What is good music?

What is good music? Give this a thought when preparing a music game meeting. Often people's preferences are due to familiarity or identity and remain unconscious. If your participants deliberately treat some music as better than other, here is what might guide them:

Wabi-sabi

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True beauty should nurture imperfection and seek for incompleteness. These are the features that can truly show the impermanence, suffering and emptiness of existence.

Religion

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Worthy of appreciation is everything that contributes to the greater glory of a higher-level worship target.

Proficiency

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Good music can't be done by anyone. Only the leaders among hard-working professionals acquire sufficient skill. If perfection is easily achieved, it's cheating.

Authenticity

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You need to be a real artist if you want to make good music. Your personality is as important as your sounds. Never compromise, especially as for making your music more appealing to masses.

Interpenetration

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Music will represent Life if you don't see your responsibility in 'making' but in 'accepting'. Don't force attention, but rather see and hear many things at once, including the background.

Communication

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Good music is the one that let's you connect. It exists only as a two-way relation. You composed good music if it let's you reach the audience with your message.

Depth

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The best case scenario is when no two people can characterize a piece the same way. It reveals different things to different players and listeners. Irreducible music.

Dance

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Good music needs to make me move. My appreciation shouldn't stop at ears, but should involve the whole body. Dancing and music are like halves of an orange and one is incomplete without another.

Construction

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Good music is weaved from many different elements into an intricate structure. The structure is formal in nature and its complexietes are to be explored.

Innovation

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Music is based on creativity. It is not good if it only repeats what already has been done before. Break the boundaries! New ideas and originality are key things to praise in all arts.

Delivery

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When we perform a song or a piece of music that connects with the heart of the listener, we create "good" music.

Tradition

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You form a community with past generations of musicians. Dive into all the gathered wisdom to master it, and then properly make what you attain from your musical ancestors into a sound reality.

Emotions

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Good music needs to make me feel something. The more, the better. The range of these experiences might be very broad, but they need to be intense.

Song

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Music is good if it has beautiful/wise/relatable lyrics. It's all about them! If there is music without words, it lets us imagine our own poetry to it.

Well-being

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Good music needs to make me feel calm and relaxed. This will help me to achieve my goals, get in contact with myself and find happiness and success in daily life.

Economics

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Good (by definition) is something people are willing to pay for. Music used to be a good investment, now the demand drops because of competing entertainment media.


The above "definitions" of good music are in a random order. We are not here to promote any musical paradigm.

If you're a facilitator, be aware of your preferences towards music and to games. Prepare a dose of calm distance for the situation when a participant considers their favorite approach to music as "the essential quality" that defines music itself.

You can add potential approaches here (start with a title):

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