This episode and the creation of this podcast was generously sponsored by the Germanico's Foundation.

I guess in a way, music can be defined in the negative, as it were, that's not music, that's noise, or that's not music, it's speech or it's something else.

Music is always mixed up in a tangle of practices.

You might say it's always part of a particular social network,

a particular set of cultural relations that makes it what it is.

To me it's organized sound, and it's sound that's organized according to certain principles,

pitch, rhythm, harmony.

It uses timbers, it has certain dynamics.

And the purpose being, I think, to communicate something.

We can differentiate music from other forms of communication by their characteristics.

So, for example, we can distinguish speech from song in various ways.

And they all indicate that language and music are intertwined.

So what is music?

How would you define it?

Or does it defy definition?

Does defining it take away some of its magic?

These are the kinds of questions we're going to be exploring on this,

the first season of Cadence.

I'm Indra Viscontas.

I'm a neuroscientist and a classically trained opera singer,

and I've been struggling with this question of what can neuroscience tell us about music.

Maybe it's because I'm a Libra, or maybe it's because my dad was an engineer and my mama conductor,

...