Music as a Continuous Aural Experience

Abstract Music is a concrete, continuous experience. New instruments and modalities of musical expression are as much to credit for innovations in musical genre, style, composition, and performance as is pure musical ability abstracted from any particular instruments or modalities. The music copyright paradigm that grew out of European classical music and the Enlightenment is ill-suited for modern music genres. Based on a conceptualization of music as abstract and atomized into evenly divided discrete pitches and time units, its written notation attempts to serve as a proxy for aural phenomena yet cannot capture the continuous tone shift and fluid polyrhythmic time of modern music. Further, it ignores altogether the timbre, style, and attitude that often constitute the main experiential value of music for modern audiences. The concrete/continuous versus abstract/discrete accounts are contrasted over music’s history, with recommendations for a modern music paradigm that better tracks the concrete/continuous nature of music.