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To me learning music is very similar to learning programming concepts. In the beginning it can all be very abstract and you don't immediately see how new concepts fit into the bigger picture. Until at one point along the way it suddenly "clicks" and it all comes together.

I've witnessed several people experience their "aha" moment in programming and in music. Before that moment they struggle hard and some even lost motivation. After that moment they all started making progress fast.

Having an instrument available helps and if you're interested in learning music I suggest starting to play and experiment. Don't think too much about the theory and the details. Just have fun, play along to your favorite songs. Dig deeper here and there when a subject piques your interest. And then someday that "aha" moment will arrive and a new world will open up.

With apologies in advance, because you probably have already done this...

Just count: 1 2 3 4 along with the pulse. First you hear the audience clap on 1 and 3, then some instrumental magic, and the audience is clapping on 2 and 4.

Is it possible that you are not hearing where the 1 begins? That can happen to the most experienced musicians sitting in on a complicated session and groaning "Where's the 'one' at, dude?"

The trick for you might be to become adept at locating the '1' beat. Start with toy problems, like children's rhymes, or even counting to four rhythmically.

Maybe your brain just doesn't work that way, as you have stated above, in which case you have an advantage over me in being aware of a perceptual lacuna and having a good analytical understanding of it.

Oh I have done this many times, when I said I've been studying this clip I really meant it because I truly want to hear it. LambdaComplex also mentioned tapping foot and counting and suddenly the count should change.

The result of my many experiments is that it is super hard to count 1 2 3 4 when they only clap twice. Most of the times, within seconds, I'm 'rhythmically' counting claps. Be it 'one three one three' or whatever numbers I chose, but the number only changes with the next clap so, well, that won't work because the audience doesn't change how they clap and I'm only using two different numbers.

I'm forcing myself hard to count to 4, basically saying another number in-between claps and if it works for an extended period of time I'm so focused on keeping my own momentum and keeping the 4-count going that I don't even hear the music just the claps and I try to remember to say the other number in between 1 and 3. That also absolutely fails because I'm already checked out of whatever I'm trying to hear

I also did experiments with my friends and some of them just hear when it happens without any counting or whatever. So I tried that as well - I would listen to this with my eyes closed and mark the point when I thought the clapping has changed. I think the results were statistically as good as my internal approximation of how long 40second is until I learned to hear the exact part of music I have to hear before I say 'yeah, it's that' - but it has nothing to do with my understanding of it.

It might help to know that the "instrumental magic" is that he literally adds a beat. Each bar has 4 beats and he switches where they're clapping by giving one bar 5 beats. You kind of have to stop/restart counting to intellectualize it.

Of course, but he adds the beat so smoothly and unobtrusively that the ordinary listener hears no glitch in the matrix. That is where the magic comes in.

So it looks like a perceptual thing, the result of how your physical brain has been wired, where you cannot perceive the phenomenon directly despite having a solid analytic understanding of the matter.

This reminds me of Frank Jackson's famous Knowledge Argument for Qualia

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

To endorse your perspective - I love music, play an instrument to a reasonable standard, enjoy a wide variety of different types of music, have an acute sensibility of tuning - can easily tell if something is out of tune.

Yet, can I recognise a chord? No chance. I’ve tried for years to train myself. Just can’t do it. It never clicks.

This is somehow related to why I hated introduction to programming at Uni. They would teach you the print function in python, and then ask you to do a full Pacman. Same with C ("why str1 == str2 doesnt work?"), they would treat it as a magical black box and answer questions that would have easily been answered by reading the language's manual or bible (K&R).

Then some of the students would say "I dont know where to start" and type random code, because they didnt teach nor the syntax nor the semantics...

Meanwhile the other ones who understood just went forward with it (they even made harder tests to comp. engineers!). Full brute-force practice (or work) doesnt equals good learning! With a good theory or methodology you can do a better learning.

Learning piano as an adult gave me a new sense of humility about people in fields other than mine

It took me about 3-4 separate attempts over the last 15 years to get music, and only this last couple of years I was finally able to crack the music notation, music theory, and music production nut. I'm by no means pro-level, but I can follow along and have a mostly intelligent conversation about anything musical and audio-related now, and also put out my own tracks that are based on this shockingly broad set of concepts that you can pick up as you're learning the world of music.

I had to attack this from every possible angle because I had practically the same experience as you. What ultimately worked for me was a combination of a piano teacher, going through the Adult Piano books, doing a few music production programs (including some online university ones) and surrounding myself (virtually) with people writing music regularly. Eventually, although through many ups and downs, it all made sense.

IMO the hardest part is having to scale the massive wall of terminology and basic concepts you have to grasp in order to speak music theory. Notes, durations, keys, chords, intervals, scales, modes, music notation, meter, various modifiers you would find on a sheet of music, etc.. in addition to being able to actually play those physically in the real world... It's a ton. You don't need any of it to actually write music that people will like, but if you want to feel like you can at least communicate about it to other humans, it really helps.

> I just cannot hear...what changed after

Tap your foot along to the people clapping in the video. They're clapping on 1 and 3 at the beginning, so you should count "1 2 3 4" as you tap your foot, with their claps being on "1" and "3". At/by the one-minute mark of the video, you'll realize that the claps are now on 2 and 4.

I actually don't like this attitude. In every case it's a mostly a matter of interest and effort. If you have those you can learn something.

I agree, that's what I told my friends, to just keep learning because if I could why wouldn't you. The point of my post is that I have realized how unhelpful that comment is because if someone told me that about music today... all I see is an insurmountable mountain ahead even though I've read quite a bit about it already

Mind you it's different with for example fluid dynamics or functional programming or even chemistry or biology, I have zero knowledge of it (nor interest) and all I know is that it's hard... but I know that if I spend years learning it I will succeed. I don't know how to explain this feeling I have with music - it's just foreign on another level

It can be very frustrating when someone you are trying to instruct just bails out on something that appears, at least to you, very simple to understand just by following some easy, clearly defined steps, and they exclaim: "No, I can't do this. It's just too complicated!"

In some cases, perhaps even most, this is due to an aggressive indifference to learning something new, but maybe it is not always the case that this is the explanation? It could be that the mechanism for understanding this one particular matter is genuinely missing or undeveloped in that person's brain.

It's because they treat music like a math problem -- something that only necessitates reading and writing. That's how you play math, after all, but that's not how music is played.