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Dumpster diving

Dumpster diving (also totting, skipping, skip diving or skip salvage ) is salvaging from large commercial, residential, industrial and construction containers for unused items discarded by their owners but deemed useful to the picker. It is not confined to dumpsters and skips specifically and may cover standard household waste containers, curb sides, landfills or small dumps.

Different terms are used to refer to different forms of this activity. For picking materials from the curbside trash collection, expressions such as curb shopping, trash picking or street scavenging are sometimes used. In the UK, if someone is primarily seeking recyclable metal, they are scrapping, and if they are picking the leftover food from farming left in the fields, they are gleaning.

People dumpster dive for items such as clothing, furniture, food, and similar items in good working condition. Some people do this out of necessity due to poverty; others do it for ideological reasons or professionally and systematically for profit.

Etymology
The term "dumpster diving" emerged in the 1980s, combining "diving" with "dumpster", a large commercial trash bin. The term "Dumpster" itself comes from the Dempster Dumpster, a brand of bins manufactured by Dempster Brothers beginning in 1937. "Dumpster" became genericized by the 1970s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "dumpster diving" is chiefly found in American English and first appeared in print in 1983, with the verb "dumpster-dive" appearing a few years later. In British English, the practice may be known as "skipping", from skip, another term for this type of container.

Alternative names for the practice include bin-diving, containering, D-mart, dumpstering, totting, and skipping. In Australia, garbage picking is called "skip dipping."

Participants
The term "binner" is often used to describe individuals who collect recyclable materials for their deposit value. For example, in Vancouver, British Columbia, binners, or bottle collectors, search garbage cans and dumpsters for recyclable materials that can be redeemed for their deposit value. On average, these binners earn about $40 a day for several garbage bags full of discarded containers. Some are scammers seeking for receipts to use in committing return fraud.

The karung guni, Zabbaleen, the rag and bone man, waste picker, junk man or bin hoker are terms for people who make their living by sorting and trading trash. A similar process known as gleaning was practised in rural areas and some ancient agricultural societies, where the residue from farmers' fields was collected.

Some dumpster divers, who self-identify as freegans, aim to reduce their ecological footprint by living from dumpster-dived-goods, sometimes exclusively.

Overview
The activity is performed by people out of necessity in the developing world. Some scavengers perform in organized groups, and some organize on various internet forums and social networking websites. By reusing, or repurposing, resources destined for the landfill, dumpster diving is sometimes considered to be an environmentalist endeavor, and is thus practiced by many pro-green communities. The wastefulness of consumer society and throw-away culture compels some individuals to rescue usable items (for example, computers or smartphones, which are frequently discarded due to the extensive use of planned obsolescence in the technology industry) from destruction and divert them to those who can make use of the items.

A wide variety of things may be disposed while still repairable or in working condition, making salvage of them a source of potentially free items for personal use, or to sell for profit. Irregular, blemished or damaged items that are still otherwise functional are regularly thrown away. Discarded food that might have slight imperfections, near its expiration date, or that is simply being replaced by newer stock is often tossed out despite being still edible. Many retailers are reluctant to sell this stock at reduced prices because of the risks that people will buy it instead of the higher-priced newer stock, that extra handling time is required, and that there are liability risks. In the United Kingdom, cookery books have been written on the cooking and consumption of such foods, which has contributed to the popularity of skipping. Artists often use discarded materials retrieved from trash receptacles to create works of found objects or assemblage.

Students have been known to partake in dumpster diving to obtain high tech items for technical projects, or simply to indulge their curiosity for unusual items. Dumpster diving can additionally be used in support of academic research. Garbage picking serves as the main tool for garbologists, who study the sociology and archeology of trash in modern life. Private and government investigators may pick through garbage to obtain information for their inquiries. Illegal cigarette consumption may be deduced from discarded packages.

Dumpster diving can be hazardous, due to potential exposure to biohazardous matter, broken glass, and overall unsanitary conditions that may exist in dumpsters.

Arguments against garbage picking often focus on the health and cleanliness implications of people rummaging in trash. This exposes the dumpster divers to potential health risks, and, especially if the dumpster diver does not return the non-usable items to their previous location, may leave trash scattered around. Divers can also be seriously injured or killed by garbage collection vehicles; in January 2012, in La Jolla, Swiss-American man Alfonso de Bourbon was killed by a truck while dumpster diving.

