When Is Sound Music?

Listening at the boundary between noise, sound, and music. The physics of a vibration. Computation with no computer. And a first line of code that makes a sound.

10:00 — The House Rule

One rule governs everything recorded in this workshop:

Where this comes from: the allotted list with your six names on it reached the facilitator on Thursday 27 August 2026, 11:08 AM. That minute is known, so that is the minute on record. When you hand in a field recording, it carries the minute it was made. When you don't know the minute, you say so — "between 6 and 7 pm" is honest; a made-up "18:23" is not.

Why a sound workshop cares: sound is the time-based medium. A sound is a pressure pattern unfolding in time; a recording is a claim about what happened at a particular moment. Getting comfortable with honest time is getting comfortable with the material itself.

10:30 — Listening Session: Boundary Cases

Eyes closed for each one. After each: one word, from each person, no discussion. Discussion comes after the whole list. Each recording streams right here — monitors up, phones down.

• John Cage 4′33″ (1952) — performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. We sit through it, all of it, in RTA 307. The frame makes the music. What did you hear once nothing was provided?
• Tanpura a solo tanpura drone — a few minutes of it, no soloist ever arrives Almost nothing changes. Is unchanging sound music? (Hold this — it returns on Day 4.)
• Field recording Indian traffic at a junction Pitch, rhythm, texture, dynamics — everything music has, unorganized. Or is it?
• Azaan the call to prayer, recorded live in Istanbul Unmistakably melodic; its own tradition does not call it music. Who decides?
• Sine tone 440 Hz, pure — 30 seconds of it is plenty The atom of sound. Nothing but frequency and amplitude. Is it below music, or above it?
• Birdsong a koel, close-miked Phrases, repetition, variation — composition without a composer?
• Ryoji Ikeda data.matrix, from dataplex (2005) Clicks, sines, and errors as a deliberate aesthetic. Failure sounds, organized.
• raga.fm the facilitator's own research — computation meeting Indian classical music, live in the browser A raga engine that performs endlessly and is never twice the same. Where does it sit on the axis we're about to build? Open it: raga.fm

Exercise: the axis

One long line on the table: SOUND ————————— MUSIC. Each listening example goes on a card. Place the cards together, out loud. You must argue for every placement, and you may move anyone else's card if you argue better. There is no answer key — the argument is the point. Photograph the final axis and note the time (house rule).

The working definition we'll carry forward, due to Edgard Varèse: music is organized sound. The workshop question then becomes — organized by whom, or by what? By Day 10 the answer will include: by a program you wrote.

11:20 — The Physics of a Sound

Everything you heard this morning is one phenomenon: something vibrates, air carries the vibration as a pressure wave, your eardrum vibrates in sympathy. Three measurable properties of that wave account for most of what you can say about a sound:

A sine wave is the only sound with exactly one frequency in it. Every other sound — a plucked string, a voice, a square wave — is a stack of sines: a fundamental plus harmonics at 2×, 3×, 4×… the fundamental. (Day 3 builds all of Western harmony out of this one fact.)

Vocabulary to leave the morning with: Hz, amplitude, waveform, fundamental, harmonic, spectrum. Six words; everything else in this workshop is built from them.

13:10 — Computation, Unplugged

Before any code: what a computer actually does, performed by humans.

A computation needs only three things:

1. Instructions — a fixed list of simple actions
2. State — something that remembers (a number, a card, a raised hand)
3. Repetition — doing the list again, and again, with the state carrying over

Exercise: the human step sequencer

1. Six chairs in a row. Each person is one step and holds a card with one instruction: CLAP, HUM (any note), HISS, SNAP, STOMP, or REST.
2. The facilitator is the clock: walks the row at a steady tempo, pointing. When pointed at, execute your card. End of row → loop to the start.
3. Run it until it grooves. Then mutate the program: swap two cards (edit), have one person execute only every second pass (conditional), let one card say "copy whatever step 3 did" (reference). Each mutation is one programming idea, felt before it is named.

What you just did is exactly what Tone.js's sequencer will do on Day 5 — the clock was a loop, the cards were an array, the tempo was BPM.

13:50 — First Contact With Code

1. Go to editor.p5js.org and create an account — it saves every sketch and gives each one a shareable link. This account is your instrument case for two weeks.
2. File → New. You get an empty sketch with setup() (runs once) and draw() (runs ~60 times a second — a loop, like the walk along the chairs).
3. Replace everything with this, press play, then click the canvas and move the mouse:

let osc;

function setup() {
  createCanvas(400, 400);
  osc = new p5.Oscillator('sine');   // the same oscillator from the demo
}

function mousePressed() {
  osc.start();                       // browsers unlock audio only after a click
}

function mouseMoved() {
  osc.freq( map(mouseX, 0, width, 100, 1000) );  // left–right = pitch
  osc.amp(  map(mouseY, height, 0, 0, 0.5) );    // up–down   = loudness
  background(mouseX / 2, 100, mouseY / 2);
}

Three things worth noticing, today only at a glance:

• osc is state — a thing we made once and keep acting on.
• mousePressed and mouseMoved are instructions that wait for you — code as a listening thing.
• map(...) converts one range into another — mouse position into hertz. This one function is the whole secret of instrument design, and Week 2 is built on it: gesture in, sound out.

Play with the numbers. Break it. The editor's play button is also a reset button; nothing can be damaged.