All very interesting, but, as I was explaining to a classical-fan friend mine, it doesn't matter a whit if you don't perceive music through melody and harmony. To illustrate, my favourite genre of music is industrial - things like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, or the South African band Battery 9. To my classically trained friend, this sounds just like noise, largely because all sounds are being used pretty primarily as rhythm. That's all there is to it - a range of interlocking rhythms. (For an example, try Ministry's 'New World Order' off their Psalm 69 album)
I suspect a lot of this music appreciation stuff has got to do with what your ear is trained to hear. I'm pretty close to tonedeaf - I tried to learn the guitar in my teenage years but was hampered by the fact that I couldn't tune the damn thing. I've noticed that the people I know who aren't tonedeaf (a minority) tend to have grown up around lots of music, particularly things like classical music.
I don't know what music is going to look like 50 years after Carl Cox (whose DJ-ing I only really got to appreciate after having sampled ecstacy), but it seems that there's a real shift going on in how people hear and appreciate music.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B