Dumpster diving with criminal intentions (Garbage theft)
The unauthorized taking of materials from a dumpster or other waste disposal container is commonly referred to as "garbage theft". Dumpster diving is a different idiom. Due to the typical low value of the stolen goods, garbage theft is not typically recognized as a serious crime, with laws against it frequently focusing on combating identity theft instead. Depending on the state or nation's rules surrounding low-level crime, garbage theft may be considered a form of petty theft and subject to a penalty that often entails a brief period of incarceration, a modest fine, or both. As a privacy violation, discarded medical records as trash led to a $140,000 penalty against Massachusetts billing company Goldthwait Associates and a group of pathology offices in 2013 and a $400,000 settlement between Midwest Women's Healthcare Specialists and 1,532 clients in Kansas City in 2014.

Identity theft has historically been carried out through garbage theft, with thieves utilizing bank and credit card statements discovered in trash to assume the identity of a victim or access their credit.

Criminals have been known to dumpster dive for cash receipts as part of a scheme to steal items and return them for cash, a form of return fraud known as "shoplisting." Police investigating shoplifting in Bellingham, Washington, found dozens of receipts from retailers such as The Home Depot, Rite Aid and Fred Meyer, along with a list of items on the receipts. Suspects believed to have taken receipts from trash receptacles near Walmart locations were arrested for return fraud in 2016 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Legal status
Since dumpsters are usually located on private premises, divers may occasionally get in trouble for trespassing while dumpster diving, though the law is enforced with varying degrees of rigor. Some businesses may lock dumpsters to prevent pickers from congregating on their property, vandalism to their property, and to limit potential liability if a dumpster diver is injured while on their property.

Police searches of discarded waste as well as similar methods are also generally not considered violations of privacy rights; evidence seized in this manner has been permitted in many criminal trials. In the United States this has been affirmed by numerous courts including and up to the Supreme Court, in the decision California v. Greenwood. The doctrine is not as well established in regard to civil litigation.

Companies run by private investigators specializing in such techniques have emerged as a result of the need for discreet, undetected retrieval of documents and evidence for civil and criminal trials. Private investigators have also written books on "P.I. technique" in which dumpster diving or its equivalent "wastebasket recovery" figures prominently.

Belgium
In 2009, a Belgian dumpster diver and eco-activist nicknamed Ollie was detained for a month for removing food from a garbage can and was accused of theft and burglary. On February 25, 2009, he was arrested for removing food from a garbage can at an AD Delhaize supermarket in Bruges. Ollie's trial evoked protests in Belgium against restrictions from taking discarded food items.

Canada
In Ontario, Canada, the Trespass to Property Act—legislation dating back to the British North America Act of 1867 —grants property owners and security guards the power to ban anyone from their premises, for any reason, permanently. This is done by issuing a notice to the intruder, who will only be breaking the law upon return. Similar laws exist in Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan. A recent case in Canada, which involved a police officer who retrieved a discarded weapon from a trash receptacle as evidence, created some controversy. The judge ruled the policeman's actions as legal although there was no warrant present, which led some to speculate the event as validation for any Canadian citizen to raid garbage disposals.

United Kingdom
Skipping in England and Wales may qualify as theft within the Theft Act 1968  or as common-law theft in Scotland, though there is very little enforcement in practice.

Germany
In Germany, dumpster diving is referred to as "containern", and a waste container's contents are regarded as the property of the container's owner. Therefore, taking items from such a container is viewed as theft. However, the police will routinely disregard the illegality of garbage picking since the items found are generally of low value. There has only been one known instance where people were prosecuted. In 2009 individuals were arrested on assumed burglary as they had surmounted a supermarket's fence which was then followed by a theft complaint by the owner; the case was suspended.

United States
In the United States, the fourth amendment protects against certain searches by the government without a warrant. The 1988 California v. Greenwood case in the U.S. Supreme Court held that there is no common law expectation of privacy for discarded materials, and that therefore the police did not require a warrant to search through trash.

There are, however, limits to what can legally be taken from a company's refuse. In a 1983 Minnesota case involving the theft of customer lists from a garbage can, Tennant Company v. Advance Machine Company (355 N.W.2d 720), the owner of the discarded information was awarded $500,000 in damages.

