It is the mystery of music that it has no specific meaning, either sensually, emotionally, or cognitively. It is not philosophical. It does have aesthetic meaning, however. For the simple fact of its moving toward and away from the tonic provides us a sense of growth and decay, of the beautiful and the sublime, and the more elaborate these movements the more the simple tonic is transformed into a complex artistic work, implying some ineffable ideal.
Indeed, this too is the nature of simple qualia (the smells, tastes, sights, textures, and sounds that we have evolved to “know” through our senses). We know, as all animals who eat them would know, when a berry is perfectly ripe; but as it grows toward this ideal, or decays away from it, its taste implies something either beautiful or sublime, respectively. A culinary artist could make such an ideal gastronomique, on par with a symphony, indescribable with words.
Then there is the qualia within, the qualia which doesn’t come to us through our senses, but from that part of our consciousness which is greater than the sum of our brains, our bodies, and the landscapes outside of us. The self and its imagination is ineffable, indescribable, and immeasurable. It is a shame we spend so much time trying to define it — how can one describe purity? All that can be said about it is that everything flows through it and it still remains pure.
Yet our ability to see patterns in all the noise and impurity, as it passes across our pristine minds, is a wondrous gift. That is why we hear “meaning” in music and find symphonies in food. That is why the arts flourish, for they reveal beauty in culture and decay in civilization. Patterns give us a glimpse of truth, and that is why a cosmological myth appeals to the innocent child in us while a scientific cosmos appeals to the adult ego — but they both lead us, forward or backward, to an ideal, an ur pattern, an order to things, to the world, to the universe. Ideals are, inevitably and essentially, pure, and they make everything appear greater than the sum of its parts.
The qualia that presents itself to us, whether through the senses or through the imagination, holds all we know in balance. The balance may be fleeting, like an epiphany of which only the feeling of having had it ever remains with us, or it may last, an enduring vision of a graspable truth. Again, we are pulled to purity — qualia leads us to the ideal. We can imagine the perfect hexagon in a snowflake, the perfect consciousness in a body, the perfect ecosystem in a landscape. And it is music, more than any other art form, tones up the imagination to be receptive to such ineffable, qualiadelic patterns of purity. That is why it moves us so.