Resonant Recall: A Theoretical Framework for Personalized, Music-Anchored Affective Persistence

Abstract

This document sets out a theoretical framework — not a finding — for a proposed approach in which a person's own deeply meaningful music serves as the substrate for an intervention intended to extend the positive affective state that music evokes beyond the listening session itself. The framework is pre-empirical: hypotheses are stated to be falsifiable, mechanisms are ranked by evidence, and the weakest assumptions are named rather than concealed. This third edition makes a structural revision. Across two prior editions, every mechanism the framework borrowed from physics has failed under examination while the intuition beneath it survived relocation into a different register. The edition therefore moves the framework's load-bearing weight out of the physics register (resonance, entrainment, synchronization) and into the psychological one (music-evoked autobiographical memory, trait absorption, default-mode-network dynamics, self-transcendent experience), where validated instruments and a real literature exist. It engages the 1983 US Army/CIA assessment of the Gateway Process as a candid historical case study in what happens when that relocation is refused, and it retires auditory entrainment from a driving mechanism to a hypothesis the author expects to fail. It resolves a genuine contradiction between the framework's own engine (autobiographical memory, which requires the default mode network engaged) and its experiential target (self-transcendence, which requires that network quiet) by proposing a falsifiable two-phase model in which the transition between them, rather than either state, is what persists. A further hypothesis would test, with music as the intervention, whether interhemispheric connectivity is cause or correlate of felt wholeness. No clinical claims are made or implied.