Bahadırhan Koçer Dissolves the Edges: When Sound Refuses to Be Music

The podcast opens with a proposition as unsettling as it is liberating: music, in the way we name and frame it, is a construct draped over the swirling chaos of sound. Bahadırhan Koçer gently urges us to question the word itself, to see it as an epistemological artifact, a boundary born from a singular place and time rather than a universal given. As he weaves his own academic journey—a thread stretching from cinematography to a PhD in music sciences—we sense the gravity behind this inquiry: few ever pause to ask what music truly is or why we believe in the category at all.

In these early moments, Koçer’s voice becomes a lighthouse in the fog, inviting us to notice how the very act of naming shapes what we perceive. Music’s existence, he argues, is not an immutable law but a collective habit—a habit grown so old it feels inevitable. Yet beneath this habit, sound itself pulses with a life far older, far wider. The question is not whether music exists, but why we need to call it that at all.

Tracing the etymology of music, Koçer leads us deep into the archives of myth and philosophy. The word emerges from the Muses—those ancient Greek spirits of inspiration—long before any interval or theory was formalized. The journey proceeds through Pythagoras, whose experiments gave us the scaffolding for consonance and the architecture of harmony, and continues across centuries where the church held dominion over which sounds could be blessed as legitimate.

This inherited narrative, soaked in Greco-Roman tradition, became so embedded that its prejudices slipped beneath notice. Koçer exposes how the moment we invoke the word ‘music,’ we accept a narrow paradigm. We seal sound inside a box built by others, centuries ago—a box that still constrains what we dare to hear, feel, or sell. The story of music’s existence is, at its core, a story about which boundaries we choose to see.

Traditional musicology, Koçer contends, is haunted by its own limits. Unlike physics, which measures what exists regardless of the observer, musicology attempts to formalize a shimmering, culture-invented phantom. Its definitions—like ‘organized sound’—crumble when pressed against the messy pluralism of lived experience. Even its most precise phrases, such as John Blacking’s ‘humanly organized sound,’ unravel under closer scrutiny, revealing only more disagreement.

As electronic music and direct sound manipulation opened new realms, the classical tools of analysis—notation, harmony, melody—grew increasingly obsolete. Koçer suggests that perhaps we’ve been misnaming the object all along. What we call music might be better conceived as ‘auditory experience,’ a field where space, temporality, and even reality itself bend and shimmer. The ghosts of old categories linger, but the living sound escapes them.

Inviting us to step beyond the brittle surface of genre, Koçer calls for a new way of listening—one that resists easy naming. He encourages listeners and creators alike to release the urge to label, to receive sound as pure experience rather than as ‘music.’ This is not just theory; it’s a practice of immersion, one that asks us to mix imperfectly, to embrace being called delusional, and to find joy in stepping outside the lines.

In this expanded field, even genres like Dubtechno dissolve into marketing terms, their original spirit found not in names but in the act of listening itself. For those who dare to think with their ears, the world of sound becomes a spectrum where body and cognition intermingle. Here, what matters is not what you call it, but how deeply it moves you—how it bends your sense of being, if only for a moment.