Items

Dumpster diving is practiced differently in developed countries than in developing countries.
 * Food. In many developing countries, food is rarely thrown away unless it is rotten as food is scarce in comparison to developed nations. In countries like the United States, where 40 to 50 percent of food is wasted, the trash contains a lot more food to gather. In many countries, charities collect excess food from supermarkets and restaurants and distribute it to impoverished neighbourhoods. Trash pickers, Karung guni, Zabaleen, and rag and bone men in these countries may concentrate on looking for usable items or scrap materials to sell rather than food items. In the United States, Canada, and Europe, some bakeries, grocery stores, or restaurants will routinely donate food according to a Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, but more often, because of health laws or company policy, they are required to discard food items by the expiration date, because of overstock, being overly ripened, spoiled, cosmetically imperfect, or blemished.American Education in Dumpster.jpg
 * Books and periodicals. As proof to publishing houses of unsold merchandise, booksellers will routinely remove the front covers of printed materials to render them destroyed prior to disposing of their remains in the garbage. Though readable, many damaged publications have disclaimers and legal notices against their existence or sale.
 * Irregular or damaged goods. Offices, factories, department stores, and other commercial establishments may equally throw out non-perishable items that are irregular, were returned, have minor damages, or are replaced by newer inventory. Many items tend to be in such a state of disrepair or cosmetically flawed that they will require some work to make the items functionally usable. For this reason, employees will at times intentionally destroy their items prior to being discarded to prevent them from being reused or resold.
 * Returned items. Manufacturers often find it cheaper to routinely discard items returned as defective under warranty instead of repairing them, although a device is often repairable or usable as a source of spare parts to repair other, similar discarded devices.
 * School supplies. At the end of each school year many people throw away perfectly useful supplies like pencils, pens, notebooks and art supplies.
 * Electronic waste. Some consumer electronics are dumped because of their rapid depreciation, obsolescence, cost to repair, or expense to upgrade. Owners of functional computers may find it easier to dump them rather than donate because many nonprofit organizations and schools are unable, or unwilling, to work with used equipment. Occasionally, vendors dispose of unsaleable, non-defective new merchandise as landfill. The Atari video game burial in Alamogordo, New Mexico, after the video game crash of 1983 is a well-known example; a 2014 excavation recovered about 1300 games for curation as museum exhibits or auction.
 * Clothing. While thrift stores routinely refuse used goods which they cannot cheaply and easily resell, the items which they do accept cost them nothing. There is therefore no shrinkage cost associated with discarding mendable garments, repairable appliances or even working donated items which are overstock or find no buyer after some arbitrary length of time.
 * Metal. Sometimes waste may contain recyclable metals and materials that can be reused or sold to recycling plants and scrap yards. The most common recyclable metals found are steel and aluminum.
 * Wood. Called urban lumberjacking, to salvage wood either for home heating, or home construction projects.
 * Empty cans and bottles. Several countries, particularly in Northern Europe have enforced a system in which empty cans and bottles can be returned to stores for money. Usually the amount received per can/bottle is relatively low, so many simply discard them in dumpsters.
 * Personal Information: cyber attackers may engage in dumpster diving to gather sensitive data, including IP addresses, bank account details, and Social Security numbers, by sifting through discarded mail or retrieving items disposed of in bins. Moreover, perpetrators may endeavor to broaden their contact databases by resorting to dumpster diving at corporate premises, aiming to obtain access to confidential and sensitive data, including phone lists or records.

Other sources

 * Residential buildings. Clothing, furniture, appliances, and other housewares may be found at residential buildings.
 * College dormitories. Items may be found at colleges with dormitories at the end of the semester when students throw away many items such as furniture, clothes and electronics.

Notable instances
In the 1960s, Jerry Schneider, using recovered instruction manuals from The Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, used the company's own procedures to acquire hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of telephone equipment over several years until his arrest.

The Castle Infinity videogame, after its shutdown in 2005, was brought back from the dead by a fan rescuing its servers from the trash.

In October 2013, in North London, three men were arrested and charged under the 1824 Vagrancy Act when they were caught taking discarded food: tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese and cakes from bins behind an Iceland supermarket. The charges were dropped on 29 January 2014 after much public criticism as well as a request by Iceland's chief executive, Malcolm Walker.

In 1996, the source code for the Atari 7800 was discovered in the dumpster of the Atari office when the company closed.

