[Jeff_Brown]

> I enjoy music as a pattern matching exercise

Me too, writ very broadly. I'll hear a melody reflect the way a thought or a story develops, instrumentation reflecting the way conversation or traffic behaves. It's completely abstract and yet I feel like music reflects reality, and its deviations from the "truth" comment on reality.

I might just be weird. But if in fact a lot of people derive pleasure from the correspondence between music and reality, then part of a composer's job is to create such correspondences, bearing in mind that every listener is going to draw different ones. They have to look for the "average interpretation".

It's a weird job.