Sound and music

You have a point here...

Music is organized sound by an expressive gesture ( of the musician ) recorded not only a s playing memory in the brain but engrammed in the body as a "wave" of emotion answering by the body gesture of the listener to the playing body of the musician...

Music is sensible meaning incarnated in sound body which live in time more than in space...

it’s as if the music is playing me,

If you hear a melody on a recording and later "re-play" it in your head, does it lose its "significance"?

@rvpiano 

It's only just occurred to me that it is one thing for a child who has never heard music to "hear" a melody in their head and and another for a child born deaf to do so. A child who has never heard music will most likely have heard the sound of birds, for example. 

@mahgister 

I suspect this physiological/vibrational aspect tends to be overlooked in western culture!  

@stuartk 

As a retired concert pianist I do look at music from the perspective of a performer.  I performed classical music which in most cases adheres strictly to the printed page (although there are exceptions.). I gather from your posting that you deal in improvisation, quite a difference, as you make it up as you go along. 
I acknowledge this difference but I still say there is no music without sound. 
in poetry we have a different aesthetic because words have concrete meaning even if they’re arranged in meter. The case in music is that there are symbols which represent emotions but not in a literal way. You as an improvising performer do approach notes differently. But even so, if these notes are not heard it is not music as we know it.

Western culture in general admit and claim with his reductionist bias on the one hand and also with his Platonic opposite bias on the other hand, disconnected from one another that music is in the "physical waves" or /and in the abstract numerical ratio...( Goethe, Husserl and Whitehead are not in this game for example )

Music is in the vibrating body sound sources and in the productive gesturing body acting on it in some way to let him speak his own language ... Qualities come in time and in pre-conscious sensation way before the reflective post thinking or theorizing conscious moment ...

This drum TALK because the "drummer" a master, listen to his instrument and do not merely play it for another reason other than talking with it...

The source of music is in the productive gesturing body...But it is true even in piano interpretation of written classical music ...Musical time is a dual dimension of his own, completely different of physical metronomical unidimensional time...Pianist must play and interpret or better said EXPRESS themselves and the written score in this dual time dimension where the emotional body live and it is not written in the score how to do it...

Nobody taught the heart how to beat or how to talk ...Human speech gesture is born with music gesture...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4oQJZ2TEVI

Then you are right...

@mahgister

I suspect this physiological/vibrational aspect tends to be overlooked in western culture!

As an aside...

the best book i read about music/sound for decade is a book by a nigerian acoustician studying Yorumba talking drum and speech  at his beginning ..

It was painful for him and very hard to be published his doctorate thesis about "sound sources" the title of his book, Akpan J. Essien ...Too much original and too much out of the main common  walked road...

This book is astonishing, after being rejected In UK universities it was accepted at the Paris Sorbonne as thesis of the highest interest ...

Very interesting criticizing 2500 years of acoustic theory from Pythagoras to Helmholtz...

And i think he is right...hIs book tell us about the missing link in sound which is the vibrating sources  and this book is not far from new hearing theory based on ecological Affordance theory as J. J. Gibson created it for the visual field  and based on the non linear structure of the ears/brain working in the natural ecological niche of natural sounds perception in the time dependant domain , excluding any abstract frequencies based theory of hearing as unsifficient as explained by Magnasco and Oppenheim  ... Sound sources with their qualities are as real as the  physical sound waves they generated and our body is synchonized to them by our ability to produce sound with speech act or with our  integral body ...

https://www.academia.edu/54667709/The_Unfounded_Foundation_of_Hearing_Sciences?auto=download