We all know music when we hear it — or at least we think we do — but how, exact­ly, do we define it? “Imag­ine you’re in a jazz club, lis­ten­ing to the rhyth­mic honk­ing of horns,” says the nar­ra­tor of the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above. “Most peo­ple would agree that this is music. But if you were on the high­way, hear­ing the same thing, many would call it noise.” Yet the clos­er we get to the bound­ary between music and noise, the less clear it gets. The com­pos­er John Cage, to whose work this video pro­vides an intro­duc­tion, spent his long career in those very bor­der­lands: he “glee­ful­ly dared lis­ten­ers to ques­tion the bound­aries between music and noise, as well as sound and silence.”

The best-known exam­ple of this larg­er endeav­or is “4’33”,” Cage’s 1952 “solo piano piece con­sist­ing of noth­ing but musi­cal rests for four min­utes and thir­ty-three sec­onds.” Though known as a “silent” com­po­si­tion, it actu­al­ly makes its lis­ten­ers focus on all the inci­den­tal sounds around them: “Could the open­ing and clos­ing of a piano lid be music? What about the click of a stop­watch? The rustling, and per­haps even the com­plain­ing, of a crowd?”

A few years lat­er, he implic­it­ly asked sim­i­lar ques­tions about what does and does not count as music to tele­vi­sion view­ers across Amer­i­ca by per­form­ing “Water Walk” —  whose instru­ments includ­ed “a bath­tub, ice cubes, a toy fish, a pres­sure cook­er, a rub­ber duck, and sev­er­al radios” — on CBS’ I’ve Got a Secret.

Many who watched that broad­cast in 1960 would have asked the same ques­tion: “Is this even music?” This may have well have been the out­come for which Cage him­self hoped. “Like the white can­vas­es of his paint­ing peers” in that same era, his work “asked the audi­ence to ques­tion their expec­ta­tions about what music was.” As he explored more and more deeply into the ter­ri­to­ry of uncon­ven­tion­al meth­ods of instru­men­ta­tion, nota­tion, and per­for­mance, he drift­ed far­ther and far­ther from the com­poser’s tra­di­tion­al task: “to orga­nize sound in time for a spe­cif­ic inten­tion­al pur­pose.” Sev­en decades after “4’33”,” some still insist that John Cage’s work isn’t music — but then, some say the same about Ken­ny G.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stream a Free 65-Hour Playlist of John Cage Music and Dis­cov­er the Full Scope of His Avant-Garde Com­po­si­tions

Watch John Cage Play His “Silent” 4’33” in Har­vard Square, Pre­sent­ed by Nam June Paik (1973)

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

John Cage Per­forms “Water Walk” on US Game Show I’ve Got a Secret (1960)

An Impres­sive Audio Archive of John Cage Lec­tures & Inter­views: Hear Record­ings from 1963–1991

How to Get Start­ed: John Cage’s Approach to Start­ing the Dif­fi­cult Cre­ative Process

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve fea­tured ancient wind instru­ments going back 9,000, 18,000, even 43,000 years. Just this month, archae­o­log­i­cal research has just added a new item to this ven­er­a­ble line­up: a set of 12,000-year-old flutes made from the bones of birds. “The instru­ments are among the old­est in the world and, accord­ing to the researchers, rep­re­sent the first to be found in the Lev­ant, the region that fos­tered the first stages of the Neolith­ic Rev­o­lu­tion approx­i­mate­ly 12,000 years ago,” writes Dis­cov­er’s Sam Wal­ters. They’re cre­ations of the Natu­fi­an civ­i­liza­tion, which “bridged the dif­fer­ence between the for­ag­ing of the Pale­olith­ic peri­od and the agri­cul­ture of the Neolith­ic,” and which was “the first to adopt a seden­tary lifestyle in the Lev­ant.”

The bones were unearthed in Eynan-Mal­la­ha, which is part of mod­ern-day north­ern Israel’s Hula Val­ley. It was “dur­ing a recent exam­i­na­tion of the arti­facts,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Tere­sa Nowakows­ki, that “sci­en­tists noticed that sev­en had strange fea­tures — like fin­ger holes and mouth­pieces — that would have allowed them to func­tion as musi­cal instru­ments.”

