What is Musicality?

Mapman,

Foot tapping and other involuntary body reactions are a good indication of musicality. Of course, you can tap your foot or sway to the music consciously. I am referring to when you catch yourself with your body moving without having directed it to do so.

If you read the original post, he wants to know what makes a system good!

OP stated that: "Appreciating good music is not only a matter of how good your equipment is. It is a measure of how musical a person you are."

He was not asking about good equipment, but rather stating fact that some people are very musical by nature and don't need great sound to enjoy music. I'm not one of them - being unable to have ANY enjoyment listening to symphony orchestra on tiny pocket transistor radio. In fact it would annoy me knowing what I'm loosing. That's logical brain speaking. I wish I could turn it off.

"some people are very musical by nature and don't need great sound to enjoy music"

Yes, its a very interesting and valid point.

Just one more reason why pursuit of the absolute sound is mostly a technical endeavor of little interest to many music lovers. TEchnical perfection helps but is not a pre-requisite for enjoying music. It can put you in a better position perhaps to enable enjoyment if needed, but alone accomplishes nothing. You need a "musical person" in order to cohabit effectively.

How hard is it really to enjoy music? Aren't we all programmed for that to some extent, each perhaps a bit differently? Hence all the variety in how we all go about to achieve the desired results.

Sabai, I stumbled unto this thread only now unfortunately, being intreaged about your use of magnets on a new thread of yours.
To my mind a system is felt to be musical, if it allows a listener to be deeply touched by what he hears. A system, which lets "the soul of the music" come through. A musical person is generally also a music lover and not necessarily just an audiophile. The two do not always and at all occasion necessarily coincide and this fact makes the definition of musicality difficult in our context here. A system itself can never be musical. It is just a collection of machines. Nor can the software, we feed our machines with be musical. It is rather in the interplay of software, machine and ear that we deem one system musical and another not.
I find the fact interesting, that even with a system which we on one day experience as musical, on another day with the same music playing we find as sounding awful. So there is more to it, than just "ear".
The high end industry strives in part due to the fact, that we often enough question our systems. Is it really as good as we think? Shouldn't we rather get product B, because our product A does somehow not keep its promise? And so on and on ad nauseam. Compare that to our going to a live concert. Unless we sit in a really lousy seat, would we ever criticize the sound as unmusical? The interpretation of a given piece, yes of course, but the sound itself? Hardly, I would contend, unless again, we are seated in an acoustical unfortunate place. So, live music, even if it is perhaps not pleasing to us, IS by definition musical. And hence I am thinking, that perhaps the late Harry Pearson was right, when he tried - at least in his beginnings - to judge systems in comparing them to what he called "the absolute sound", namely that of live music. And yes, to be a good critic of how a given system sounds, you must necessarily be a "musical person" who, if he is a music lover, would also enjoy music from whatever source it comes from. If the source is more important than the music, I would call that person an audiophile, a sound lover, translated, but not a true lover of music. Just my two cents.....

By the way, I brought up the same question about a decade ago with a lot of very thoughtful replies to my thread.
Here is one, which I consider one of the most thought provoking and certainly should be recalled here:

04-28-01: Ozfly
Detlof, this has been an inspiring thread. IMHO, and borrowing liberally from Katharina, Frogman and others, musicality cannot exist without, first, the highest level of artistry. Whether the art is in physics (Djjd) or the creation and performance of music, the artist must have a natural emotional and intuitive understanding of the craft. We've all heard it -- it's what keeps us going and stirs our souls: The performances that are so seamless that is seems the artist is transparent and only something greater, the music, exists. Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughn come to mind in the blues genre. Once that happens, our amps and speakers are called on to deliver it in our homes. I don’t know whether the delivery of musicality occurs because of accurate nth harmonic reproductions, the accurate capture of natural echoes, a totally black background or just the right soundstaging. But it does require enough subtlety to capture the nuances that differentiate the great performances. Presumably, the audio reviewers use the music that stirs their souls when they test systems. So, since the musicality was already there in the performance being evaluated, the system can be tested for the faithful reproduction of the subtleties that define great musicality. As many suggest, it is simply a matter of whether you feel you are there -- you are sharing in the mastery of music. Maybe I'm rambling, but a system can get in the way of musicality but it cannot reproduce it if it isn't in the performance first. Great performances are differentiated from average ones by great differences in emotion and talent that are funneled to us in many small ways. The accurate capture of those small things is what counts. Since we are dealing in nuances and each system has tiny imperfections, we are guaranteed a life of tweaking and searching as audiophiles. But, it’s a happy search and there are a lot of gems found along the way. Again Detlof, thanks (I’ve pretty much left “musicality” linked to my emotional response – now, I’m wondering whether there aren’t some things that can be grasped more analytically so I can improve my system more intelligently. Not to worry, I can’t give up the emotional response :-))
Ozfly (System | Threads | Answers | This Thread)