> It's only taught as a series of facts to remember if you're not involved in practical application.. AKA actually playing music. First, no. I went hard into m

> It's only taught as a series of facts to remember if you're not involved in practical application.. AKA actually playing music. First, no. I went hard into music in my early life, I both learned basic piano and intermediate saxophone, and I went through the full suite of band/orchestra/jazz/soloing, to the point where I was a fairly decent-ish musician. It's not until later that people get taught this stuff in my experience, I struggled with any practical connection to music theory probably until late middle-school. But second, what you're describing is exactly why the article is useful; because the people who are trying to get into music haven't played an instrument for so long that they can improvise on it and start to put together intuitively that certain ratios or key signatures or whatever sound good. What happens with people who are taught to play instruments is that they spend a lot of time honing those instincts by playing the instrument, but at the same time, what they're playing is constantly attached to this notation so that when they intuitively connect that minor/major/augmented chords sound good or bad in different situations, they simultaneously connect them to the notation as a way of expressing those concepts. People who don't have formal instruction don't go through that process the same way. They might be composing music without ever thinking about the notation. And when they go to seek out instruction or learn more about techniques, they don't have a bridge to connect their intuitions about what does and doesn't sound good with the notation, everyone just expects them to find the notation intuitive. I had a lot of formal instruction on playing jazz. A lot of it was about honing intuition, listening to jazz, replaying other famous improve tracks, improving over those tracks, memorizing licks. But that intuition and practical experience was also coupled with being able to break down and describe what those other musicians were doing. That required a shared notation that I could understand, it required being able to understand what an instructor meant when they talked about why certain riffs worked or common ways to resolve a run of notes if I got lost in the middle of an improv solo and didn't what to do next. But I could follow that instruction because I knew the notation and I had a connection between my practical experience of how music sounds and the formal notation about key signatures and chords and crud. A lot of people don't have that because they haven't spent X years learning to read sheet music. Articles like this are helpful for them.