I agree. But yet there’s something special about music that I noticed. I saw a documentary about old people with dementia or Alzheimer’s. They were playing music and singing and it seemed to make a huge difference to their health. Family were saying that they appear as if music brings them back to life, are more cognizant of their surroundings and their family after those sessions.
My Grandfather had Alzheimer's. He didn't recognize anyone, but if you put a harmonica in his hands he could still play the polkas he learned when he was young. I can't say whether it had any other effects, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.
There is some capacity in the primitive brain that allows some birds to mimic what amounts to a simplified audio file, storing and replaying it like data without any real understanding of the data or how they do it.
Others seem to genetically have a song of the species whether or not they learn from the birds of a feather.
It can remain in storage for who knows how long, it's in their brain cells of some kind, and memory is what they do.
Some of them sing pretty good and as nature intended can be heard from quite far away. So the other ones can recognize them by their song starting in the most prehistoric of times. Familiarity acts like it's built-in from the get-go too. How long have living things been recognizing each other by their song?
Like a digital file, it's the same data regardless of the playback tempo.
What other kind of place would you want a time-series abstract data file to be stored in higher life forms? It would be good to have a part of the brain inherently prepared for flawless memorization since before anybody could possibly figure it out.
Plus there may be other parts of the advanced brain that are bigger and more capable if suitably engaged, even if not comparable in terms of effortless, flawless memorization and recognition of things as abstract as frequencies, timbres, and their patterns across time.
Put it all together and that could be a virtuoso or something.
One of my late partner's grandmothers ended up with Alzheimer's and when it progressed to a point, it became difficult to communicate because there was so much hesitation and loss for words. She had been born a Louisiana Cajun and graduated from the first school in her town in the early 20th century. Same textbooks, radio programs, TV shows (when they came along), as any other grandmother from that generation in other states, so she was a regular native US English speaker and nobody ever thought she had a real Cajun accent at all. Nothing like her parents or grandparents but she was born into it and still was exclusively spoken locally for her early years.
Well she left the backwoods behind when she married a Texan and moved there, and hardly ever spoke French again. Sounded like she was from Texas when she had all her faculties, that's like 60 years later. Then years after that there was serious decline but you could play her a Cajun song and she could sing or speak perfect French and tell you what it was like getting ready to go to a high school dance back on the bayou. In detail.
