What are Songs? What is Music? | Philosophy Tube ft. This Exists

1. 

   @assgrass

   December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

   songs are a social construct

2. 

   @Ulitemyfyre

   December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

   Who controls the song though, the writer or the singer? Songs are usually from multiple people.

3. 

   @kimcoleeppling8177

   December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

   {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}{{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}} = 4
   – Set Theorists

4. 

   @Utomneian

   December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

   this makes me think of how alienated i get when i hear DJs play remixed versions of songs i like. i mean, i don't mind some double drops and switchbacks here and there, but i also feel like some DJs don't do well enough to maintain the original identity of the songs for live play. though this is a personal preference, i realize a lot, if not most of EDM/Dubstep/Trap fans don't really mind.

5. 

   @zakesters

   December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

   These are all pretty bad, honestly: just the same Essentialist idea re-stated three different ways. All say that there are instances being compared to some authoritative thing, and only disagree about what the authoritative thing is ( viz. a Platonic Form, a list of parameters for inclusion in a set, or the author's arbitrary pronouncement.) It seems to me a more appropriate aesthetics for a Post-Modern age would take into account, say, the role of the audience at the concert (as well as past and future audiences, listeners at home, popular and academic critics, advertisers, propagandists, philosophers with YouTube shows, and all the rest of it) in constructing the song's identity.

   However, as to the question "who gets the credit?" it might be more salutary to think of Bowie (and this is speaking as a University-trained musician/composer,) as the man who originated the recipe for a certain dish: the outcome of the recipe in the hands of various cooks can vary considerably (though less so in an age of recorded mass media,) and while we can never be certain whether the dish in question really is that dish, we can at least know what recipe it was the cook was attempting to follow, whether he deviated from it or was faithful to it. Either way, the recipe and the dish are two different things–the latter is not a token of the former, but a consequence of it.

6. 

   @KarolaTea

   December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

   So when and why did we decide that an image can only exist once (eg. The Mona Lisa) and any copy is 'just a copy' but a song can be copied and reperformed and is still the same thing sorta? Surely we could do the same and point towards the first original recording of each song, especially back in the time of physically scratching/punching/magnetising?
   The issue with the "it's whatever the artist wants it to be"… what happens once the artist is dead? Does the song just always stay what the 'last will' of the artist was? Also, what about super old stuff, folk songs that nobody really knows who wrote them, there's no 'original' sheet music or even lyrics written down, just passed down the generations, until eventually there's a wikipedia article listing 10 different versions with further local modifications and at least 3 spoof lyrics?

7. 

   @emeraldkat2167

   December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

   So I am (very slowly) going through all your back catalog of videos after thoroughly enjoying the last year or so. And while I know this is quite a long time than the original discussion, I immediately thought of an interesting example:
   Radiohead's Bloom.

   This song will never sound the same when hearing different performances, even by the original band. Sure, they all have the same lyrics, but the instrumental parts vary. It was written in such a way that each section of the song is in parts (this will become more clear shortly). And regardless of which instrument is played, it is left to each musician to decide which pieces of that section to play, what order (if any), and how many times to play them. For instance, the intro for lead guitar, I believe, was sectioned into 15 parts of varying bar lengths. In one performance, there are almost infinite possibilities of what they might decide to play.

   So what makes each version of Bloom, Bloom? Is it just the lyrics? Is it the feeling you get when hearing it? The weirdest part of it all is, you know its Bloom every time. It's almost inescapable because it sounds so unique and yet so beautiful.

8. 

   @riotgrrrl8807

   December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

   Ah, good they took out the misogyny, I didn't know about that. After all Horovitz is married to Kathleen Hanna 🙂

9. 

   @LiquidDemocracyNH

   December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

   Man whatever happened to this exists?, amiright?

10. 

    @James69813

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    An asteroid hits Earth. Earth no longer exists. Any memory of music is gone. (Sad day for me, but…) No gravity to let sound exist even… I say all this hating this very idea, it goes against everything in my soul. For the same reason, I can't relate when people hate on music because it's six months old. In my mind, songs are concrete almost, they are a "thing" that not even dislike can destroy; Friday by Rebecca Black still "exists". I tend to dislike fad pop music, as it seems to just be a product like hot dogs to be consumed and forgotten. But I think I am the one who is wrong about music. It is temporary. I like to think of music as eternal, but I think I'm wrong. Even concrete won't exist after the end of the world (except maybe in chunks that float through space… silently).

