I'm picking a nit, but I think holding that these changes are measurable is important to me because that is the quality that deflates mysticism, in general one of my missions in life. To me, if anything different between two items is discernible, that means that if the quality that is different is isolated, it can, in fact, be measured by some appropriate unit of measure. For instance, variation in touch, from one note to the next, can be quantified in units of velocity and/or volume; pitch, in cents, etc.
I guess you are more advanced than I am on my Grand Theory of Music, then. I still haven't quite worked out how all those small, measurable, and discernable differences make one performance into something that drops your jaw and brings tears to your eyes, and another performance just makes you shrug and say, "That was pretty good." Being able to measure them doesn't necessarily make you understand them, unless you are a much more dedicated theorist than I am... ;-)
Seriously, though, I'm sure you grasp that you don't have to subscribe to mysticism to realise that you may not be able to understand something perfectly. I'm no mystic, I have never hugged a tree or had my spirit leave my body, but I know that some music talks to me in a barely understood language, and some music doesn't, and I don't know why exactly, though I really want to know how and why, and may never find out EVERYTHING about it.
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