely attends to elevator music with the attention that one is obliged to give in a concert hall, nor does one often give concert music the level of physical engagement normally expected on a dance floor. It appears that these sociocultural boundaries often serve to delimit not only music s functionality but also our reception, attention, and understanding. When speaking of music cognition, we should also address musical functionality, and hence we should keep these social factors in mind.

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