What is music? A unified theory of music and dreaming

Love Liebestraum :) If you can get past LL's emoting this is my favorite rendition of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FqugGjOkQE

As someone with ADHD, I can confidently say that music is one of the least ephemeral things in my mind.

Music is much more like a heuristic for generating patterns based on limited data points. You just need a key, a rhythmic base and a sentiment and you're off. Memory is a small part. it only works because you can regenerate the idea of a song based on small cues. There are so many songs where I couldn't tell you the exact words to a particular verse, but if I can grab onto another part of the song I can imagine the rhythm of the lyrics and rhyming scheme, then work backwards to something that I think I might recognize, but really it will probably be off in some way. Perhaps my head rendition is at a slower tempo and higher key, but if I tried to sing it from memory you would still recognize the song.

So I'd argue that music is a more of a exercise in pattern recognition and pattern generation than physical memory recalling or story telling.

To expand on a comment reply I made earlier elsewhere in this thread, I think that the author is correct about there being a connection between music and dreaming. However, I'd venture there is another fundamental reason that is not mentioned in the content above.

I posit that both dreaming and music listening (including listening via imagination, like a song stuck in your head) are both actually fundamentally processes of pattern recognition and pattern generation happening together in real-time. In a dream, our mind is generating visual, auditory and mental/emotional stimuli based on the real stimuli we've experience in our waking lives. It's not purely replays of real life jumbled up, because many of us have experienced dreams where we've created passable imagery of imaginary individuals we've never seen before and probably don't exist.

I think music is fundamentally the same thing. We hear a song once that creates mental/auditory stimuli, and our brain is able to recognize the general patterns and compress it into pieces of data we can replay at a later time. We don't listen X different times to a song per X individual instruments being played, but often if we hear a prominent part of an individual the song out of the context we will immediately recognize it as part of another song. For a well-known example, imagine the bass line from "under pressure"/"ice ice baby" and how just imagining that bass line lets you conjure up totally seperate parts from either of those two songs in your memory. You can now sing back those different parts of those songs and people will easily recognize it, even if you are technically singing in a different key, a slower tempo, and you flub some words.

So in this hypothesis, even listening to music is not a passive action because your brain is engaged with recognizing and real-time generating the next parts of it (ie singing along). So when the author says:

> Nevertheless... music is often accompanied by a non-specific desire to engage in some level of active behaviour. Because this desire is very non-specific, and because musical feelings are more strongly bound to things that match the rhythm and/or melody of the music, the end result is that the desire to engage in such activity can be satified either by dancing or by joining in with the performance of the music.

It's clear that dancing and joining in make sense because listening and/or imagining music itself is a generative process of imagination + memories (or perhaps "delusional" to use the term in the article).

As an somewhat interesting aside: I mentioned that I have ADHD in the other comment. One of the interesting, though very under-studied things I've discovered about myself and some others with ADHD is that many of us end up with songs playing in our head constantly (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/7tu8jz/music_is_const... ). Some studies talk about getting a particular song stuck in someone's head as an OCD type thing, but this type of "head radio" as I call it, doesn't necessarily stick to the same thing forever and really isn't very mentally distressing. Sometimes even I'll get unique tunes stuck in my head that I end up writing out later. Until high-school I assumed everyone had music playing in the background of their heads at all times, but when I started taking medication I noticed it became less frequent. So I'm of the opinion that the "head radio" was mostly a form of mental fidgeting, part of the hyperactivity component of ADHD.

From https://whatismusic.info/blog/HypothesisMusicLetsUsPracticeH...:

  > Now let us suppose that the person enjoys listening to music.
  >
  > Music enables the person to feel very strong emotions that lie outside the range of their normal everyday emotions.
  >
  > Music lets a person feel these emotions, almost, but not quite, as if those emotions were real.

I’m quite puzzled by these statements. I enjoy listening to some genres of music. But I don’t see at all how music is connected to experiencing emotions. Isn’t music enjoyable because of completely different reasons? They are hard to describe, but I don’t think they’re “emotions”, are they?