Even traditional art often tries to do more than compress concepts, it tries to express the inexpressible.
Linguistic determinism/relativity (Sapir-Worf, etc) explains some of it. People can FEEL that their thoughts are being constrained by language, but they don't know how to express that and maybe don't even consciously realize that it's their real problem. They just figure out that art makes it feel a little better so they do art.
Here are some example 21st century painters: https://medium.com/@John_Dalton/living-masters-the-top-13-re...
Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.
Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".
And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.
What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.
With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.
I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.
But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).
While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.
My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.
Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.
With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.
Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.
But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.
So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.
So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.
As an example, EDM music is highly predictable, and highly popular.
African tribal drum music is also highly predictable, while also being complex in poly-rhythmic ways.
Yet it's way more fun if the music evolves and takes twists you don't expected. I actually get quite aggressive from to predictable music, basically most modern pop music, but I guess that's highly subjective. For me good music must be intellectual exhaustive.
A fast BPM song alone would be indicative of events where things are happening fast and quickly.
When I see a picture on a computer screen, it evokes similar emotions as seeing the real thing, since the light that ends up on my retina is very similar, even so other aspects of the sensory input might be missing.
Music on the other side doesn't really have a natural analog. Nature is mostly just wind and water noises, with a bit of bird song and chirping crickets. The only thing they have in common with music is that they are all sounds, but the structure and complexity is quite different.
Music as an offshoot from pre-language communication seems more likely, it could explain the emotional component at least, since groups of animals might need to sync their emotional state. But even there you end up with quite a big leap between what sounds happen naturally and what we call music.
Having participated in a lot of free improv music (one of my cohort has a grammy related to it), I am not sure if there really are a lot of patterns going on there. I am not a fan and it doesn't feel fun for me in the way that sitting with a band and playing Django-style music ("Tears" or "Swing 42" or "September Song").
I don't think it's a noise thing, I think there just isn't much "signal" getting compressed so the decoders are doing way more than they should.
I suspect, though, that many of those patterns are inaccessible by an audience, or even the other musicians. Or sometimes to the person performing said patterns.
It is also possible that people are listening to the music for reasons other than the music itself (community, feelings of superiority, etc.)
Either way, it sure does explain the popularity. If you consider it as predictability instead of compression, it might make more sense. Listeners have an expectation on what music sounds like and popular music is going to ride that line between the listeners expectations and something more original and stray from those expectations.
I think this could also be why AI music is so bad, because it can hit the listener's expectations, but the ways that it strays from them are seemingly random, which is why a big reason to why it is so uncanny.
If you could hear music on the surface of Mars without a space suit, I’m pretty sure it would sound quite different.
In that sense, I think any form of atmosphere, it will have its own music but it would probably not sound great in other atmospheres.
Also, any atmosphere can carry any sound wave for at least some distance. It takes more or less energy to do so, and if the medium attenuates rapidly, you have to start with higher frequencies so that the right frequency reaches your audience, but that's it. You need different instruments to play in different atmospheres, sure, but not different music. And electrical instruments actually work exactly the same regardless of the medium.
It is mind-bending to watch a liquid's meniscus simply… fade away without moving or boiling.
Of course, the sound that non-electrical instruments make is indeed dependent on the atmosphere in which they are played, assuming the same motions etc. You could probably make a violin produce the exact same sounds that it does on Earth playing it on Mars, but you'd have to play it differently than you do here. But even this doesn't apply to electrical instruments - Jimi Hendrix would sound the same if he could somehow play on the surface of Mars.
(Collins dictionary, noun 'theory')