If I played you any song from any Rolling Stones album and asked you if you thought what you were hearing was music, chances are you’d say “yes.” If I played you a recording of you and your mother having an argument and asked you if you thought what you were hearing was music, chances are you’d say “no.” But what about everything in between?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines music as “the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity.” Great — so what constitutes unity and continuity? This is the can of worms that has confounded musicians, philosophers and inquisitive elitists for decades.

When one ponders the conventions that make music “musical,” the three words that instantly spring to mind are rhythm, harmony and melody. Naturally, numerous iconoclastic composers have toiled consciously to tear these walls down, demonstrating — or attempting to demonstrate — how music can still be music while staunchly rejecting these three anchors.

Enter Arnold Schönberg. While it would be facetious of me to call Schönberg the granddaddy of avant-garde music — the movement erupted sporadically from various “troublemakers” over the course of the 20th century — the man certainly flipped popular music on its head. With 1909’s “Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11,” a set of completely atonal solo piano pieces, Schönberg took the concepts of melody and harmony and threw them out the window.

Which brings up yet another question: what determines tonality? Music theory situates tonality as the hierarchical arrangement of notes around a key “center” — for instance, a song in the key of C-major would employ notes in a scale of even increments around that particular tone. But, commonly, “tonality” is used to refer exclusively to the mainstream Major-Minor system, the scale used in the vast majority of Western popular music. In this sense, our entire perception of melody and “catchiness” has essentially been conditioned into our heads by the media, having absolutely nothing to do with any natural law or objective way of hearing.

Schönberg was disturbed by the totalitarian quality of Western society’s officially adopted system of listening, finding it to be excruciatingly limiting, and set out to compose “Drei Klavierstücke,” a piece that completely eschewed systematic gravitation around a central note in favor of complete sonic freedom. And, in spite of its clattery dissonance, “Klavierstücke” still sounds undeniably like music, albeit music arranged by a madman.

While there’s no discernible central melody, or even repetition of atonal motifs, the piece has an inarticulable sort of unity and continuity, flowing along seamlessly on a fluid wave of emotion. And while the composition may not adhere to a basic rhythm, creeping along ominously at one moment only to explode into schizoid piano hammering the next, the rhythm is constantly foregrounded, holding the piece together as it evolves and mutates in fascinating ways.

So what about the type of music that not only rejects traditional harmony and melody, but completely abandons any rhythmic grounding as well? Look no further than alt-rock pioneers Sonic Youth. While the majority of their work can undoubtedly be qualified as music, despite its frequent left turns into grating squalls of guitar feedback, the band’s SYR series self-consciously blurs this line.

SYR6, in particular, is an amorphous, hour-long sludge of hissing amplifiers, demonic moaning and psychotically twinkling chimes (among many other disquieting sound effects), sounding more like the score to Satan’s stream of consciousness than a standalone musical piece. In fact, the entire album possesses a strangely cinematic quality, to the point that it effectively feels more like a movie than a record.