[ajuc]

I'm not a good musician by any means, never had music education apart from the primary school which was abysmal. I can't recognise pure tones (just the intervals). I still can play any song I hear on guitar or keyboard "good enough" so that people have fun singing to it.

The huge reveal to me was the same - notes doesn't matter - the intervals make the song recognizable. People change notes all the time when singing (jump octaves, start again lower to adjust to others, etc).

So on amateur level it's really just starting on random place on keyboard and guessing which note will sound "right" after that. Everybody hear if the next note is higher or lover, so it's just "was that +1, +2, or +3?" Usually you can guess, if not - start again. Very easy and makes playing instruments so fun.

I never understood why they bother kids with these complicated drawings and hashes and be-mols, if they could've just wrote all songs as "start at this note, and jump by +2, +3, -5, ...".

[entropy_]

Some notation systems do exactly that. For example, the notation used for byzantine chanting: http://www.byzantinechant.org/notation/Table%20of%20Byzantin...