If anything is music...

If anything can be music, what type of music is worth making?

If anything can be music, I think the type of music worth making is music that makes people listen to sounds in a different way. I think experimental music does this in part. For example, Cage’s 4:33 makes people suddenly aware of all the sounds that exist in a time frame that should be “silent”. Suddenly people are hearing themselves breathe and think, or hearing people’s feet shuffling, and thinking about these sounds in a new way. I also think music worth making should evoke emotion or some kind of reaction from listeners.

What makes a combination of sound worth listening to?

In my opinion, humans as a race strive to understand things and experience things in some kind of order. For this reason I think the kind of music worth listening to is organized sound, something that makes sense without being too predictable. To me, something worth listening to is not random, for everyday life is random, and I’m always hearing sounds at random. In terms of music, I want the sounds to be organized, to have some type of rhythm or repeating pattern. If the sounds are organized and pleasant, I will pay more attention to them. This is just what’s pleasing to me, though. This is not to say that random or disorganized sound is not worth listening to for some. I think there’s a lot of merits to making people listen to random sound for 4 minutes and 33 seconds in the mental confines of considering the happenings in those 4 minutes and 33 seconds music.