ETA: he did eventually learn how to read music:
“I learnt to read music after I bought the Roland MC8 Microcomposer, because it then became essential for me. … I learnt music by ear and have picked up most of my technical knowledge through the sessions and gigs.”
https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/ronnys-electro-music-caba...
The Roland MC-8 MicroComposer by the Roland Corporation was introduced in early 1977 at a list price of US$4,795 (¥1,200,000 JPY) ... it was considered revolutionary at the time, introducing features such as a keypad to enter note information and 16 kilobytes of random access memory which allowed a maximum sequence length of 5200 notes, a huge step forward from the 8-16 step sequencers ... Roland switched to the then brand new Intel 8080A 8-bit microprocessor and increased the RAM from 512 bytes to 16KB, allowing storage of over 5,300 notes, which could be entered via the calculator keyboard (the preferred method) or recorded in real-time (not so easy). Backup was via cassette and could take 45 minutes to an hour for a three- or four-minute piece of music to back up and verify. The memory was volatile, so a loss of power meant complete loss of data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MC-8_Microcomposer
Only 200 were made, but it's possible he purchased it second-hand, as he had done for the Moog that was once owned by Tangerine Dream.
"You should be able to get something out of a machine that is better than an average musician."
I think he was even more `absolutely right` than he even thought
Music before recordings was much closer to jam-band style than people realize; and in the Middle Ages you could hear substantial differences in the same song just by traveling a few tens of miles.
Now, I had learned music theory and sheet music, which immediately disqualified me from a career in punk rock. But the music store sold modern pop music as well. It wasn't long before I had Tina Turner, Billy Idol, and Depeche Mode songbooks.
The Billy Idol songbook was especially interesting, as it included guitar tabulature. The text explained how Billy's guitarist, Steve Stevens, used novel techniques to achieve his sound.
Now I did not play guitar, so the tabulature was merely a visual curiosity for me, but me and my sister had some Casio keyboards from Toys-R-Us, in addition to my saxophones. So I would try and play the tunes I knew best from the songbooks.
But it was really weird, because when I played the melodies according to the sheet music, it didn't sound (musically) like the band on the radio. In fact, there was a Howard Jones song that would jar me into a Christmas spirit, because of a certain run of notes in a particular key. But sometimes the rhythms were approximated, or the notes were off.
I lost interest in purchasing these song books. I think it eventually became clear that the artists were not composing pop songs by writing sheet music, but someone with a degree, taking a break from their McDonald's job, was listening to the songs and transcribing them to conventional sheet music.
Many years later, I joined a large secular chorus of mixed voices. The sheet music we received included Rogers & Hammerstein, and John Rutter arrangements. That sheet music was exactly the remedy to restore my faith again, and my high school studies were finally vindicated for a life of non-profit volunteer service!
You lose more evolved vocabulary and formal grammatical structures, but you gain a liveliness and a colloquial dexterity that bookish people often lack.
You can also be more inventive in your metaphors and figures of speech, instead of relying on the usual stock cliches - something often seen in oral interviews with illiterate folk.
In the case of music, you virtually always only hear the music, and the written down form is just a formalisation of said music.
In the case of language, a vast corpus of information (the majority of it) is available only in written form, with only recent proliferation of recorded audiobooks.
Additionally written text is a separate form of language with its own beauty and particularity, while in the case of music notation it is just an imperfect way of making notes of music. So many of the parts and details which make music beautiful are absent from the vast majority of partitures.
I find such a striking difference between notation that just swims in front of my eyes:
https://musescore.com/user/14835636/scores/6186772
And a bar graph which I can hear when muted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o
I have a similar issue with algebraic notation, the signifier and signified never connects. So much misery spending hours with a mass of punctuated greek in a cs paper to discover it describes a triangle. The decryption is not even sticky, I look away for a second and it immediately re-encrypts back to soup.
I don't understand why since programming languages having always felt natural and something I learned as a pre-teen just by being left alone with a BBC micro and a "type in a game" book.
Improvisation goes back as far as music and even some classical music has improvised elements (cadenzas were traditionally improvised before they became commonly notated, Baroque music scored for continuo essentially provides a bassline and chord changes, albeit the chords given in an archaic form (figured bass) that is not widely known by contemporary musicians.
The most amazing improvisers, it turns out, are professional church organists (think the ones who work for the largest churches/cathedrals, not the grandmas playing a church warbler at the corner parish, but sometimes them too). When I auditioned for the Holy Name Cathedral Choir, I wanted to sing a piece by Massenet, but I had lost my original sheet music halfway through trying to transcribe a cleaner copy so I had a melody line and only a few parts of the piano accompaniment. The (assistant!) organist who accompanied me at my audition site-improvised an accompaniment for the piece that was, in my opinion, actually better than the written accompaniment I had lost.
That said, being able to read music can be a sort of superpower. So many times on church gigs, I’ve had guitar players be astonished by my ability to pull chord changes out of piano/organ parts without notated chords. Certainly, some aspects of music are hard to convey in notation. Swung rhythm is a particularly notable case where you’re playing something halfway between a triplet rhythm of ♩♪ and a dotted rhythm (insufficient Unicode to write a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth). The early transmission of jazz music to European composers by way of sheet music led to them missing out on the rhythmic aspects but picking up some of the harmonic novelties. A common injunction to musicians is to play the music, not the notes.
"It doesn't matter if people know what they are doing, if they can just do it intuitively"