As both a musician and a programmer that has been into both for most of my life, I’ll share my perspective which is quite long but I hope you find it useful or interesting.

Same way we have music theory concepts like scales, harmony, rythym, etc… For software, we have principles, repeatable designs patterns, grammar/syntax… We have musical genres and styles, and programming languages with different conventions.

In music we apply these concepts to our compositions to make music people want to hear, while programmers apply theirs respectively in their code to make the computer do something.

In practice, as a composer you should know if you want to make something sound a certain way there are harmonic functions, scales and dynamics that imply certain things depending on what you want the music to feel like. If I tell you to create a blues, you know the blues has a certain form that implies certain harmonic sequence. The harmony feels a certain way and makes you think differently that if I say “Let’s play some Chopin”. You know you can use the blues scale to create melodies and you know the “blue note” color and how each chromatic approach to a chord tone has a different harmonic connotation if you analyze the musical context.

As a musician, you know this because you’re somehow familiar with it. Either you or someone close to you listened to or played blues a lot, maybe you studied music theory, experimented with the exercise of creating a blues composition, or whatever it may be…

As a software developer there are certain things you will have to build over and over again, similarly to how practice your scale runs. After you’ve built the same things over and over again, maybe with slight variations you kind of know what to expect, and how to make decisions depending on the situation, sort of how you would know the fingerings in your instrument to smoothly change between scales when improvising. For some instruments like guitar, you may even have multiple positions to play the same thing, and the performer will decide which one to play at the moment of performance. At first maybe you had to think about or be very aware of it but, with practice, you eventually don’t have to think much about it.

If tutorials are not working for you to learn coding, I don’t blame you because I can barely hold my attention on most video tutorials. You might be of those people that learn more by doing and figuring things out yourself, which is also why you might not have fit in well with traditional education systems if you say you’re not too good academically.

The issue is that you still need the fundamentals to understand what you’re doing so you gotta find the best way to learn those for you. You can probably find out how by observing and evaluating how you learn the things you are good at that are not driven by intuition. Think of how you do things you purposely know you gotta spend time to practice but yo enjoy doing it because “no pain, no gain”. Like going to the gym, if you’re a health conscious person.

Music feels intuitive because there are cultural codes that have been built into our DNA. It’s one of the oldest traditions and methods of communication. It’s partly why the major scale is so predominant in Western culture. Thank you Pythagoras and the Greeks…

Unlike computation, sound generation and repetitive rhythms are also things that happen in nature. So music has many more dimensions than computing in that sense. It involves physical aspect, emotional response, athleticism and discipline… And so more many things including some we do not even yet understand. Computation is kind of like a subject built out of other subjects including math/logic, physics/science and philosophy/linguistics.

To me computers are pretty intuitive too. I had a computer available before an actual musical instrument. I played puzzles and learned reading through computer games so I’ve literally have been working with computers all my life. When I started formal music lessons I loved the technical exercises for the instrument much more than the actual study pieces. So I also understand the inclination to technique and the athletic part of performance. And when I discovered recording and production my mind was blown that I could do both things I loved at once.

I kind of like thinking of music as a language like the bassist Victor Wooten claims. If you’re not familiar with Wooten’s philosophy of music as language, I’d suggest you look it up. It’s great because he speaks of learning music intuitively like you would your native language. Which is an interesting take considering there are people usually learn to speak and have conversations before they read and write. The issue with that approach is that unless you’re submersed in it, you kind of have to find a way to practice in a way you can build up to have a conversation.

When I was in university for computer science, doing my research project required for graduation I got a very ambitious goal. I wanted to integrate music and AI which was still an emerging field. When discussing it with one of my professors (objective the best profesor the school had, said even by students that disliked him) he told me something I have never forgotten:

“To show you know about something, you should be able to explain it to a child. To show you master something, you should be able to explain it to a computer.”

Anyway, instead of an actual AI application, my project ended up being a research of how LLMs principles could be used to generate music based on linguistic context, if it were considered a language in the computing world. And dissecting music concepts that way actually inspired me to audition to my local conservatory and study there for a while too to get a deeper understanding of music. If you’re interested I could share my research project with you. DM me if so, I’m always happy to talk or nerd out about this stuff. Maybe I can help you find your learning aptitude too!