What Is a Major Chord?
Granted, I&#x27;m a musician, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. And I don&#x27;t know what the author&#x27;s background is.<p>But I&#x27;ve noticed that the people who tend to have the biggest problem with music theory are engineers. I think it comes from an assumption that music should be learned like engineering, where you start with fundamentals, and then build upon them. And then they&#x27;re horrified to discover that even the fundamentals are arbitrary and approximate.<p>Most musicians don&#x27;t start out with fundamentals. We started by choosing an instrument and somehow learning to play it. For the most part, musicians don&#x27;t care about temperaments. Equal temperament only applies to a handful of instruments that can be kept in tune long enough for it to matter, and that can play the same note, the same way, twice. An orchestra, jazz band, or solo fiddler, have no temperament in any meaningful sense.<p>Yes, musical notation is a cluster. But it serves its purpose well enough to be useful to support a symbiosis between the composer and the performer. If any composer chooses to try a bespoke notation, they&#x27;ll discover that nobody will ever perform their composition. It&#x27;s like a programming language that nobody likes, but that is supported by a job market and labor pool.<p>My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music is, get an instrument and learn to play it. Preferably a non-electronic one, so you won&#x27;t be tempted to turn music into a numbers game.