[mathattack]

This is a topic I've been getting very interested in lately. The correlation between music and math/technology success is high. I used to think it was that "disciplined people who like to be inside do both".

Now I think there may be some causality. Learning music is an intro to binary math. (2 half notes in a whole note. Two quarter notes in a half note.)

I haven't seen a good empirical study to try and split this apart.

[agumonkey]

The time subdivision is barely the tip of the visible surface to me[1]. The music itself, the superimposed flows of time relationships and frequency relationships (melody, rhythm, harmony), is something very wide and when you're finally able to parse and follow along it's a very soothing mental experience. It's really separating a whole into different views, and recombining them (almost) on the fly, not very different to data transformation. Also, in my case, the conservation of momentum in sticks, when trying to play jazz drum parts was really close to physics. You can't sustain complex and fast movement like these if you don't think deeply about your limb/joints and in more abstract ways and when you do so, it flips everything upside down (you almost rotate your sticks backward)

Music is invisible at first, the journey between unconscious appreciation and the 'parsing' stage is long, and full of counter intuitive realizations, which to me, is the same whatever domain your try to understand.

Another parallel is the way we interface with these. There's the remote long round trip way and the direct tangible way. For computers : large systems requiring pauses in your knowledge acquisition, think ~minutes build times (this is the main view on computers, lisp OSes and smalltalk browsers are unknown to many) vs REPLs. In music there's music theory[1], lots of wasteful (borderline absurd) ceremony and delay before reaching to the music itself, and just following along, failing and trying again (here I think the most used one is the direct, you buy an instrument and "play" without real understanding, opposite of computers).

Hoping I wasn't too blurry.

[1] Have you seen Chris Ford Functional Composition talk ? https://www.google.com/search?q=chris+ford+functional+compos... (youtube/skillsmater hosted) He manage to layer music theory ideas in a very simple manner in one hour, with direct rendering of what they are. Much more efficient than what I could experience or see in music classes younger (I understand that kid psychology is different especially in groups). It's really not very profound and actually it won't teach you music, just reference ideas needed to then impregnate the whole subject through your won learning process (I believe it's a 10000hour thing).