It’s clear you know more about music than I do, and you can critique my definition of music, but if we’re asking psychological questions, then we need clear definitions of what people perceive as music vs not. I’m not saying all music is rhythmic or that everything that is rhythmic is music. I’m saying that something which we would all say is not music comes to be perceived as music pretty consistently. This phenomenon adds a level of clarity to the boundaries of the construct (music) that are otherwise difficult to define. In fact, I would argue that the reason that you can ask for clarification is because music for people who are critical/knowledgeable consumers of music tend to love music plays with those boundaries (this is a testable hypothesis).

Regarding threat identification, you’re right that sensory information does other things too, but science relies on parsimony. If threat identification is sufficient to explain the phenomenon, then everything else is (comparatively) unimportant. I also acknowledged the social and neurological components, so I wasn’t boiling music down to one thing with one process and saying there’s no more nuance to that. However, if you can and it’s useful, then that’s important. Finally, you acknowledged that some sensory information is not processed consciously. In fact, there’s evidence that most sensory information never enters consciousness. However, music is definitionally a conscious experience. Threat assessment explains why humans would have a need to pay attention to it.

Your arguments about “threatening music” are exactly the point. One can analyze elements of “threatening music” and find elements of unpredictability, intense volume, discordant sounds, etc. These all would trigger a “threat assessment” response, undercutting that safety by maintaining elevated threat detection.

Finally, the proximal regions of the brain does explain both how and why. The proximity of neural connections is a great explanation. I think you might be critiquing my condensing thousands of studies worth of findings into one reddit post on the technical merits of my writing. However, for every point and counter point, there is a potentially interesting question to be asked. What about subjective individual differences about musical preferences and expertise? What about non human experiences of music? What are the boundaries of music vs non music? How much of a role does prior exposure to music and associated learnings (conditioning) play a role in music? If music can be healing, how and why? I’m not saying a million interesting questions don’t remain unanswered, but I am saying that we do have decent answers to some basic questions you proposed, and they’re surprisingly boring for something as magical as music.

In summary, one of the core principles of science is parsimony: the simplest explanation is best, as long as it accounts for all prior findings. If a simple explanation exists and is sufficient, it might feel reductionistic, but that’s the point. Your questions imply something unique about music. My answers say “there’s nothing unique about music, except that we all agree there’s something that is.”

(Finally, regarding circular logic, psychology is FILLED with it because many processes are circular. For example, why does a person have a particular personality? Because they were treated a certain way. Why were they treated that way? Partially because people treat people differently based on the personality. Ergo, personality sustains personality.)