>I can't play an instrument. I have tried more than once, and each time I got as far as being able to make roughly the right noises without ever understanding why they were the right noises. The problem was never the practice. It was that every explanation of music theory seemed to miss out the fundamental reasons for how and why things are the way they are.

You can’t play an instrument because you failed to practice. Playing an instrument doesn’t require knowing theory. It certainly helps with being a musician, however, which is a completely different thing.

That aside, the way the author goes about explaining “music theory” here is exactly how one prevents themselves from ever producing an actual piece of music. Yes, it’s good to understand the mechanics of how sounds and chords work under the hood, but one thing I’ve learned in my nearly 30 years of making and recording music is that thinking is the enemy of creating art. This framework introduces far too much cognitive overhead and gets in the way of what we’re really trying to do, which is communicating emotion. What is written in this article is has been known for a very, very long time, but we still use the more common version of music theory because it abstracts much of this away so that it doesn’t get in the way.