Q: If so, how does it work?
A: eternally mysterious as music remains to this day, one thing i'm sure of is: the core principle seems to be about 'making patterns and breaking them'. This seems to apply to more than just music. But, what music adds to this, in addition, is pitches, which clearly have some nice relationships, which help to enrich the pattern making/breaking process to a level that is so deeply subliminal i feel you could spend 1000 lifetimes trying to figure out exactly how the heck it actually works. But, again, what i will say is, regardless of what seems 'known' or 'unknown', or 'right' or 'wrong', it becomes unnecessary to choose between the two, because what seems to always power the whole thing is this 'making patterns and breaking them' phenomenon. so given that, finding what's "right" and "wrong" becomes an ellusive chase which never yields a static answer. you just have to keep playing the game. which also happens to be very serious