[KidComputer]

> It's looking at real life

Collecting observations aka data.

> deriving the mathematical laws that govern what you see

Fitting a model.

> Your neural network doesn't tell you what features make songs distinct

It literally learns better features that you could ever come up with by hand. This is why CNNs do better in computer vision that hand engineered filters.

> I guarantee you they'd do a better job, and their models would work on a commadore64, with real time training.

LOL if you think that a room full of people can listen to TBs of audio data, decide what mathematical functions when combined together are better descriptors of that data than a DL model learning its features.

You don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about.