Editing Definition of music (section)

===Nattiez===
"Music, often an [[art]]/[[entertainment]], is a [[total social fact]] whose definitions vary according to [[era]] and [[culture]]", according to [[Jean Molino]].{{sfn|Molino|1975|loc=37}} It is often contrasted with [[noise (environmental)|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".{{sfn|Nattiez|1990|loc=47–48, 55}} 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",{{sfn|Molino|1975|loc=42}} an organization of definitions and elements is necessary.

Nattiez (1990, 17) describes definitions according to a [[wikt:tripartite|tripartite]] semiological scheme similar to the following:
{|
|-
|colspan=3|Poietic Process
|colspan=2|Esthesic Process
|-
|Composer (Producer)
| →
|Sound (Trace)
| ←
|Listener (Receiver)
|}

There are three levels of description, the poietic, the neutral, and the esthesic:
*"<!-- If musical semiology's sole contribution were replacing what everybody calls "composition" and "perception" with barbarou neologisms like 'poietic' and 'esthesic', then semiology would entail risibly small profits. There is, of course, more to it than that. --> 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".{{sfn|Nattiez|1990|loc=90}}
*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:{{sfn|Nattiez|1990|loc=46}}
{| class="wikitable"
!
!poietic level<br/>(choice of the composer)
!neutral level<br/>(physical definition)
!esthesic level<br/>(perceptive judgment)
|-
! music
| musical sound
| sound of the<br/>harmonic<br/>spectrum
| agreeable sound
|-
! non-music
| noise<br/>(nonmusical)
| noise<br/>(complex sound)
| disagreeable<br/>noise
|}

Because of this range of definitions, the study of music comes in a wide variety of forms. There is the study of sound and [[oscillation|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]].