Books

 * Author John Hoffman wrote two books based on his own dumpster-diving exploits: The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving (1993; ISBN 978-1-58160-550-1) and Dumpster Diving: The Advanced Course: How to Turn Other People's Trash into Money, Publicity, and Power (2002; ISBN 978-1-58160-369-9), and was featured in the documentary DVD The Ultimate Dive, which was directed by Suzanne Girot and described by the Internet Movie Database as a "Tongue-in-cheek how-to film on the art and science of dumpster diving."
 * In 2001, dumpster diving was popularized in the book Evasion, published by CrimethInc.
 * In Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction novel Fifty Degrees Below (2005), the character Frank Vanderwal joins, for a time, a group of freegans (referred to as "fregans" in the novel) who frequently prepare feasts culled from dumpsters; kind-hearted restaurateurs aid them by setting aside foods which have not been touched by the public.
 * Jeff Ferrell, Professor of Sociology at Texas Christian University, is the author of Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging (2005; ISBN 978-0-81472-738-6).
 * Cory Doctorow integrated garbage picking characters into the plots of his novels Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and Pirate Cinema.
 * David Boarder Gilles' A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-class Waste of Global Cities (2021) is an ethnography of this global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need.

Television programs

 * British television shows have featured home renovations and decoration using salvaged materials. Changing Rooms (1996–2004) is one such show, broadcast on BBC One.
 * TLC's Extreme Cheapskates and Extreme Couponing featured people who regularly dumpster dive to avoid spending money on different items —in the case of the latter, unwanted newspapers and newspaper inserts containing coupons were the subject of dumpster diving.

Films

 * Surfing the Waste: A Musical Documentary About Dumpster Diving, a film by Paul Aflalo, Sandra Lombardi and Tomoe Yoshihara, with music composed by Alden Penner and Nic Boshart.
 * Dumpster Wars: Reno's Trash Politics (2008)
 * I Love Trash (2007), a 30-minute documentary by David Brown and Greg Mann. OCLC's WorldCat provided a synopsis: "I Love Trash is a documentary about the art of dumpster diving. Starting with an empty apartment, only the clothes they were wearing and a flashlight, David and Greg find everything they might otherwise buy, in trash cans and dumpsters. All their food, clothes, electronics, art materials and entertainment, all out of the trash." Accolades: Skyfest Film and Script Festival, (won 2nd place for Documentary Films ); and Lake Michigan Film Competition, (won 3rd place for Documentary films).
 * The 2010 documentary film Dive!, a short documentary written and directed by Jeremy Seifert, investigates dumpster diving in the Los Angeles area. Dive! premiered in October 2009 at the Gig Harbor Film Festival, where it won the Audience Choice Award. It has gone on to win awards at many other film festivals, including Best Documentary at the DC Independent Film Festival and Best Film at the Dutch Environmental Film Festival.
 * Spoils: Extraordinary Harvest. A short film/mystery film and documentary by Alex Mallis. (2012) Accolades: Official Selection, New Orleans Film Festival. Official Selection, Independent Film Festival of Boston. Official Selection, DOC NYC.
 * The Leftovers: A Documentary about People Who Eat Trash (2008), a 28-minute Swedish documentary by Michael Cavanagh and Kerstin Übelacker. Mykel Bently, Paul Hood, Krystal Trickey, Nick Gill, and Sofia Arborelius (the latter two were exchange students) joined together for this dumpster diver adventure.
 * From Dumpster To Dinner Plate (2011), an award-winning New Zealand short documentary directed by Vanessa Hudson. "As the cost of food reaches record highs an underground movement of dumpster divers is rapidly gaining momentum fuelled by consumers who are forced to find creative ways to feed themselves."

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Digital synthesizer

A digital synthesizer is a synthesizer that uses digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to make musical sounds. This in contrast to older analog synthesizers, which produce music using analog electronics, and samplers, which play back digital recordings of acoustic, electric, or electronic instruments. Some digital synthesizers emulate analog synthesizers; others include sampling capability in addition to digital synthesis.

History
The very earliest digital synthesis experiments were made with computers, as part of academic research into sound generation.