11. 

    @selsickr

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Hi,

    I like your channel a lot and it gives me a lot of inspiration.Thanks.

    I am a neoplatonist and I think that it answers all the questions.

    There is just one ultimate song-form which is part of the One. This absolute song being part of the One also has an absolute pleasure and it is from this that we get pleasure when listerning to it.All other songs are copies that are more or less exact. In Plato's terms the songs are copies of copies or the songs of today are copies of copies of copies …
    As the real thing is impossible for us to obtain these copies are all that we have . David Bowie has the merit that his song which is about the closest we can get came down through him , just like your friend said.This would be like someone finding a great treasure that already exists . Assuming the right laws the treasure is his. An ordinary person cannot connect to the forms so David Bowie did a great service to humanity in bringing down his version of the perfect song with all the imperfections that it might have. His imperfect song copy is his.

    I interpret even Epicurus that real pleasure is only pleasure derived from Good. He said that it is better to look for someone to eat his meal with than to look for more to eat. He also said that the happiest day of his life was when he was dying from a kidney stone.This is probably one of the most painfull deaths.Plato said that someone who does bad is "sick" and that it is better to suffer an injustice than to do one.Meister Eckhart and Alfarabi both said that it is not enough to do good but one must be good and want to do good. My interpretation of Epicurus is that he was talking about someone on this level . Later generations made a mistake with his intentions.

12. 

    @leocolless7043

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Well considering Platonism, there would be the version of perfection then every other version of, kinda like tuning into a radio station.

13. 

    @Pfhorrest

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    There isn't really a meaningful distinction between creation and discovery. There is an infinite abstract space of possible ideas, and "creativity" is identifying previously unknown ideas in that space and showing how they relate to other, better-known ideas. Much like how discovering a new place involves being able to show where on a map it is relative to places you already know. Randomly cobbling together some truly arbitrary idea does identify some place in that abstract space, but that's analogous to drawing a point on a scrap of paper, unconnected to any map, and saying that you have mapped the location of a new place: where does that scrap of paper connect to the map of known places? That's the important question. And the lack of answer to the analogous question with regards to creativity is why just spitting out randomness doesn't seem creative. It's new, but it's completely detached from the old, and it's the connection between the old and new that constitutes the creativity, or discovery.

14. 

    @evelienheerens2879

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    I believe there is a distinction, between the song as a blueprint for performed music, as it is written, and a specific performance/recording rendering of that design. I think attributing other dimensions or supernatural entities to the concept of these things is pointless. Concepts (labels) exist within our minds. That is the place where they have meaning, within the framework of our thoughts. Believing that everyone shares the same framework is a fallacy. While many of these frameworks are vastly similar, because otherwise we could not communicate about these concepts to each other, there are always minute to large differences.

    So concepts, are an invention of the mind and philosophy tends to treat them as a thing that physically exists, and even derive conclusions about them or come up with metaphysical constructs that explain them. Doing that would require us not to think about specific concepts like music, but instead to pursue this from the angle of it's underlying medium, consciousness. If concepts are to be understood, and thoughts are to be understood then we must first understand the underlying framework within which these things exist, our consciousness or the mind itself.

15. 

