I've had a theory for a while now that music is related to Kolmogorov complexity, or in other words how compressible it is. Random noise that we find unpleasant is very incompressible. On the other hand, simple sound patterns that we find boring such as Do Re Mi is very compressible. What we call music sits in the middle, and is maximizing the amount of signal. In this way, we can view humans as information seeking machines, which is why we like music.
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It is this way with all art. If you ask someone to describe a work which is “good art” or “well designed”, it usually takes longer to describe than things which are considered too simple (easily compressed) and also longer to describe than things which are considered too random (easily compressed). But not all things which take this Goldilocks amount of words to describe are considered well designed, just some of them. So art is also more than that.
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That doesn't really explain the popularity at times of clicks-and-beeps music and some other modern music.
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I don't know. I'm inclined to think that it's more visceral. At least a good part of its appeal, and the oldest. There's the famous example of slaughterhouses using calm, predictable music and consonant harmonies to calm their animals.
I once read a book that tried to express this as a fractal dimension. I really don't remember the name of the book though.
I've read a paper which had a similar theory - music is a reward hack for the brain - the brain is a prediction machine, and it gets rewarded when it correctly predicts stuff. Music is highly predictable due to it's rhythmic mathematical structure, thus very easy to predict, with a lot of content to predict (hundreds of events per minute) thus you get a lot of reward from it.
As an example, EDM music is highly predictable, and highly popular.
African tribal drum music is also highly predictable, while also being complex in poly-rhythmic ways.
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You mean you have a hypothesis. :) A theory is an entire body of facts and experiments.
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