In 1957, the first programming language for computer music, MUSIC, was developed by Max Mathews on an IBM 704 at Bell Labs in 1957. It generates digital audio waveforms through direct synthesis.

c. 1969, EMS MUSYS 3 system was developed by Peter Grogono (software), David Cockerell (hardware and interfacing) and Peter Zinovieff (system design and operation) at their London (Putney) Studio. The system ran on two mini-computers, Digital Equipment PDP-8's. These had a pair of fast D/A and A/D converters, 12,000 (12k) bytes of core memory (RAM), backed up by a hard drive of 32k and by tape storage (DecTape). The earliest digital sampling was done on that system during 1971–1972 for Harrison Birtwistle's "Chronometer" released in 1975.

In 1972–1974, Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer was developed by Dartmouth College Professors Jon Appleton and Frederick J. Hooven, in association with NED co-founders Sydney A. Alonso and Cameron W. Jones.

In 1977, Bell Labs Digital Synthesizer was developed by Hal Ales at Bell Labs.

In 1977, New England Digital (NED) released the Synclavier, the first commercial synthesizer to use purely digital sound generation and also the world's first commercial FM synthesizer.

Early commercial digital synthesizers used simple hard-wired digital circuitry to implement techniques such as additive synthesis and FM synthesis. Two other early commercial digital synthesizers were the Fairlight CMI, introduced in 1979, and the New England Digital Synclavier II, introduced in 1979 as an upgrade to the original Synclavier. The Fairlight CMI was the one of the earlier sampling synthesizers, while the Synclavier originally used FM synthesis technology licensed from Yamaha, before adding the world's first 16-bit, real-time hard drive streaming sampler later in 1982. The Fairlight CMI and the Synclavier were both expensive systems, retailing for more than $20,000 in the early 1980s. The cost of digital synthesizers began falling rapidly in the early 1980s. E-mu Systems introduced the Emulator sampling synthesizer in 1982 at a retail price of $7,900. Although not as flexible or powerful as either the Fairlight CMI or the Synclavier, its lower cost and portability made it popular.

With the addition of sophisticated sequencers on board, now added to built-in effects and other features, the 'workstation' synthesizer had been born. These always include a multi-track sequencer, and can often record and play back samples, and in later years full audio tracks, to be used to record an entire song. These are usually also ROMplers, playing back samples, to give a wide variety of realistic instrument and other sounds such as drums, string instruments and wind instruments to sequence and compose songs, along with popular keyboard instrument sounds such as electric pianos and organs.

As there was still interest in analog synthesizers, and with the increase of computing power, over the 1990s another type of synthesizer arose: the analog modeling, or "virtual analog" synthesizer. These use computing power to simulate traditional analog waveforms and circuitry such as envelopes and filters, with the most popular examples of this type of instrument including the Nord Lead and Access Virus.

Digital synthesizers can now be completely emulated in software ("softsynth"), and run on conventional PC hardware. Such soft implementations require careful programming and a fast CPU to get the same latency response as their dedicated equivalents. To reduce latency, some professional sound card manufacturers have developed specialized Digital Signal Processing ([DSP]) hardware. Dedicated digital synthesizers have the advantage of a performance-friendly user interface (physical controls like buttons for selecting features and enabling functionality, and knobs for setting variable parameters). On the other hand, software synthesizers have the advantages afforded by a rich graphical display.

With focus on performance-oriented keyboards and digital computer technology, manufacturers of commercial electronic instruments created some of the earliest digital synthesizers for studio and experimental use with computers being able to handle built-in sound synthesis algorithms.

In Japan
In 1973, the Japanese company Yamaha licensed the patent for frequency modulation synthesis (FM synthesis) from John Chowning, who had experimented with it at Stanford University since 1971. Yamaha's engineers began adapting Chowning's algorithm for use in a commercial digital synthesizer, adding improvements such as the "key scaling" method to avoid the introduction of distortion that normally occurred in analog systems during frequency modulation, though it would take several years before Yamaha were to release their FM digital synthesizers. In the 1970s, Yamaha were granted a number of patents, under the company's former name "Nippon Gakki Seizo Kabushiki Kaisha", evolving Chowning's early work on FM synthesis technology. Yamaha built the first prototype digital synthesizer in 1974.

Released in 1979, the Casio VL-1 was the first low budget digital synthesizer, selling for $69.95. Yamaha eventually commercialized their FM synthesis technology and released the company's first FM digital synthesizer in 1980, the Yamaha GS-1, but at an expensive retail price of $16,000.

