Music is just layered simple patterns and our brains LOVE IT.
Sound is pressure waves, musical notes are a specific pattern of pressure waves. Melodies are repeated musical notes. Songs are repeated melodies following standard structure.
Our brains love trying to decode and parse all these overlapping patterns.
Maybe not really a shower thought and more wild speculation.
It’s absolutely worth an entire lifetime of exploration. But dismissing things you can’t explain away immediately with chemical processes, as some sort of unknowable sorcery, is exactly why I call it reductive. As far as I’m concerned, maintaining a reverence for the fact that you will never be capable of conclusively explaining such things, because there is vastly more detail involved than even a thousand lifetimes could ever uncover, is necessary if you want to actually begin to learn about what’s really happening.