murmurations

How much do our culturally-acquired preconceptions of of music shape our listening? It's pretty clear, I think, that our socialisation has a lot to do with the kind of beliefs we hold about music (this needs to be the case for any notion of 'music' to get off the ground, since not all human societies have this specific notion). As we grow up within our societies, we're taught explicitly or implicitly what music is made up of in terms of both its creation and realisation. So we learn (at least in Western society) that music is created usually by individuals through the use of a score and is then realised through certain objects called instruments when humans interact with those objects in a certain way. These ideas aren't fixed in the essence of the concept 'music'; they are socially-legitimised beliefs constituting the 'right' view of music, a collection of shared norms of (listening and creating) behaviour. So when you hear the sound of piano n...