Very clearly. The author constructed a melody from first principles in the article. You can take any song, deconstruct it using the information in there and begin to see why it sounds nice.
> This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts
This is a music theory lecture with code examples. Hardly “not-so-important”.
> mistaking some math for anything that would help `programmers` (?) understand music.
Compared to the lessons on https://www.musictheory.net this is definitely programmer/engineer friendly. It’s better than my old go-to at https://www.lightnote.co
It is a trope amongst gigging musicians that over-intellectualizing the feels is a massive no-no.
Hence the joke about Db being the saddest chord... also Phil Collins said that, he would know :-D... ...and C# being the most evil chord. Hilarious.
I persist: "before you can be good, you first have to be bad" is more helpful music theory than that whole JavaScript visuals page.