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We often think of music as a distinct art form, separate from literature, dance, and visual art. We often assume that music exists only in the realm of sound-the sounds we hear on radio, on recordings, or over the Internet. Before the advent of recording and broadcasting, the experience of music was much more closely connected with other art forms. The musicians were present, for one thing, generating sounds by visible physical actions. Audiences of opera or music theater experience the integration of the arts: music, literature, dance, and visual arts are combined, and the experience is inherently multidisdplinary. Many international art forms are similarly integrated. One can look to the intimate connections among dance, music, and visual arts in Africa and Indonesia, to name just two important world cultures.
During the twentieth century, possibly as a result of recording and playback technologies, sound came to be seen as an independent medium, separate from the others, somewhat abstract. Two general approaches to the experience of music in this context can be described as background listening and foreground listening. Background music-or background sound-functions primarily to support narrative and expressive content. The instrumental parts of songs often illustrate the content and meaning of the lyrics, for example. With the advent of recording, the role of background sound expanded, with almost-unnoticed music accompanying a shopping trip, creating a specific mood, and, some believe, predisposing a listener toward making purchases. Background uses of recorded sound also include music for such performing arts as theater, opera, and dance, in which expressive music accompanies the portrayal of specific emotional states; and the soundtracks of movies, in which the quality of the music indicates suspense to a viewer and the exciting parts of a narrative are matched with agitated-sounding music. A more recent form of background sound is heard in visual art installations where prerecorded voices tell stories or otherwise provide explanation or context for the visual material. In all these examples the actual sound is secondary to the story that is being told: in some sense, the music assists in the communication of extramusical content.
Foreground music, by contrast, maintains the primary emphasis on the actual sound heard by the listener. Foreground music requires a more aware approach to listening, an...