As a programmer studying music, I found the "music theory for nerds" article [1] very helpful to get started, and then kept noticing how many general music lear

As a programmer studying music, I found the "music theory for nerds" article [1] very helpful to get started, and then kept noticing how many general music learning materials for beginners skip the fundamentals/justification, suggesting to just remember many non-arbitrary things that can be deduced, without explaining why they are that way. As the article itself mentions, the hard part is to figure which parts are arbitrary and which ones are not quite so arbitrary, but pretty sure an engineer can get an easy start by studying those bits first. Playing an instrument is nice and fun too, of course, but I think it's more helpful for intuition rather than actual understanding -- and those are usually best to combine. [1] https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/