Music, like any other artistic creation, has form and content. Its form has harmony and time. Harmony is the objective form of the sound and time corresponds to life. The form is like a symbol; it is a means of communication that goes beyond, yet is less than, its true meaning. Therefore, music as a symbol is an æsthetic concept behind which we hide unconscious fantasies.

The authors base their analysis on study of language, the history of instruments, anthropology, and other subjects. They conclude that music is that which recalls mother's voice, and that it is the most regressive form of sublimation, representing one's own voice, flatus, and the sounds of fecal material and urine and of coitus. These auditory experiences contribute to the devising of instruments and the need for musical creation. Man wants to find in the external world something similar to the sounds, both his mother's and his own, heard in his infancy. He re-creates them in his musical activities.