Music is a cultural universal with no single tight definition
Music arranges sound into form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or other expressive patterns, and every known society has it. English music traces to Greek mousiké technē, “art of the Muses.” Origins theories clash over whether song preceded language or followed it.
It frames rituals, festivals, and private listening; industries employ writers, performers, engineers, and distributors. Some languages only recently borrowed a blanket word for all genres the West lumps together. Paleolithic clues include the disputed Divje Babe bone, at least forty thousand years old, possibly a flute or animal-chewed femur. In Chinese the nearest term, yue, shares its character with le, meaning joy, and once covered all the arts; neither China nor Japan had a single broad word for music before Western contact. Indonesian and Shona adopted such words only recently. The Songye of Congo and the Tiv of Nigeria have a rich idea of music but no native word for it, and Hindi sangita properly means art music.
Egyptian instruments appear more securely in Old Kingdom evidence—harps, flutes, double clarinets—later joined by percussion, lyres, and lutes.
Scholars agree music rests on a handful of core elements but not on which ones they are. It is made through composition, improvisation and performance, with instruments that include the human voice, or produced mechanically and electronically, from music boxes and barrel organs to software on a computer. It scores films, television, opera and video games, and it has been captured by sheet music, phonographs, tape and now smartphones. The English word arrived in the 1630s via Middle English, Old French and Latin. Of the nine Muses, Polyhymnia came to be most closely linked with music, and musicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia stresses how often African music is bound up with dance and speech.
Source: Music
