[Gloin the Dark]

…without an innate pre-disposition to music, mankind probably wouldn’t have bothered with it in the first place.

I’d make a distinction between:

• an innate predisposition to engage cognitively with music, and
• an innate predisposition to like specific musical elements or artefacts.

As I said in my previous post, I think it’s obvious that we have the former, and, because of it, we (or most of us, anyway) come to find pleasure in certain aspects of music. But which things we come to like are contingent upon our personal musical experiences (I’d guess mainly those from when we are very young and our neuroplasticity is high, but also to some degree – perhaps requiring a more deliberate effort – when we’re older), and hence upon the culture that we’ve grown up in.

What I don’t see is any reason to think that we have a “hardwired” predisposition to like a specific musical feature, like a plagal cadence, or the tune to “Danny Boy”.

Some people with practically zero musical education may be seized by the emotional impact of a piece of music, while others may have had even formal musical education but don’t actually appreciate music much at all.

Oh, sure. Like, in school I was taught various things about English vocabulary and grammar, but the essential part of my learning the language was something that took place, informally, long before that; mostly before I’d even started school. The essential part of musical “learning” is similarly distinct from formal education.