Introduced in 1983, the Yamaha DX7 was the breakthrough digital synthesizer to have a major impact, both innovative and affordable, and thus spelling the decline of analog synthesizers. It used FM synthesis and, although it was incapable of the sampling synthesis of the Fairlight CMI, its price was around $2,000, putting it within range of a much larger number of musicians. The DX-7 was also known for its "key scaling" method to avoid distortion and for its recognizably bright tonality that was partly due to its high sampling rate of 57 kHz. It became indispensable to many music artists of the 1980s, and would become one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time.

In 1987, Roland released its own influential synthesizer of the time, the D-50. This popular synth broke new ground in affordably combining short samples and digital oscillators, as well as the innovation of built-in digital effects (reverb., chorus, equalizer ). Roland called this Linear Arithmetic (LA) synthesis. This instrument is responsible for some of the very recognisable preset synthesizer sounds of the late 1980s, such as the Pizzagogo sound used on Enya's "Orinoco Flow."

It gradually became feasible to include high quality samples of existing instruments as opposed to synthesizing them. In 1988, Korg introduced the last of the hugely popular trio of digital synthesizers of the 1980s after the DX7 and D50, the M1. This heralded both the increasing popularisation of digital sample-based synthesis, and the rise of 'workstation' synthesizers. After this time, many popular modern digital synthesizers have been described as not being full synthesizers in the most precise sense, as they play back samples stored in their memory. However, they still include options to shape the sounds through use of envelopes, LFOs, filters and effects such as reverb. The Yamaha Motif and Roland Fantom series of keyboards are typical examples of this type, described as 'ROMplers'; at the same time, they are also examples of "workstation" synthesizers.

As the cost of processing power and memory fell, new types of synthesizers emerged, offering a variety of novel sound synthesis options. The Korg Oasys was one such example, packaging multiple digital synthesizers into a single unit.

Analog vs. digital
An analog synthesizer creates sound using electronic circuitry, such as voltage-controlled oscillators and voltage-controlled filters. In contrast, a digital synthesizer generates a stream of numbers, often using some form of digital signal processor, which are then converted to sound using a digital-to-analog converter (DAC).

A digital synthesizer is in essence a computer with (often) a piano or organ keyboard and an LCD as a user interface. Because computer technology is rapidly advancing, it is often possible to offer more features in a digital synthesizer than in an analog synthesizer at a given price. However, both technologies have their own merit. Some forms of synthesis, such as, for instance, sampling and additive synthesis are not feasible in analog synthesizers, while on the other hand, many musicians prefer the character of analog synthesizers over their digital equivalent.

Usage in Popular Music
The new wave era of the 1980s first brought the digital synthesizer to the public ear. Bands like Talking Heads and Duran Duran used the digitally made sounds on some of their most popular albums. Other more pop-inspired bands like Hall & Oates began incorporating the digital synthesizer into their sound in the 1980s. Through breakthroughs in technology in the 1990s many modern synthesizers use DSP.

Digital synthesis
Working in more or less the same way, every digital synthesizer appears similar to a computer. At a steady sample rate, digital synthesis produces a stream of numbers. Sound from speakers is then produced by a conversion to analog form. Direct digital synthesis is the typical architecture for digital synthesizers. Through signal generation, voice and instrument-level processing, a signal flow is created and controlled either by MIDI capabilities or voice and instrument-level controls.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Digital synthesizer


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Definition of music

A definition of music endeavors to give an accurate and concise explanation of music's basic attributes or essential nature and it involves a process of defining what is meant by the term music. Many authorities have suggested definitions, but defining music turns out to be more difficult than might first be imagined, and there is ongoing debate. A number of explanations start with the notion of music as organized sound, but they also highlight that this is perhaps too broad a definition and cite examples of organized sound that are not defined as music, such as human speech and sounds found in both natural and industrial environments. The problem of defining music is further complicated by the influence of culture in music cognition.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines music as "the art of combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion". However, some music genres, such as noise music and musique concrète, challenge these ideas by using sounds not widely considered as musical, beautiful or harmonious, like randomly produced electronic distortion, feedback, static, cacophony, and sounds produced using compositional processes which utilize indeterminacy.