    @Kram1032

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    I'm leaning out a bit much here: I don't know that this is actually how it works. However, perhaps songs are dependent types? What I imagine that to mean (and I might be completely misusing a technical term here) is that the type of any given song may depend on extra variables. It might depend on space and time, so it only really is a thing in the context where it makes sense. It might also depend on the performer or specific performance. Not sure if there is a problem with circularity there, however.
    Roughly, the way I vaguely picture it, that would allow us to keep the notion of Songs As Types, but it would kind of cop out of many of the questions you posed with a simple "It depends." The song is what ever you care about as being part of the song right now. If you mean all the performances ever, that is permitted. If you mean all the performances by a specific person, that's permitted too. It all depends on which variables you specify or keep generic.
    That poses the question, however, what its most generic/bare-bones form would be. Like, could you just keep every variable unspecified, thereby recovering the purely Platonic version of the type? Or is there a minimum of variables that are necessary.
    I feel like a minimum should be necessary. For instance, if nobody knows the song anymore (or yet) and no records exist of it at all, does it really exist? Perhaps not. So I think the broadest you can get is the collection of all its performances and other representations such as memories or sheet music. All variants and performers included.
    If you object to that on the grounds of "this version is so different it has got basically nothing at all to do with the song I think of when I talk about this song", my response to that would then be "Ok, sure, that's fine. We just have to insert more restrictive values for the various variables and that's totally valid."
    In this view, each discussion of what a song is would require context on what we actually care about when asking that question in the first place. That might seem tedious but I think most of the time it's gonna be clear enough from context and experience what's meant. And when it's not, it's a good practice to be clear about that anyway.

16. 

    @ryanthibbs1317

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Sorry for the new-agey gibberish, but I think it's trippier than that… Just because the artist can change it doesn't mean it isn't eternal, but rather as we hurdle through time and space the artist's relationship with the transcendent form in question (the song he/she discovered) has to be expressed differently in order to re-capture the original truth (or sometimes, to come closer to the original truth)

17. 

    @LibbyStephenson

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    RIP David Bowie

18. 

    @noahboss9618

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    i think some synthesis is in order here

    the artist creates/discovers the first "token" of the type, which becomes the "official" token, and the artist can subsequently change which token is the "official" token. but others can create other tokens of that type

    I also think that a token can be of more than one type at once (mashups and remixes for example).

    creation and discovery are synonymous in the situation of realizing in spacetime the first (known) token of some type

19. 

    @vitorschroederdosanjos6539

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    I think the music belongs to the public and it's the public realization of that music (aka when the pubic acknowledges the music) that a music is still the same that's why mumbling it still counts

    To back up that it's only the acknowledgement of the public that counts I'd like to say that musics are to be heard that way everyone that has already heard a music is the "keeper" of the music which exists only in the persons mind

    For example if I showed you Beethoven's 5 and told you it was the Star Wars theme and you had never heard either, you'd believe me

20. 

    @fidi324

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    oh god this video stinks. how can you say its not an abstract object while only providing the counter of it being changeable? that just means another abstract object very similar to the previous was discovered! i swear youre like the behind the meme of the philosophy world.

21. 

    @marcodallapiazza1517

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    And what about the different "variances" you get on different playback? I mean, every setup give us different/colored sounds. From earbuddy to pro loudspeaker to flat mediums. All of them are included on the set?

22. 

    @3dfeldt

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Also very interesting is the question: what is music? Is music the imaginary library with every possible song ever written and yet to be written by humans in it? You could see it as that when a person writes an entire new song that sounds like no other song known to man, that song just were there in this library waiting to be discovered, rather than this person "creating" it out of thin air. All the notes already exist.
    Also what are the boundaries of what could be a song? Songs are notes played with a certain amount of length and time between each other. If you played a note of a melody now and play the next a year later, and the next a decade later, could that be called a song?

23. 

    @ThreeNPlusOne

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    0:19 Moon Men plays

24. 

    @songsbymichaelroberts9078

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    There is, of course, the question of language. And, in this case, there are two concurrent languages in what makes a "song" as represented in all the examples in the video. The first component is lyrics, which is less abstract than the second component, which is music. Words are understood by just about everyone, ( at least on a basic level) and music is deeply abstract. So, when we talk about a what is essential in a song, it doesn't make sense to treat these two components as equally abstractable (perhaps a made-up word). Also, the pieces referenced in the video are pop songs, which are almost never meant to be note-for-note representations. They are meant to be malleable, and are most often not "fixed" in written musical language. For those who understand pop music, La Bamba is a C chord for 2 beats, and F chord for two beats, and a G chord for four beats, repeated over and over. There is also, a melody and a lyric, of course. But if you consider the harmony and the accompaniment, nowhere are you obligated to play those chords in a particular voicing, form, tempo or rhythm. In fact, you are free to substitute your own related chords, and to make variations in the melody (variations in the melody is what most people think of as "interpretation"–at least in pop music. But it is really re-composition). A song by Schubert, by contrast, has every note (including how quickly, loudly and fluidly it's played) strictly dictated. You can change the piano part of La Bamba, and it's still La Bamba. However, if you change a single note of Schubert's Erlkonig, you have denied Schubert's definition of his own work. It stands to reason, I believe, that the it's much more possible to attempt to define a song that is fully composed and fixed in written form (and is written with the wish and expectation by it's creator not to be changed–that's why it's written down with such precision), than it is for a pop or rock song. Perhaps, then, the subject of the video really is, "What are POP songs".

