It's a fun webpage about a programmer dipping their toes in the very most basic elements of music and documenting some of their current understanding.Imagine I wrote an article called "Programming for musicians" that was mostly about how to turn your computer on and install homebrew[1] and finished by showing you step by step how to cut and paste "hello world" in javascript from stack overflow. You might rightly say that while "programming-adjacent" the article didn't really address programming.

Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory. So this is super-basic music theory of the level that you couldn't really expect to pass high school music without knowing. I've picked associated board because this is the most generic music theory syllabus possible, and grade 5 is very basic. If you were actually studying music you'd go way way beyond this.

To a first approximation none of this is in the article. It also doesn't have any more advanced topics (functional harmony, orchestration, voice leading, transposition, key/scale relationships, advanced rhythmic concepts etc). That's why I say the article isn't really music theory.

And then for completeness, when I say that what is music theory is wildly misleading I'm talking about things like "chords are notes stacked in thirds". There's so much wrong about about this it's hard to even start, but for starters it's an if and only if when it really shouldn't be. Notes stacked in thirds are chords, but there are a whole heck of a lot of chords that aren't stacked in thirds. It's like if I said "even numbers are 4 and 6". It's like sure, but there's more to it than that.

[1] without mentioning that this was only needed if you were using a mac

[2] https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/music-theo...

> You say that the article isn't music theory but don't bother to say why.

His response sounded kind of gatekeep-y to me. Kind of like an academic with theoretical knowledge, but no practical experience.

Many great musicians never learned proper music theory. Innovation comes from outside, not from inside the establishment.

I think what he means as music theory is the next step after what this (blatantly AI-written, but passable) article talks about. This is the part that you take for granted, but it certainly is music theory in the same way that Peano's axioms are number theory even though you don't use them explicitly.

At many western music schools, if piano isn’t your first instrument, it is compulsory to study piano as a second instrument. The reason for this is that it really helps when understanding harmony. You also do ear training, which is meant to solve the problem I think you’re describing. I expect you would find ear training resources on youtube or something now but I did it the old-fashioned way where you start by listening when people play major / minor chords, all the intervals, learn to recognize inversions etc and then move on to doing transcriptions of music you like. I have box files full of transcriptions I did when learning. But Levine (for example) includes some ear training advice.

> I am still not able to recognize a sound and understand what note that is

That is called "perfect pitch" and it is not necessary to play music. It's very rare to have perfect pitch, and it seems to be innate, not something you learn.

Contextual note recognition (relative pitch) is what musicians normally use to jam. It comes with practice and contextual clues that you pick up over tens of years (including familiarity with your jammate's instrument, even if it's not the one you play; familiarity with multiple eras of music theory; pure practice), so this shouldn't be your #1 priority since it just comes along for free (or a bit of practice), as you learn. Music playing 101 is just... playing music in your instrument. You don't need to recognize notes until you want to jam, which comes years after you start playing an instrument.

Some people seem to just be physically unable to distinguish relative pitch though.

You might want to start here: https://www.musictheory.net/ (not affiliated, I just think it's a very good resource for Music Theory 101).

Doesn't look like really a "v2" to me, rather v1 a bit re-arranged. A true "theory" able to explain present music (or even Jazz from the seventies) and also support its creation is still widely lacking, or just a naive variation of what was used for classical music. Tymoczko & co go a bit in a more general/useful direction where the theory eventually can also be used to define algorithms which can "compose" credible contemporary music, but still a long way to go. The latter is like the "litmus test" from my humble point of view whether a theory is indeed useful.

I don't know it personally but skimming it looks pretty good.

If you like that book, you might also enjoy David Huron's books on voice leading and anticipation. I have not read the book you referenced, but from the description it seems like a similar approach.