An often-cited example of the dilemma in defining music is the work 4′33″ (1952) by the American composer John Cage (1912–1992). The written score has three movements and directs the performer(s) to appear on stage, indicate by gesture or other means when the piece begins, then make no sound throughout the duration of the piece, marking sections and the end by gesture. The audience hears only whatever ambient sounds may occur in the room. Some argue that 4′33″ is not music because, among other reasons, it contains no sounds that are conventionally considered "musical" and the composer and performer(s) exert no control over the organization of the sounds heard. Others argue it is music because the conventional definitions of musical sounds are unnecessarily and arbitrarily limited, and control over the organization of the sounds is achieved by the composer and performer(s) through their gestures that divide what is heard into specific sections and a comprehensible form.

Concepts of music
Because of differing fundamental concepts of music, the languages of many cultures do not contain a word that can be accurately translated as "music" as that word is generally understood by Western cultures. Inuit and most North American Indian languages do not have a general term for music. Among the Aztecs, the ancient Mexican theory of rhetoric, poetry, dance, and instrumental music used the Nahuatl term In xochitl-in kwikatl to refer to a complex mix of music and other poetic verbal and non-verbal elements, and reserved the word Kwikakayotl (or cuicacayotl) only for the sung expressions. There is no term for music in Nigerian languages Tiv, Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Birom, Hausa, Idoma, Eggon or Jarawa. Many other languages have terms which only partly cover what Western culture typically means by the term music. The Mapuche of Argentina do not have a word for music, but they do have words for instrumental versus improvised forms (kantun), European and non-Mapuche music (kantun winka), ceremonial songs (öl), and tayil.

While some languages in West Africa have no term for music, some West African languages accept the general concepts of music. Musiqi is the Persian word for the science and art of music, muzik being the sound and performance of music, though some things European-influenced listeners would include, such as Quran chanting, are excluded.

Music vs. noise
Ben Watson points out that Ludwig van Beethoven's Große Fuge (1825) "sounded like noise" to his audience at the time. Indeed, Beethoven's publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro. They subsequently published it separately. Musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez considers the difference between noise and music nebulous, explaining that "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be".

Organized sound
An often-cited definition of music is that it is "organized sound", a term originally coined by modernist composer Edgard Varèse in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's concept of music as "organized sound" fits into his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?"

The fifteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica states that "while there are no sounds that can be described as inherently unmusical, musicians in each culture have tended to restrict the range of sounds they will admit." A human organizing element is often felt to be implicit in music (sounds produced by non-human agents, such as waterfalls or birds, are often described as "musical", but perhaps less often as "music"). The composer R. Murray states that the sound of classical music "has decays; it is granular; it has attacks; it fluctuates, swollen with impurities—and all this creates a musicality that comes before any 'cultural' musicality." However, in the view of semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, "just as music is whatever people choose to recognize as such, noise is whatever is recognized as disturbing, unpleasant, or both". (See "music as social construct" below.)

Language
Levi R. Bryant defines music not as a language, but as a marked-based, problem-solving method, comparable to mathematics.

Musical universals
Most definitions of music include a reference to sound and a list of universals of music can be generated by stating the elements (or aspects) of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, duration, spatial location and texture.). However, in terms more specifically relating to music: following Wittgenstein, cognitive psychologist Eleanor Rosch proposes that categories are not clean cut but that something may be more or less a member of a category. As such the search for musical universals would fail and would not provide one with a valid definition. This is primarily because other cultures have different understandings in relation to the sounds that English-language writers refer to as music.

Social construct
Many people do, however, share a general idea of music. The Websters definition of music is a typical example: "the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity" (Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, online edition).

Subjective experience
This approach to the definition focuses not on the construction but on the experience of music. An extreme statement of the position has been articulated by the Italian composer Luciano Berio: "Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music". This approach permits the boundary between music and noise to change over time as the conventions of musical interpretation evolve within a culture, to be different in different cultures at any given moment, and to vary from person to person according to their experience and proclivities. It is further consistent with the subjective reality that even what would commonly be considered music is experienced as non-music if the mind is concentrating on other matters and thus not perceiving the sound's essence as music.

Clifton
In his 1983 book, Music as Heard, which sets out from the phenomenological position of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricœur, Thomas Clifton defines music as "an ordered arrangement of sounds and silences whose meaning is presentative rather than denotative ... This definition distinguishes music, as an end in itself, from compositional technique, and from sounds as purely physical objects." More precisely, "music is the actualization of the possibility of any sound whatever to present to some human being a meaning which he experiences with his body—that is to say, with his mind, his feelings, his senses, his will, and his metabolism". It is therefore "a certain reciprocal relation established between a person, his behavior, and a sounding object".

