The Holy Grail of Music

Music is very powerful as a communication medium because it operates at the visceral, subconscious and conscious levels. Adept musicians employ music to elicit a spectrum of emotions, mental imagery and even physiological changes in the listeners.


But this raises the following questions:

• Why does music elicit a response at the physiological and psychological levels? Is the connection deeper?
• There is a clearly demonstrated cultural factor in responses to different pieces of music, but what is known of the culture independent aspects of music? 
• What aspects of music control the spectrum of emotional response?
• As is true with spoken language, is "how you sing something" more important than "what you sing" when it comes to expression in music?
• At the neurological level, how is language and music different? How are they similar?

These (at least in my mind) are the Holy Grail of music. Finding the answers is a quest. I will devise small and simple experiments to tackle some of the easier aspects of these, to gain insights at the macro level.