It's the relationship between music and listener that's a little
   different than the relationship between words and listener. It's
   an active participatory process. The system requires both to act
   in concert. Yes, I just said that smile emoticon I'm going to
   use engineering analogy. Apologies ahead of time: Imagine a
   series of mechanical sliders inside of us. These mechanical
   sliders can be moved by many means. Words, music, art, movies,
   thoughts - they can even move on their own. They never really
   stop moving. These sliders are all of the components of our
   emotional states. There's many emotional states. Sliders are
   tied into each other, so one slider can affect others. Two
   sliders can affect an entirely different set of sliders. Now you
   have music. Music is a very direct manipulation of these
   sliders. It's not entirely an objective system; there are
   certainly cultural elements involved... yet the cross-cultural
   nature of whole bodies of music (classical is a good example, as
   it's everywhere), makes them activate these sliders in the same
   way across many nations around the world, even those with local
   cultural music that's different and doesn't quite move the same
   way. Yet we're not bound by our cultures either. We have our own
   settings we prefer. Our sliders are all unique and slip and
   stick differently. Now compare to language. Language involves
   semantic systems as well as activating the sliders. Language is
   musical but it is also visual/tactile: metaphors activate fast
   comprehension of meaning. "emotionally distant" activates the
   parts of the brain that are also used in seeing things that are
   far away, and activates the emotional sliders in the same
   manner. Broken heart activates pain centers of a heart attack.
   It's all hidden in plain sight. The sliders are of course tied
   into all of course sensory inputs. I believe we all have
   synthethesia to differing degrees. Music can activate a smell
   sense, a taste, a warmth, a vision, a coldness, an anger. Words
   can too but they're a little more prefrontal cortex. There's a
   lot of calculations going on to ascertain meaning. Music though,
   can move the sliders themselves, almost effortlessly if one is
   attuned (see what I did there?) to that style of music. == Well,
   I think we're far more than complex Turing machines. I tend to
   believe in embodied cognition as a better model, where our
   social, physical, environmental and mental are all "one thing"
   that's us and it's more complicated than a computer. But it's an
   easily available metaphor so I used it smile emoticon == I don't
   like having to use engineering/computer metaphors for humans,
   because we're not robots or computers. We're not spiritual
   meatbags, at least as far as I see it. But the metaphors are
   common. I'm still working on better metaphors that can better
   encompass the totality of the systems that humans engage in as a
   functioning (and dysfunctioning) unit, along with all of the
   products of our creation such as
   computers/math/language/music/art/philosophy/poetry/etc as well
   as the Universe around us, and all of the things that are unseen
   and unseeable. But that's probably a life-project. I'm far from
   close. I'm always feeling as if I'm just starting it new. ==