(Hell, artists were exploring "noise as music" in the 1920's, even earlier... a century later, and it's really time we stop pretending we can pin down and define "art" as a mathematical or scientific phenomenon. Art is fundamentally a social phenomenon, driven specifically by an inherent counter-cultural attitude, and therefore by definition it naturally evolves beyond any specific description we attempt to apply to it. By that I mean that art is always trying to break its own rules. You could argue that good art, what we consider ground-breaking work, at any point in history, is specifically that which is not described by previous attempts to define a set of rules.)
I guess my point is that at soon as you use the word "music" you are making a value judgement, particularly if you are categorizing it. Example from the first paragraph of the article: "Monotonic music is boring." I would consider this viewpoint at least 50 years out of date. I can find you hundreds of potential counter-examples, and hundreds of people who will disagree with each other on the "boring" part. Add to this the fact that it doesn't even matter what hundreds or millions of people think; in "art" popular opinion does not always line up with the "connaisseurs" or academic thought. More people probably dislike Phillip Glass than like him, but it doesn't matter: he's still a world-renowned composer, regardless of what people think of his work.
I understand the viewpoint here, but pointing out mathematical structure in music / timbre / tonal sounds is not exactly new and we should stop being amazed everytime a new mathematical feature is discovered, because fundamentally the rules are not formal, and naturally subject to a large amount of ambiguity and interpretation. Finding expression of mathematics in music is sort of akin to astrology--you can find lots of correlations, but at the end of the day you won't find much causality. Imho a physicist or mathematician doing "armchair musicology" is just as bad as a musicologist doing "armchair physics."
The closest we can get, scientifically, is the psycological or psychophysical viewpoint-- why do certain combinations of harmonics sound a certain way to us that is distinct from others. This is of course an on-going topic of research, and it has biological / evolutionary reasons as much as anything. The mathematics is mostly coincidental, although convenient mathematical relationships may be enablers (catalysts) to development of perception mechanisms because they imply convenient forms for decoding mechanics. (e.g. cochlear membrane as a Fourier transform).
Sorry but I think you are blowing this way out of proportion. The article is simply trying to talk about the sound technical term "noise" vs. the technical term "music".
This is not art critiqe, this is not what you learn in art school. This is what you learn if you want to be a soundengineer.
So either you haven't read the article at all or you are completely missing it's point.
I'm not arguing that the content of the article is incorrect, I'm arguing that the title and first paragraph of are misleading, and this didn't particularly encourage me to continue reading. Positioning the words "music" and "noise" as opposites is fundamentally incorrect. Since the article is about music theory, the author should know better. Anyways, I'm getting downvoted so I'll just give up my argument; it's okay for someone to be wrong about music but not about programming languages or physics. Noted.
I don't think the title is wrong or for that matter misleading and to be honest I don't think you thought that either. You just though the article was about something else.
If you really think the title was misleading then why not say that?
We can define art as some function of popular perception. Then we can treat individual critics' opinions as noisy sensors and get a pretty good idea of whether something is art that way. Then we can throw some ML at the problem :)
(Hell, artists were exploring "noise as music" in the 1920's, even earlier... a century later, and it's really time we stop pretending we can pin down and define "art" as a mathematical or scientific phenomenon. Art is fundamentally a social phenomenon, driven specifically by an inherent counter-cultural attitude, and therefore by definition it naturally evolves beyond any specific description we attempt to apply to it. By that I mean that art is always trying to break its own rules. You could argue that good art, what we consider ground-breaking work, at any point in history, is specifically that which is not described by previous attempts to define a set of rules.)