Music presents logical intuitions that allow us to examine it within the lens of the rationality types of so-called "great cultures." These logical intuitions can be represented in two formulas of musical process, or movement as a "basic-level" category (E. Rosch). They reflect the fundamental property of consciousness to answer the questions "what" and "what" using musical language. Contrasting responses to these questions depend on the types of coherence of cognitively distinguished tones and manifest themselves beginning with the level of the musical-verbal phrase (proposition). Cognitive salience indicates types of rationality that can be recognized in the language of music and the language of music description as substantial, corporeal, and processual, or perceptual. The author's proposed research methodology is scalable across different regions of the world based on the study of conceptual metaphors, which help to assemble key musical concepts scattered across diverse genres into a coherent image. On this path, it is important not to impose “figurative schemes” (M. Johnson) on the material being studied, but to rely on the analysis of the principles of nomination of traditional melodies (O.A. Pashina) and their categorization (G.B. Shamilli), which conveys a thousand-year experience of observing musical phenomena.
