21/09/2026

A Unified Theory of Protomusic, Music and Speech as Systems of Communicative Thought Control

In December 2020 I published https://whatismusic.info/blog/TheSpeakerControlsTheThoughtsOfTheListener, which explained the concept of speech as a form of “thought control”.

My claim is that speech is thought control, in the sense that when a speaker speaks, and a listener listens, the speaker is forcing the listener to have thoughts based on the meaning of what is being said.

And this is not just an unfortunate side effect of listening to a speaker – it is a central and unavoidable part of the whole process of listening to and understanding what someone is saying to you.

We might wonder why this should be the case. Should it not be possible to receive information without at the same time being controlled in some way by the person sending the information?

Surely, if evolution could find a way to separate the two things, it would have done so.

But actually it hasn’t. And if it hasn’t, maybe that’s because it can’t.

Perhaps there is a strong constraint preventing that separation.

It’s almost as if the following is an axiom:

(That original article also included some ideas about how that relates to music, however over time I have developed different ideas about how music fits into the picture, and in particular this current article has a completely different hypothesis about how music relates to the idea of speech as “thought control”. Also, more recently I published https://philipdorrell.substack.com/p/speech-as-a-form-of-thought-control Jun 2023, republished in this blog at https://blog.thinkinghard.com/blog/speech-as-a-form-of-though-control, which summarised the concept of thought control as applied to speech, without including any hypotheses about music.)

Comparing to Non-Biological Communication

If we remove the word “biological” from the above axiom, then it is not true at all.

A digital computer system can process data without there being any requirement to understand let alone “believe” the truth of any messages contained in the data that it processes.

Consider, for example, the simple problem of reading sentences and passing them on to another person.

You might read:

The sentences might be printed on a piece of paper (or on a computer screen), and you have to read them out loud so that the other person can hear you say them.

In the process of doing that, you cannot avoid processing the meaning of those sentences and (as asserted by the axiom above) considering the possibility that they are true.

Whereas a computer system can receive messages like that and pass them on to another computer system one character byte at a time, without making any attempt to process or understand any meaning. The computer system can just as easily pass on data containing messages that are true, or false, or uncertain, or nonsense, and in all cases the content of the data has no long-term effect on the “beliefs” represented by the operating state of that computer system.

In other words, a computer system can receive and process large amounts of data, with a complete separation of the system processing the data and the data being processed, without in any sense having its “thoughts” controlled by that data, and the above axiom does not apply at all to a digital computer system.

Mitigations

In the human case, there is no way to prevent a human listener from having their thoughts “controlled” in the sense of believing or at least considering the possible truth of whatever is being said by a speaker.

However we might still expect evolution to create mitigations, in particular to reduce the risk of believing the truth of something that is possibly or probably false, whether that be due to the intention of the speaker, or just due to the speaker being wrong for whatever reason.

The simplest and most direct form of mitigation is to evaluate everything a speaker says as soon as it has been said. So in the worst case, the speaker is choosing to control the listener’s thoughts in a manner that may act against the interests of the listener, but, if the listener successfully and critically determines that what the speaker says is false, or at least implausible and unverifiable, then said control may be very short-lived and transient.

Of course the process of evaluation is not cost-free, and may involve significant mental effort in some cases.

So the only way to completely avoid paying a “cost” due to listening to a speaker saying things that are not true is to actually never be close enough to that speaker to hear what they say.

Comprehension vs Planning to Act

The axiom above can be extended to include a secondary related axiom.

If we learn a new fact, and believe it to be true, then our belief will often require us to formulate some action with regard to that new fact. In some cases the requirement to act will be quite urgent.

So we can add an additional axiom to the first one, as follows:

This adds to the cost of receiving information – while the truth of the received information is being evaluated, not only is the listener temporarily believing that information to be true, but, due to that belief, they are starting to think about how they should respond to that new information.

In the case where the information is false or dubious we would want to avoid or reduce that cost as much as possible.

Protomusic and Music

So far I have talked about how these axioms apply to the comprehension and response to speech.

But the axiom as stated applies to all systems of biological communication between different individuals.

As part of my attempts to explain what music is and how it evolved, I have developed the hypothesis that music seems like a form of communication, but actually it is not a pragmatic system of communication, but, originally it evolved from an ancestor that was a pragmatic communication system.

Also, in its very earliest form, protomusic was a system for communicating emotions.

So applying the axiom to the hypothesised protomusic, we must conclude that protomusic was a system of thought control where the sender controlled the emotions of the receiver. In other words, if the sender made a protomusical vocalisation with a sad meaning, this directly caused the receiver to feel sad.

In effect, the sender was saying “I feel sad about something that is happening or perhaps something that has just happened, and you the listener (or listeners) should also feel sad about that.”

Evolution by Mitigation

We can consider what it means for communicative protomusic to have evolved into non-communicative music.

We could just suppose that protomusic evolved to be less thought-controlling.

However, an obvious effect of music in its modern form is that it does have some effect on the mental state of the listener, although we would probably stop short of saying that it controls the listeners’ thoughts.

An alternative to assuming a simple reduction in the degree of thought control is to apply the concept of mitigation as described here, and suppose that communicative protomusic evolved into non-communicative music by ramping up the level of mitigation, in effect processing all musical “communications” by assuming as quickly as possible that they are very probably not true.

This idea, as it happens, fits in with some of the specific observations that I have previously made about the nature of our response to music.

In particular:

Comparison: Mitigation for Speech and Mitigation for Music/Protomusic

My underlying hypothesis is that a biological communication system requires the receiver to consider the possibility that the information received is true, and the risks of having to process possibly false information are mitigated by evaluating that information as quickly as possible to determine its plausibility or reliability. In other words an effective and useful biological communication system requires the receiver to initially allow for both the possibility that information received is true and the possibility that the information is false.

And this exactly describes how the human brain processes speech.

I am then proposing that music has evolved from an ancestral protomusical system of communication by arranging for the evaluation of the information received to immediately return a result of “not true”.

So in the case of music, the mitigation very efficiently avoids any issues caused by false information.

But because the mitigation immediately prevents the receiver from processing the information as true, what was once a system of communication no longer acts as an actual system of pragmatic communication, because any possibility of the receiver processing the information as if it is “true” has been eliminated.

Conclusion

The final conclusion of this analysis is that the speech, protomusic and music can all be understood in terms of what kind of thought control is or was involved in those systems: