Comment by wisty

I think music is more universal than you suggest (or people may think you're suggesting).

Trying to classify things as music is a normative approach - saying what music should be. There's always exceptions to rules, as you point out, and people will always disagree and find exceptions.

The article is a descriptive approach - it studies what people think music is.

You can treat music as information. If it's not information, it's just noise.

Sometimes it has a low information density. People like to sing along to stuff they recognise. Sometimes it has higher density - a surprise bit of syncopation or an unusual note. Music is a variation in pitch and rhythm (etc) that is boring enough (in the context of the priors) to be familiar, but not too boring.

OTOH look at how tone poems flopped. There are patterns that are naturally easier to learn - rhythms (in the article) and maybe scales and harmonies (though this is clearly a bit more complex - not every culture has the old Mesopotamian diatonic scales that the Pythagorians formalised). But like Chomsky theorised with grammar, there might be defaults (or a range of defaults) that humans are naturally drawn to as the priors.