In yesterday's New York Times was an article about having to disguise research on music as research on "complex nonlinguistic auditory processing." If ever there was evidence that music is alien to our culture this is surely it.

Now the problem is more subtle. Music is OK, provided it is written music. The purely oral aspects of music are not reliable. Thus, jazz is OK as long as it is by the book. That's why so much of it sound alike.