On Musical Sound

In the early 2000s I owned a Fender Stratocaster knockoff, a Korg AX3000G multi-effects unit, and played through a Stranger amplifier. To me, it sounded great. Looking back, I cannot tell you if it really sounded good; it’s just that I didn’t know any better. I did hundreds of gigs at pubs and clubs with my band and never thought about the quality of musical sound. Our priorities were different.

Later, much later, I began to think about sound itself. In my context, musical sound has always been tied to the guitar, both acoustic and electric. Over time I noticed that what I called “tone” was not only in the instrument but also in the volume, the room, and my ears’ expectations. Now, at forty, I feel I have a slightly better sense of what sounds are “musical” to me.

To me, musical sound is relational. At its base it is the relation between time and beat, the relation between two notes, the relation between sustain and decay. These are the fundamental axes: rhythm, interval, and duration. They give music its skeleton, the frame on which all else rests. Beyond this, musical sound becomes harder to pin down. Timbre and texture resist measurement; they belong as much to perception as to vibration. The shimmer of a cymbal, the rasp of a bowed string, the thickness of a chord are musical not because of what they are in themselves, but because of how they appear in relation to our listening.

And then there is expression and meaning: the affective dimensions of sound. A slow vibrato can suggest sadness, a sudden accent urgency, a swelling chord triumph. Expression is how sound gestures outward; meaning is how it is received. Together they show how vibration becomes significance.

Musical sound is the meeting point of tone, volume, and space, always filtered through the expectations we carry in our heads. Tone lives partly in circuitry, wood, strings, or tubes, but it is also shaped by how loud the sound is allowed to be. A guitar amplifier may promise a particular voice, but that promise is fulfilled only when the speaker moves enough air to let the sound bloom. At lower levels, the tone may remain pleasant, even beautiful, but it never quite arrives in its fullness.

Volume is the threshold at which harmonics, resonance, and the sensitivity of the ear come together. Beyond that point, notes feel rounder, chords richer. Below it, what we hear can feel like a sketch of the sound we imagine. And then there is the room. No sound is ever self-contained. Surfaces absorb, corners resonate, reflections colour what we hear. The same amplifier, unchanged, can feel like a different instrument from one room to the next. What we call “our tone” is always in conversation with the walls around us.

I, for instance, am particularly shy when it comes to volume. I try to be considerate of others. I play softly, muted, my concern always not to inconvenience. The truth is that I will never make a great musician, because my concerns are not where they should be. In Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, Goopy is banished from his village not only because he sings poorly, but because he sings loudly. That, perhaps, is what makes the musician: not politeness, but devotion to craft, inconsiderate of others if need be. My restraint is not just temperament but training, the outcome of a culture that prizes consideration over excess. Yet what counts as “too much” or “not enough” is never fixed. It depends on the ears around us, the archive of listening through which we are judged.

When I was a teenager, I would listen to Nirvana’s Nevermind on the radio at absurd volumes. My grandfather, a very learned man who loved music deeply, would be greatly irritated. It was not that he disliked music, but perhaps because he could not recognise it as music. His archive was full of other tonalities, other rhythms, other measures of musicality. Mine, at that moment, was being written by distortion, angst, and the energy of electric guitars. Musical sound is always heard through such an archive: the accumulated repertoire of what we have learned to hear as music, both personal and collective.

And so I chased that sound — what I thought was musical — and tried to manifest it in my own playing. I realised that musical sound might be about the touch and feel of the instrument itself. What matters is the relation between what we hear in our heads and what our fingers draw from strings, wood, and air. This is the frightening instrumentality of music: that imagination can be made audible, that sound can be sculpted into form. Like the carpenter who finds a table hidden in a block of wood, or the sculptor who chisels an idol from stone, we sculpt musical sound out of vibration. Each note is less a thing produced than a moment of discovery and the recognition of form within noise.

Modern media tells us what “tone” is and what musical sound should be. Thousands of gear-demo channels on social platforms, the so-called “experts” of tone, instruct us in what to desire and what to dismiss. It is convincing because we all participate in it: comparing, commenting, buying. In this loop, musical sound becomes a commodity, a product to be packaged and sold, whether as an amplifier, a plugin, or a preset. Yet if you return to the old records from which this “expertise” draws its authority, you notice something different. You notice that we do not all hear the same thing. What I find musical in a recording may not be what you find musical, even though we are listening to the same vibrations etched into vinyl or stored in bits. The canonised “tone” is less a fact than a persuasion. This is the paradox of musical sound today: it is both relentlessly marketed as a universal object and irreducibly subjective in experience.

Today I am, sadly, only a bedroom musician. I sit at home and play my guitar. It still brings me joy, though the joy is quieter now, less about volume or performance and more about intimacy. I feel I am closer than ever to replicating the sound I hear in my head, closer to aligning imagination with touch. And yet I wonder if that is the same as making music. Perhaps music only fully exists in the moment it leaves the room of practice and enters the ears of another. Between those poles — between product and perception, between archive and imagination — we continue to chase sounds that may never fully exist, except in the fleeting recognition that, for this moment, this is music.