25. 

    @neymow2242

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    I think it all depends on the performers intention. If you improvise over a song it's still the song, right?

26. 

    @arvidsteel6557

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Hello Philosophy Tube, I see you made this video in a world where Bowie is still alive, that's nice.

27. 

    @renzpublico1157

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Please help me define Musical piece

28. 

    @AmyNaylorMusic

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    I've found this channel 3 years after completing my A level philosophy… So I'm a bit late to the party, but you sir, rock!

29. 

    @RaT90909

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Every sound is music.
    Which sounds we decide to call music are decided based on previous sounds that we have heard before and that we were told that are music, which is basically a social construct.
    If we could build a time a machine and listen to the music of the far future we would probably think that is just noise, because we wouldn't have gone through the process of historic social constructionism to accept those sounds as music.

    Anyway, that's my opinion, and I apologize if the text is not very comprehensive since english is not my native language.

30. 

    @RaT90909

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    "Plato is always wrong." – Nietzsche

31. 

    @TylerDurden-nm4rv

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    No No an artist can't truly change a song they can reproduce an edited version but that doesn't change the original version frozen in time

32. 

    @TylerDurden-nm4rv

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    songs are a pattern of sound, the same could be said of the mona lisa or any other work of art they are just patterns of color or stone or whatever. to reproduce simpy repeat the pattern, so in other words every version of David bowies songs you've heard are like photos of the mona lisa.

33. 

    @flamencoprof

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Is this a case of the limitations of language? Just because we have a word "song" it doesn't oblige everything in the world to fit or not fit our vaguely artificial category it proposes to name. Can't we accept that a song is not a thing, real or unreal, it is a general idea with fuzzy edges?

34. 

    @Patralgan

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Just a thought: maybe it would be good to have people be born to captivity and otherwise bad conditions (in relation to what a privileged person with home etc. lives) and live their whole lives there but also give them just enough things to enjoy so they would be adequately happy. Now since they don't know any better, the entertainment and other things the person absolutely needs don't have to be anything remarkable.

35. 

    @rexdxiv

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Songs are ideas. Music, is a language by which intelligence can express itself. Music is a universal language. Songs can be complex ideas, but non the less, ideas. Much of human intelligence is expressed in music.

36. 

    @sunnyrainyday6820

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Songs are a group of sounds that bring forth certain forms (ideas) that a person is to let imprint on themselves or reflect upon. The forms brought forth are decided by the musician, remixer, or whoever else uses it. For example a happy song is and I listen to it to be happy the artist decided it to be so and it is but a remixer remixes it an tries to make it a song the creates sadness but instead the song makes the feeling of hope. This example shows that songs are mere tools used to inspire the feeling of forms or ideas within us the artist has succeeded in his song for me but the remixer has failed to use the song to create sadness the song is the recognizable group of sounds that the remixer started with even if I can't recognize it, it is that song-it is that tool. If I use a hammer to hammer a nail and the hammer maker Intended that it has happened and if a person makes a pick axe out of it but I use it as a sledgehammer then I am still using a basic object it's just been improv

37. 

    @inego101

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    channel of the music expert dude?

38. 

    @SodaliteSabre

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Box drawing seems like it's just about always trouble. Would applying fuzziness here make anything easier?

39. 

    @gda295

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    not to forget views of R Scruton …song [esp modern] is a chronically compromised format of music…

40. 

    @Albeit_Jordan

    December 23, 2025 at 7:33 am

    Stating that songwriting is more of a process of discovery than it is creating makes a lot more sense to me. I mean, those chords and notes already existed before you started trying to write a song- you just discovered that if you put them in a particular order, they sound a certain way.

    Redundancy 101

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