What is the difference between a collection of sounds and music?
From my reading I've gathered that the difference between music and noise is that music is an organized collection of sounds. In that definition, noise would then be an unorganized collection of sounds.
If this is a viable definition, then my question is:
What does organized mean? Do we (as a society) define what organized sound means or is there some universal law defining what sounds can be interpreted as music?
If you disagree with the first paragraph's definition about the difference between music and noise, then my question is:
Is there a way to universally distinguish music from noise?
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No, there is no universal definition which can objectively distinguish noise from music.
Most people will probably agree that a Mozart symphony is definitely music. Most people will probably agree that continuous white noise is not music.
But there is a very wide grey area in-between, in which the distinction between music and noise is entirely subjective.
For example, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, a cacophony of atonality and absence of rhythm, is music to some -- but many more people would not consider it to be music. Sunn O))) make whole albums consisting of a slowly modulating drone - but to some people it counts as music.
Many kinds of pop music, from Elvis, to The Beatles, to rap, to dubstep have been dismissed as "not music" by traditionalists.
Then there's John Cage's composition 4'33" -- arguably designed to draw attention to impossibility of the question of what music is and isn't.
What you call music is a combination of particular sounds like guitar notes to transmit emotions to one another. Organized means that between different sounds, there exists some relationship in its physical characteristics like frequency or intensity.
Thinks to the ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, and release) of the sound wave.
PS. This is my opinion. The other answers maybe more specific and correct.
In my opinion, there are no definitive criteria based on characteristics of sound that can be used to draw a hard line between 'music', and 'sound'/'a collection of sounds'/'noise'. I feel the definition of 'music' comes down to:
Intention: 'music' is sound that has been presented, packaged, or otherwise put forward as being a worthwhile listening experience.
Human involvement: 'music' is almost always sound that a human (or, perhaps, another form of intelligence) has been involved in producing or arranging - we might package an hour's worth of seashore sounds as worth listening to, but if it's an essentially unedited recording, I don't think we'd usually call that 'music'.
In some cases, a listener might call an unintentionally-produced sound 'music' if they find it very pleasurable to listen to. ("I love the throbbing music of police helicopters over the city"). One could see that as a different sense of the word 'music', or simply as a metaphorical use of the word.
Organized in the context you quote means organized in time. Think of a musical piece or song as a graph. The Y axis is notes or sounds, and the X axis is minutes and seconds. When notes and sounds are planned to occur, in sequence, at specific points on this graph, relative to the X axis of minutes and seconds, then this is music.
Generally speaking, music is sounds organized in time.
By the way, with regard to the physics of sound, there is a distinction between musical notes and noise.
Musical notes are sounds that have, as a major component, prominent identifiable frequencies that repeat in a regular oscillating waveform. This is what we call a pitch or a tuned sound.
Noise refers to individual sounds that do not have a regular oscillating waveform, which is to say, among other things, that they have no recognizable pitch.
Now many percussion instruments do not produce a strong recognizable oscillating waveform, so technically a sound from such an instrument would be called noise. We call these instruments non-pitched percussion. But these are used in a musical context, meaning that the sounds they make are played by the player in a manner that is organized in time, so we regard them as musical instruments.
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