Literacy in Music

As literacy extends itself to understanding and analyzing information through reading, seeing, and absorbing, one of the areas that this becomes necessary is the arts. While the category of 'arts' can blanket many things, I'm interested specifically in music. Having extremely little knowledge of the mechanics of music, one can still hear it and make a response. The way our minds interpret things such as tone, loudness, an mood are fairly natural, and people can generally respond to music in some way, again without any knowledge of what is actually happening. On another level, people can interpret music basically. This correlates to hearing music and thinking it is 'good' or 'bad.' Perhaps you cannot explain in musical or lyrical (if lyrics exist) terms why your preference is as such, but you know whether or not it appeals to you or not. On another level, you the listener, is comprehensive of the music. You know about the artist, you can make educated comparisons, you can give the song genre tags. You can discuss the song as a comprehensive listener, making a salient analysis of the song. Similarly, there is the musician-listener. This person expresses an understanding and knowledge of a song from a musical standpoint, specifically what they are hearing as a process of building individual sounds and parts into a whole product.

As nearly every other field, there are various levels of literacy one has to approach a given subject and situation. With music, I feel as though most people have some sort of literacy towards it, even if it is just basic physiological reactions. Especially here at Emerson, it seems so many people are passionate about music, be it finding the 'next' band before someone else, playing music, or simply liking it a whole lot.

So, I'm curious. If this is true, and music does affect nearly everyone as I seem to think, what music affects you? Why?
Why not give a song, why it affects you, and where you stand on the song.
And sometimes you cannot explain it, I have had songs rock me to my core, and I have no idea why.
I'm curious!