What Music Really İs
Most people identify music with one particular tuning system, and define what music is through culturally inherited sets of rules and tools devised along this tuning. These include specific nomenclature, measuring units, reference frequency, musical instruments and layouts, notation, performing directives and a music theory given to integrate and regulate them.
The cultural aspect of music – rooted in arbitrary social constructs – can only define what music is through the subjective experience of musico-social conditioning. Musical practices differ from one region to another, even though all systems share the same fundamental principles and have (or should have) the same universal laws at their base.
We always try to understand what music is with our own methodology of thinking, unconsciously shaped by the culture of the past 5000 years or so. In order to define what music really is in its undistorted, uninterpreted version, we must suspend that entire period and achieve a pre-Bacho-Keplerian, pre-Pythagorean, pre-Babylo-Sumerian state of mind: clean of historical prejudice, inherited creeds, unquestioned values, stiff dogma and cultural hypnosis.
