I think you're missing the point. To me music isn't qualitatively different to any other sound sequence, or lack of sound. "Silence" is something you can listen to, just as much as "running water", "conversational din", or "Beethoven's 5th". Yet because it is structured in the form of certain integer ratio harmonics, 95% of the population treats it as something categorically different. Objectively, that is what's weird here.
If you abstract enough, everything is just the movements of particles; and yet, you can distinguish and categorize certain kinds of such movements, and music is no exception. It's no weirder than any of the categorizations you no doubt assume every day.
If for you, there's no value in that categorization, that's fine, of course.
Correct! Speech, for example, is a category of sound that we've ascribed meaning to by learned convention. It's a purposeful categorical construction. The sounds of the jungle is another -- it's probably good to know it's a tiger when you hear a tiger :)
I say music is "weird" because it doesn't fit into either of these categories of useful natural or constructed forms. People didn't first make music in order to feel good, but because that music made them feel good. They already had an instinctual response. It's more like those odd visual illusions that are due to the freaky things our brains do to correct for visual blind spots in our eyes: a species-specific thing largely without intrinsic survival value. Audio hallucinatory masterbation, essentially.
(Some things probably are evolutionarily driven. Percussion sounds a lot like a moving herd of animals being hunted. Makes sense this would dump adrenaline into your system to make you run faster and harder. But being moved to tears by a violin concerto or lost in ecstasy at a rock concert is categorically something else.)
Anyway, to the point which started this sub-thread if someone asked me "what music do you like?" I'd interpret that question as "what kinds of things do you like to listen to?" since in my experience that's what most people mean by the question. And indeed, I have noise cancelling headphones I don't even bother plugging into my computer because "silence" is what I prefer to listen to when working, thinking, etc. If you get shocked by the answer.. that's the fault of you and your own assumptions. You asked; I answered: I prefer to NOT listen to music, thank you very much.
