Music is an art configuration in which the medium is total organized in time. Common fundamentals of popular are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), Stock Music rhyme (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture

20th-century composer John Cage disagreed with the notion that music must consist of pleasant, discernible melodies. Instead, he argued that any sounds we can hear can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound." According to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, "the border between music and clamor is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus.… By all accounts there is no peerless and intercultural universal thought defining what folk might be, except that it is 'sound through time'."