Comment by motohagiography

music is the category of all possible languages, is a statement I've been mulling lately. it's less of an aesthetic judgment than the usual, "music is a language," where it's more of a comment on encoding.

I'd suggest the capacity for our brains and minds to apprehend shapes, relationships, patterns, and ultimately symbols is made from its ability to parse the category of things in music. time, difference, harmonics, consonance, dissonance, patterns. as though all the symbols and representations that emerge from our chunking and caching of stimuli into patterns are in a category of logical artefacts. we represent them- and relationships between them- as musical. Maths codifies or encodes these same relationships and artefacts, but the underlying objects aren't just abstractions, they are a measurement of essentially "musical" relationships.

it falls a bit for the "everything is X" fallacy, but if people seriously pursue the premise that our brains compute, then plausibly, the stimulus it computes over is this category of possible languages we call "music." not sure how useful the idea is, but it's pretty.