This is an “evergreen” question which I keep hearing around and reading about on music related forums and websites, so here is my modest contribution trying to answer such a complex question…
What is music?
What follows is my canonical definition of music (which is simply my personal extension and canonicalization of the original Edgard Varèse‘s definition):
Music is an organized form of acoustic noise capable of triggering all sorts of emotions, mind states and feelings in the human race and perhaps even on other living species. – Sonic V
Let’s use this definition of music to understand better its nature…
Chaotic noise is actually capable of triggering emotions as well. Look at what happen when a thunder (or an explosion) triggers fear in us and in animals or the sound of water of a brook can trigger a relaxed mind state.
All our emotions are actually related to our instinct, mind states and our life experience (our culture if you want) and they can be also triggered by specific external events. In other words, our brain tends to create associations between our moods and emotions with events like sounds, odours, tastes, images etc…
Patterns is the organization of music
But what happens when the chaotic noise becomes organized? It immediately recalls a PATTERN in our mind. Patterns are generally easier to remember for our brain than random sequences of sounds, points on a piece of paper etc… Patterns are easier to remember because of the way our brain works. Daniel Bor (Neurologist from Cambridge University) explains this process as follows:
Perhaps what most distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ravenous desire to find structure in the information we pick up in the world. We cannot help actively searching for patterns — any hook in the data that will aid our performance and understanding. We constantly look for regularities in every facet of our lives, and there are few limits to what we can learn and improve on as we make these discoveries. We also develop strategies to further help us — strategies that themselves are forms of patterns that assist us in spotting other patterns, with one example being that amateur track runner developing tactics to link digits with running times in various races. – Daniel Bor
As an example of our way of thinking/learning researchers discovered that our brain learns to recognize and memorize basic patterns at a very early stage of the baby development when it’s still in the womb, because the baby learns his mother’s heartbeat (a pulse).
So our brain develops capacity of acoustic-pulse/patterns recognition at a very early stage and it also develops its peculiar capability of association of moods to sounds and acoustic patterns. While we grow, for example, we generally learn that a fast heartbeat pulse may indicate fear or tension (this because the adrenaline we produce in these particular situations increases our heartbeat), so our brain starts to associate pulse speed with particular mind states.
So, probably, music gets associated to emotions by our brain while we grow up because of our instinctive patterns research and memorization and the association with what we see around us (like a movie sound track that, when we are very young, gets associated with the actors exposed emotions of a scene, and then, later on in our life, we recall these past experiences when watching new movies with similar scenes, so we expect the music to describe that scene as we learned it).
Patterns are not just rhythmic, they can actually be melodic and even harmonic, so, in the next part, we’ll see what these words means to understand better how our brain is capable to understand these other forms of pattern and memorize them and, eventually, associates them with mood or feelings like, for example, it happens in western culture where we generally associate a sad mood with what’s called a minor chord…
Here is part 2 of this article.
Hope you enjoyed part 1!
Sonic V 
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