The main idea of the theory is that music is asuper-stimulusfor the perception ofmusicality, where "musicality" is actually a perceived property ofspeech. "Musicality" refers to the property of music that determines how "good" it is, how strong an emotional effect it has, and how much we enjoy listening to it.
The theory implies thatordinary speechalso has this property, in a manner which may vary as a person speaks. Themusicality of speechis much more subtle than that of music, but it provides important information which thelistener'sbrain processes (without conscious awareness of the processing), in order to derive some information about theinternal mental stateof thespeaker. This information is applied to modulate the listener'semotional responseto speech, and this accounts for theemotional effect of music.
