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You're wrong about categories of analogy, but I don't blame you - analogies are a pretty slippery slopes. In particular, you're most likely conflating these because of the implementation detail - you write HTML, so writing music is an analogy. Not really - writing HTML is closer to performing music.

You can teach almost everyone to perform "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on piano or "Smoke on the Water" on guitar within 15 minutes, both of which are de facto "Hello world!" equivalents to many aspiring musicians.

EDIT: Removed attempt at drawing a HTML/music analogy which could be closer to truth. It is really fruitless endeavour, makes no sense.

I disagree. The rendering engine of the browser is the performer who looks at my script(HTML/CSS/JS) and produce the final result for the visitors to the web page. Writing HTML is not closer to performing music, but actually closer to composing music, if you will.

Also, I think although knowing theory would help you play a song with an instrument, it's not required, is it? More likely knowing music theory is for understanding/appreciation of the composition/structure of the music. So no, playing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on an instrument is NOT equivalent to writing "Hello world!" program. On the other hand, composing a super simple but complete song is closer to writing a "Hello world!" (or a Fibonacci series) program.

CSS is probably a better analogy for performing music. You generally keep the same content, but presentation is important.

Well I think there are a number of things going on here... If the equivalent set of documents were created for programming you might have all sorts of concepts ranging from methods, classes, pointers, monads, program structure, design, markup, protocols, API, ... and a whole bunch of other stuff. A newbie to programming would be completely overwhelmed and unable to put any of it into context.

I know for me, the stage at which I was doing the very simple HTML examples you listed was when I was 13. Back when you're that young, just playing around with that stuff was SO FUN for some reason. As a 29 year old guy if I were just starting out I'd be much more inclined to try to skip that step and make stuff more real-world.

The equivalent in music theory would be simply playing around with the white keys on the piano (C major). Making interesting melodies (but ultimately kinda boring melodies like mary had a little lamb). To your young ears, this would be very interesting and fun. You'd play around with this for weeks and weeks and make small observations. For example, you might notice B->C has a sense of resolution to end the melody, or internalizing what C->G feels like by just playing it a lot and singing it. You might notice that E->F feels smaller and has more of a "pull" to it than A->B (in the context of C major). It's this stage that's so crucial for later understanding music theory.

Adults want to skip the simple exploration and just dive right into Beethoven. We think we can use our strong analytical sense to just book-learn music theory. What I've learned is that it's much more fruitful to make observations first and then learn what music theory calls those observations.

When you're writing HTML at 13 years old, you don't really know the high level concept of a "mark-up language" and how it might be manifested, you just know that there are parts in angle brackets that don't show up on the page but control the content. Later in high school when you learn the concept of a mark-up language you make that connection to HTML with extreme ease because all those memories of changing background="green" to background="black" flood back to you.

I understand it's important to have plenty of intuition, but as an adult I do want to speed up the learning process. That's one of reasons I set out to learn the theories. My main goal is to be able write songs of quality at least slightly above total crap.

Maybe I have not found the right learning materials or correct way, or maybe because I am the type of persons who need to have lots of hands-on exercises to be able to grasp new concepts.

Sure, programmers also need to know all sorts of things you listed, but armed with only a few concepts, a newbie can start to write simple programs from the very beginning, in the forms of piecemeal topic-focused little exercises. The result of each exercise is a fully functioning program. I wish I can find a similarly structured music theory course that uses the same approach. Also, are there projects in music which are similar to ProjectEuler.net or the likes, where you can do focused practice on specific topic? I would be happy to pay for those services.

> As an adult I do want to speed up the learning process

I understand the desire but it's also very important to realize that these things take a LONG time to develop. You can't really expect yourself to grasp chord progressions until you have a firm understanding in scales and you can't just gloss over it and be familiar with it, you have to internalize it. You have to get scales under your fingers... you have to feel the pull of the leading tone to the tonic... you have to be able to sing them and know them inside and out or your knowledge of chord progressions will be built on a shaky foundation.

