C’mon, Keith.
“Natural” is what we as a species have been experiencing for roughly the last 42,000 years. That’s if the dating of a pair of flutes - one made from bird bone, the other from mammoth ivory - is anything close to accurate.
Music as a socio-cultural phenomenon predates Edison’s first attempt at playing back prerecorded sound by several dozen millennia, while the ability to playback sound in a commercially-available format has only been with us for less than 150 years.
From an evolutionary point-of-view, we have been singing, drumming, and blowing hollow objects for way, way longer than we have been sitting in front of inanimate objects playing back ghosts. So it’s difficult for me to conceive that we don’t know what “natural” is or should be.
If memory serves me correctly, I recall you’ve posted before how a system “knows” what it’s playing. No system does, of course. It does not possess sentiency. But we do. We’ve been making music for a very, very long time, so as a species, we’re already neuro-biologically wired and predisposed to identify what music is as distinct from, say, someone quoting Shakespeare or an explosion in a cutlery factory (cue Einstürzende Neubauten jokes).
So we are always the arbiters of what “natural” is, because there is no other thing on earth that has the capacity to make a distinction between music and non-music. And defining it is not difficult. That is, if one is open to move beyond rigid objectively-defined and adhered-to dogma as to what constitutes the listening experience, and allow that without the subjective human experience, music has no meaning, and “natural” has no value.
