This essay holds that music is the art of tones, while rejecting the view that music is the universal art of sound; it recognises an emergent non-musical sound art which takes non-tonal sounds as its material. To allow that any sounds can be incorporated into music is not to say that any sounds can constitute music – thus room is left for the conclusion that music makes predominant use of tonal sounds, and increasingly co-exists with a non-musical sound art. This broadly tonal conception of music rests on what I term the objectivity of tone, which several contributors to the present volume seem to question. The article argues that whether a particular sound is musical or tonal is partly an objective matter, independent of how it is experienced by any particular individual. This claim should be understood humanistically and not scientistically – that is, it rests on a humanistic concept of music, and not on an abstract, scientistic standpoint.