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You can understand music without being able to read music. I know a fairly famous guitarist who can tell you all about voicings, harmonization, and any other bit of music theory you'd care to know about. He uses all this to write and improvise music. You put a piece of music in front of him and he'll take five minutes to figure it out. He'll be counting lines and spaces and humming notes to do that.

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How is "counting lines and spaces" not reading?

Technically it is "reading music", but it's so slow that learning a piece takes much longer than it should. Over the years I've had a couple motivational spurts where I felt like playing piano again, and lack of frequent exposure to sheet music slowed my reading skills down to a crawl.

Reading music is the ability to look at a line of music and being able to hear it in your head, or at the very least play it back almost immediately on the instrument of your choice. My buddy's music "reading" ability is more on the order of a kid who doesn't really read but knows a few words. He's effectively illiterate, but he's not stupid and can figure it out with difficulty.

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