Metronomed poetry as detoxed music

Music is harmful. Dance is useful, and often relies on music. Let's replace the music aiding dance with something less harmful and just as effective.

Music, sans lyrics, is complex enough to form coherent memories. Enjoyable music is simple and structured enough to be partly predictable. The combination makes music dangerously memorable. Lyrics are spoken in parallel with music, and so naturally associate with those memories.

Pure lyrics — essentially, poetry — are memorable at a lower, safe level. Emotional effects of music, at least from casual listening, likewise depend on rhythm and tone, beyond mere lyrics. Poetry written just as poetry follows higher standards of content than popular music's lyrics — on average, from what I've seen. Poetry-writing, as a career, is less contagious and less oversupplied than music production, and has more skill-overlap with more useful jobs.

Recited poetry is conceptually halfway to music, but with very little of the harm.

Music enables dance by synchronising people's moves. In concert/performance dance, it also gives distinctive cues for the moves, which helps you remember their order.

A single sound repeated at a constant interval, as by a metronome, is too simple to incidentally memorise. When have you had the dripping of a faucet or the hum of a dishwasher replay as an earworm? Simple patterns like that, when loud enough for all to hear, suffice to synchronise the crowd, almost as well as full music.

Reciting poetry to a metronome is more appealing than a mere ticking, and aligns words with times. Treating words as sounds, each phrase in a metronomed poem acts as an auditory cue for an action, such as a dance move.

In theory, poetry recited alongside a clear, trivial rhythm makes for the perfect dance music replacement.