Clifton accordingly differentiates music from non-music on the basis of the human behavior involved, rather than on either the nature of compositional technique or of sounds as purely physical objects. Consequently, the distinction becomes a question of what is meant by musical behavior: "a musically behaving person is one whose very being is absorbed in the significance of the sounds being experienced." However, "It is not altogether accurate to say that this person is listening to the sounds. First, the person is doing more than listening: he is perceiving, interpreting, judging, and feeling. Second, the preposition 'to' puts too much stress on the sounds as such. Thus, the musically behaving person experiences musical significance by means of, or through, the sounds".

In this framework, Clifton finds that there are two things that separate music from non-music: (1) musical meaning is presentative, and (2) music and non-music are distinguished in the idea of personal involvement. "It is the notion of personal involvement which lends significance to the word ordered in this definition of music". This is not to be understood, however, as a sanctification of extreme relativism, since "it is precisely the 'subjective' aspect of experience which lured many writers earlier in this century down the path of sheer opinion-mongering. Later on this trend was reversed by a renewed interest in 'objective,' scientific, or otherwise non-introspective musical analysis. But we have good reason to believe that a musical experience is not a purely private thing, like seeing pink elephants, and that reporting about such an experience need not be subjective in the sense of it being a mere matter of opinion".

Clifton's task, then, is to describe musical experience and the objects of this experience which, together, are called "phenomena", and the activity of describing phenomena is called "phenomenology". It is important to stress that this definition of music says nothing about aesthetic standards. "Music is not a fact or a thing in the world, but a meaning constituted by human beings. ... To talk about such experience in a meaningful way demands several things. First, we have to be willing to let the composition speak to us, to let it reveal its own order and significance. ... Second, we have to be willing to question our assumptions about the nature and role of musical materials. ... Last, and perhaps most important, we have to be ready to admit that describing a meaningful experience is itself meaningful."

Nattiez
"Music, often an art/entertainment, is a total social fact whose definitions vary according to era and culture", according to Jean. It is often contrasted with noise. According to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez: "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be". Given the above demonstration that "there is no limit to the number or the genre of variables that might intervene in a definition of the musical", an organization of definitions and elements is necessary.

Nattiez (1990, 17) describes definitions according to a tripartite semiological scheme similar to the following:

There are three levels of description, the poietic, the neutral, and the esthesic:
 * " By 'poietic' I understand describing the link among the composer's intentions, his creative procedures, his mental schemas, and the result of this collection of strategies; that is, the components that go into the work's material embodiment. Poietic description thus also deals with a quite special form of hearing (Varese called it 'the interior ear'): what the composer hears while imagining the work's sonorous results, or while experimenting at the piano, or with tape."
 * "By 'esthesic' I understand not merely the artificially attentive hearing of a musicologist, but the description of perceptive behaviors within a given population of listeners; that is how this or that aspect of sonorous reality is captured by their perceptive strategies".
 * The neutral level is that of the physical "trace", (Saussere's sound-image, a sonority, a score), created and interpreted by the esthesic level (which corresponds to a perceptive definition; the perceptive and/or "social" construction definitions below) and the poietic level (which corresponds to a creative, as in compositional, definition; the organizational and social construction definitions below).

Table describing types of definitions of music:

Because of this range of definitions, the study of music comes in a wide variety of forms. There is the study of sound and vibration or acoustics, the cognitive study of music, the study of music theory and performance practice or music theory and ethnomusicology and the study of the reception and history of music, generally called musicology.

Xenakis
Composer Iannis Xenakis in "Towards a Metamusic" (chapter 7 of Formalized Music) defined music in the following way:
 * 1) It is a sort of comportment necessary for whoever thinks it and makes it.
 * 2) It is an individual pleroma, a realization.
 * 3) It is a fixing in sound of imagined virtualities (cosmological, philosophical, ..., arguments)
 * 4) It is normative, that is, unconsciously it is a model for being or for doing by sympathetic drive.
 * 5) It is catalytic: its mere presence permits internal psychic or mental transformations in the same way as the crystal ball of the hypnotist.
 * 6) It is the gratuitous play of a child.
 * 7) It is a mystical (but atheistic) asceticism. Consequently, expressions of sadness, joy, love and dramatic situations are only very limited particular instances.

title: Definition of music