The equivalent to project euler would be to just compose your own songs. Seriously, compose then analyze. Since music is subjective there's no way to say, "you're song is correct, move on to the next song". Also, there's no real correlation between song writing and theory knowledge that I know of. You can know about theory a lot but still not be good at writing songs. Also knowing theory doesn't make you a good musician by any stretch of the imagination. Music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive (i.e. it doesn't tell you HOW to write or what you should write, but rather is just a language to describe what you've written)

You can know about programming like if you're good at math you probably have a sense of what programming is about but until you sit down and type out some code, you're likely to not be any good at programming.

> My main goal is to be able write songs of quality at least slightly above total crap.

You will write total crap. The best thing you can do is come to terms that you'll write crap probably for years and that's okay. Here's the first song I ever wrote way long ago:

http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/4dd02b77f3dc95b0de340c...

Bleh... not exactly something I'm super proud of other than the fact that I did indeed finish it and I was honest with myself about what level of song I could write at the time that I wrote it. I'm still not a super great musician, but I've at least improved every song since that one!

A very nice 'Lullaby', I enjoyed it, thanks. Also thank you for the tips.

> Since music is subjective there's no way to say, "you're song is correct, move on to the next song".

Are there some kind of music "compiler" or "linter" for educational purpose out there, which check for a song's obvious and blatant violations of fundamental composing principles? This might helps beginners to hone in on the basics. I know the rules are meant to be broken later, but at the beginning, the 'compiler/linter' is efficient and cost effective in guiding the student and checking their practice work.

Thank you :)

I think a "linter" like that would be kind of like a linter for analyzing poetry or short stories. It's so subjective that the most it could do would be offer very superficial suggestions without really understanding context. Things like "does it have a rhyming scheme and meter". And that's not that useful because some poetry doesn't rhyme, and some doesn't adhere to a meter.

Like, is 50 Shades of Grey bad writing? some might say so... but can you deny the popularity of it? Are the people that enjoyed reading that book wrong for enjoying it? Trying to apply an objective measure to quality of writing or music is futile, I think. Same goes for music. You might write a song that some stuffy old classical music PhD would scoff at but maybe children LOVE it. How could a linter possibly know that?

I say embrace the subjectivity of it. Write a song, ask people what they think of it. Accept that you will not write super great songs right away and just keep writing and experimenting. Use theory as a language to explain what you've done in songs you wrote and songs that you like.

Good luck!!

One of the best way to learn music theory (much of which is harmony) is to play jazz, or jazz-inspired styles of music – you'll get the most exposure to the most diverse array of concepts in the least amount of time (not saying it will be a short amount of time – just compared to, say, being a classical musician). The emphasis on improvisation requires players to have comprehensive understanding of the underlying harmonic concepts – you can play jazz completely by ear, but this is not the norm by any means.

As a couple of commenters have said, your HTML analogy just doesn't seem to fit here, music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. The best way to learn it is through playing music, a lot, and then using concepts from music theory to go back and gain more insight into why certain things sound the way they do, why certain progressions work well, why an F natural sounds ethereal and sublime on top of a B∆9 chord while an E natural sounds awful, and so on.

Again, I believe the optimal way to learn music concepts is to play (not study) music.

If jazz doesn't interest you, I would ask you what your musical goals are, and what genres do interest you, and just encourage you to play, and then play some more. Ideally, play with musicians who are better than you - you'll learn more, faster, just like anything else. It takes thousands of hours to get good at this stuff.

Analyzing and writing music aren't the only things you can do with music theory. For me the main application at first was playing music by ear. For example, you could learn what a dominant is and how it sounds, then sit down at the piano and figure out the chords to some song that's mostly tonic and dominant, and so on. And once you have that down, you can compose some stuff meaningfully.

Consider learning jazz. The whole approach of many basic kinds of jazz is to take some chords and turn them into music.

Thanks for the tip. Any suggestion on learning materials or where to find beginner friendly resources?