OK, here's my minute or two. I have to take it now.
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Why, do you think, this music makes you feel emotion? Is it the dynamic contrast? The twisting of familiar sounds? The reference to similar music you have heard? Do you think this music would generate the same emotions in someone hearing the style for the first time. Many current theories of emotion in music are based on expectation or reference. Does modern music create such references not to other music, but to outside sounds? Does it work on a purely evolutionary level? (Loud sounds=danger). Does it build up conflicts and resolutions using factors other than pitch?
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I'm not sure what you mean by "dynamic contrast." Contrast is certainly part of it, but that's part of all music. Twisting of familiar sounds is certainly part of it. I do enjoy hearing sounds out of their ordinary contexts... But then, I enjoy sounds in their ordinary contexts, too. Here in my friend's apartment in the Village, I was awakened by an impact drill, then, after I was awake, I became aware of car horns and sirens and the various sounds of a building. That's all very pleasing. (Cage pointed out once to someone asking much the same kind of question about emotion that we make emotional responses to all sorts of things. A thunderstorm can elicit an emotional response. For me it's largely the pleasure of hearing sudden loud rich (complex) sounds.
I don't know how it works with other people, but I doubt that hearing something for the first time would work very often. I know that it
has worked at least once. Beatriz Ferreyra first heard electroacoustic music at a "concert collectif" in 1963. She knew right away that that's what she wanted to do. (Forty four years later, she's still doing it, by the way!)
I don't think it's an evolutionary thing. Doesn't seem so to me. (See my comment in my previous post about loud sounds.)
Very much so can conflicts and resolutions be built up with factors other than pitch. I'm surprised by how much ink has been spilled (and pixels... well, whatever you do with pixels) insisting that tonality is the only way to do conflict and resolution. You can do it with rows, as any half-way decent twelve-tone piece will show. Of course, rows still means pitch. You can do it with rhythm, with dynamics, with harmony (meaning any sounding together of two or more sounds). With any change, from pitches to complex sounds, with fast to slow, feedback to cows mooing--anything, really.
I listen to a lot of music which rather ignores the whole issue of expectation and reference--or maybe it just creates its own. I like improv--and if that's done well, you simply don't know what you'll be hearing next. Which I like. I like the feeling of imbalance, of surprise, of having patterns seem to be building up only to break into other patterns or no patterns at all (if that's even philosophically possible--I'm not at all sure that it is.)
So, there's my story. And I'm stickin' to it.