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.