Someone nearby is tapping their toe. Is this an irritating noise or a musical sound? As it turns out, the difference depends almost entirely upon the listener.
The best indicator we have of knowing whether a particular person will interpret a sound as noisy or musical is their age. Since human hearing deteriorates over time, it becomes harder to hear "conversational" sound frequencies as we get older. Conversation is in the mid-range of our hearing--not super high and not super low--and so it can blend in with other environmental sounds and make the world sound more irregular and unpleasant. If someone is singing and there's an air conditioner sound in the background, the singing might get interpreted as noise.
source Education.com
Obviously, some sounds are more musical than others. Musical instruments, for example, produce sound waves that are ordered and regular–-this leads our ears and brains to process them as pleasing and therefore, as music.
pictured: a chaotic-looking noisy sound wave and a well-order music sound wave
Although both [noise and music] are mixtures of sound waves at different frequencies, music is considered to be ordered sound, while noise is disordered sound. For example, the mixture of sound waves that produce music can be easily separated into individual frequencies, with some being more dominant than others. On the other hand, noise contains all possible frequencies of sound with no dominant frequency present.
The further we delve into displeasing or “dissonant” music, the more likely it is to be perceived as noise. Ultimately the line between the two is very blurry, and while we may be able to easily identify static on the television as noise and a trumpet as music, there are so many sounds in between that can fall into either category. It comes down to the amount of order and disorder that you can handle in what you listen to. For example, take a listen to the Noise Music below and see what you think. As the saying goes, beauty-–or in this case, music-–is in the ears of the beholder.
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