Traditionally, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics concentrated on the quality and study of the beauty and enjoyment (plaisir and jouissance) of music. Aesthetics is a sub-discipline of philosophy. However, many musicians, music critics, and other non-philosophers have contributed to the aesthetics of music. In recent decades philosophers have tended to emphasize issues besides beauty and enjoyment.

It is often thought that music has the ability to affect our emotions, intellect, and our psychology; lyrics can assuage our loneliness or incite our passions. For this reason, the philosopher Plato proposed that music is a dangerous entertainment that should be closely regulated by the state. (Plato, Book VII)

It is commonly believed that human responses to music are culturally influenced. For example, musical passages in Beethoven that sounded highly dissonant to his contemporaries does not sound dissonant to listeners today. As such, music's aesthetic appeal seems highly dependent upon the culture in which it is practiced, however there is a physical background which defines sound being proper or improper. Proper sound is perceived as gentle sound while improper sound is more or less considered nice sounding depending on what the listener is used to listen to. Harry Partch and some other musicologists like for instance Kyle Gann therefore have studied and tried to popularize microtonal music and the usage of alternate musical scales. Also many modern composers like Lamonte Young, Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca paid much attention to a scale called just intonation.

Some of the aesthetic elements expressed in music include lyricism, harmony, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance, playfulness, and color (see also musical development). However, there has been a strong tendency in the aesthetics of music to emphasize musical structure as the most important (or even only) aesthetic element that is important in the experience of music.