I'm a professional engineer and amateur musician. I've always made music a bit of an engineering puzzle and I don't necessarily consider that a problem. The thi

I'm a professional engineer and amateur musician. I've always made music a bit of an engineering puzzle and I don't necessarily consider that a problem. The thing about engineering music is that once you've established some soft constraints, there's still a ton of room for experimentation. And when you have a good handle on following the rules, breaking them can lead to interesting places too. I wrestled with temperaments for a bit before realizing that the "engineering rules" of music (at least at the compositional layer) are not dictated by physics but by culture. Equal temperament is in some sense "arbitrary", but because it's what people are used to hearing and performing music in, you have to just accept it as an axiom and move on (unless you're setting out with the express intent of challenging that norm, in which case more power to you). Also when you delve into world music (particularly from India or the Middle East) you quickly learn that twelve-tone octaves are also arbitrary and that musicians in those regions regularly perform tones that don't fit in that model and have other common musical idioms that western music theory is poorly equipped for because our common music theory originated from a particular western European style from a particular era. My hope for the future of music notation is that we recognize this and welcome more forms of music theory/notation for different styles of music just like we recognize different strengths of different programming languages.