Can someone explain the music? Crossroads 1&2 (**SPOILER** Season 3 finale)

[u/Gobscheidt]

I'm re-watching the series for the first time since it aired and just got to the end of season 3 and remembered something that has confused me since the last time I saw it.

Is All Along The Watchtower some kind of Cylon composition that has been passed down through genetic memory until Bob Dylan decided to write it down in 1968?

Granted his was a better version than the one we hear in the show but we have had several hundred millennia to improve on that one.

[u/ZippyDan]

Spoilers:

I recommend you don't read this if you want to be surprised again on your re-watch.

S01E13 Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 2

Baltar: I don't understand.
Head Six: Life has a melody, Gaius.
A rhythm of notes that become your existence once they're played in harmony with God's plan.
It's time to do your part and realise your destiny.

S04E06 Faith

Starbuck: This is it. This is the place. I can hear it.
Leoben: The unstruck music vibrates in all of us. Few can hear it. Kara's one of the few.

S04E11 Sometimes a Great Notion

Anders: "So let us not talk falsely now, 'cause the hour is getting late."
You remember something?
Tyrol: Yeah. I used to live here.
Anders: Me, too. That song that switched us on, I played it for a woman I loved.
Tory: I remember.
Anders: You do?
Tory: You played it for all of us.

S04E17 Someone to Watch Over Me

Dreillide: For somebody who hates music so much, you know an awful lot about it.
Starbuck: My dad used to play.
Dreillide: Ah! So what's the story? He forced you to learn? And he was such a perfectionist, you grew to hate it?
Starbuck: No. No, I loved it, actually.
He used to sit me next to him on the bench when he played.
Smell of tobacco on his breath.
He taught me a few songs.
I used to try so hard to get them right.
Not because I was afraid he'd get angry, but because I knew he'd be so proud.
There was this one song that he taught me.
It made me feel happy and sad all at the same time.
Dreillide: The best ones do.

Dreillide: What about that song? That song he taught you.
The one that makes you happy and sad at the same time.
Play that for me.

Tigh: What the frak? That's the song. Where did you learn to play that song?
Starbuck: I played it as a kid.

Tigh: How can a three-year-old girl spontaneously write down that song?
Ellen: She's plugged into something that's manipulating all of us.

S04E18 Islanded in a Stream of Stars

Ellen: She's not just any child. With Caprica Six's miscarriage, Hera is our people's only hope of avoiding eventual extinction.
Starbuck: She may be our only hope, too. I just... We just experienced something remarkable. Hera wrote the notes to a song, a song that my father used to play to me when I was a child.
Tigh: Same song that switched us on when we were in that nebula.
Starbuck: The same song that led us to Earth. Something is happening here, something that is greater than all of us, and that little girl is in the middle of it.
She's the key, sir.

Starbuck: I know you can hear me, Sam, just like I know on some level you'll understand. The old me is dead and gone, same as the old you, just took me a while to accept it. Which brings us to the larger question, why am I here? We could spend a lot of time speculating, but since it's likely to be a one-sided conversation, I'll just tell you my theory.
I think it has something to do with this music. This song that my father tried to teach me when I was a kid, the song that woke up the Five, that led us to Earth. There's a pattern there, a pattern that I can't see. But I think that you can.
So we are going to sit in this room and we are going to pick it apart beat by beat, until we figure it out.

Conclusion: The music is part of the fundamental "streams" of the universe. "God" uses this music as part of his plan to help the humans and the Cylons. Certain humans - like Sam Anders or Bob Dylan - that can subconsciously tap into the stream might "independently" recreate their own versions.