You can read in detail about the dis­cov­ery and study of these ancient instru­ments in the arti­cle pub­lished ear­li­er this month in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports. Nowakows­ki quotes its co-author Tal Sim­mons as say­ing that “the sound they pro­duce is very sim­i­lar to that of two spe­cif­ic birds of prey that were hunt­ed by the peo­ple liv­ing at the site where they were dis­cov­ered, name­ly the kestrel and the spar­rowhawk.”

Only the most bird-ori­ent­ed among us could eas­i­ly imag­ine what that sounds like. But they’d sure­ly also be inter­est­ed to hear the Natu­fi­an flute itself, and how close­ly it, in fact, mim­ics those calls. The video above offers about a minute of the sound of a repli­ca, the cre­ation of which would have involved a con­sid­er­able amount of small-detail work, giv­en the tiny size of the bird bones from which the orig­i­nals were craft­ed. “Though there were plen­ty of big­ger bird bones pre­served at the site, which would have been bet­ter for turn­ing into instru­ments as well as for play­ing, the Natu­fi­ans specif­i­cal­ly select­ed small­er bones that pro­duced a screechy sound sim­i­lar to a bird of prey,” writes Wal­ters. They thus cre­at­ed a use­ful hunt­ing tool — but they also opened to their civ­i­liza­tion a whole new dimen­sion of music.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute — the World’s Old­est Playable Instru­ment — Get Played Again

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Hear the Sound Of Endan­gered Birds Get Turned Into Elec­tron­ic Music

Hear a Pre­his­toric Conch Shell Musi­cal Instru­ment Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years

Google Uses Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Map Thou­sands of Bird Sounds Into an Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Almost all of ancient lit­er­a­ture is lost to us, as clas­si­cal-his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan explains in a video pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. But we have even less ancient music, giv­en that for­m’s essen­tial ephemer­al­i­ty as well as the not-incon­sid­er­able fact that the ancients did­n’t have tape recorders. Still, that has­n’t stopped Ryan from describ­ing to us what music would have sound­ed like in the hey­day of the Roman Empire in the video above, for his chan­nel Told in Stone. Not only does he intro­duce the instru­ments played by the pop­u­lar musi­cians of ancient Rome, he also evokes the atmos­phere of ancient Roman con­certs, which had their own “equiv­a­lent of rock stars, noto­ri­ous for sell­ing out the­aters, spark­ing riots, and talk­ing back to emper­ors.”

They did all of this by mas­ter­ing what look to us like sim­ple tools indeed. The dom­i­nant exam­ples of these were the cithara, a kind of lyre ampli­fied by a sound box; the tib­ia or aulos, whose two pipes could be played at once (thus pro­duc­ing “a flut­ter­ing coun­ter­point that audi­ences found wild­ly excit­ing”); and the hydraulis or water organ, the rare instru­ment that could be heard even over a loud crowd.

Though Roman musi­cians could be vir­tu­osic in their tech­nique, some still con­sid­er them “hacks, con­tent to bor­row Greek music with­out any­thing sub­stan­tial to it.” Ryan acknowl­edges that in music, as in cer­tain oth­er realms, Romans did indeed pick up where the Greeks left off, but “over time they evolved both a dis­tinc­tive musi­cal cul­ture and dis­tinc­tive tastes in musi­cal spec­ta­cle.”

Despite the afore­men­tioned lack of tapes — to say noth­ing of CDs, MP3 play­ers, or stream­ing ser­vices — music was “every­where in ancient Rome.” One would hear it at reli­gious rit­u­als, sac­ri­fices includ­ed; at fes­ti­vals, where hymns were sung in hon­or of the gods; dur­ing glad­i­a­to­r­i­al com­bat, when the organs “roared as men and beasts bat­tled in the blood­stained sands”; in pri­vate gar­dens and din­ing rooms; on street cor­ners and plazas, full of the ancient ver­sion of buskers; often the the­ater and less often at musi­cal con­tests judged by the emper­or him­self. But it was the most skilled soloists who became renowned across the empire and “inspired some­thing like Beat­le­ma­nia, dri­ving aris­to­crat­ic ladies to fight for cast-off plec­trums and lyre strings.” For those besieged Roman rock stars, alas, it was a cou­ple thou­sand years too ear­ly to make a Bea­t­les-style retreat into the stu­dio.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is “100% Accu­rate”

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

The Evo­lu­tion of Music: 40,000 Years of Music His­to­ry Cov­ered in 8 Min­utes

Hear the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

A Street Musi­cian Plays Pink Floyd’s “Time” in Front of the 1,900-Year-Old Pan­theon in Rome

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.