Music is like Language

Music is like language, in that it follows Zipf's law, which holds that the most common words are way more common than the rest. In music, these words are the root & 5th, triads, pentatonics, and they are organized using the major modes. Just like in language, it makes sense to start with the most common words, as those will be needed most often to understand and create sentences.

Music learning should be treated more like language learning. You did not learn to speak by reading, and yet for most musicians, the journey is made up entirely of playing what you read — a process in which listening is unnecessary. NoSheet exists to fix this. Someone who only knows how to play songs arranged by someone else is essentially like a person who has learnt to recite poems in a foreign language without knowing what they are about. NoSheet's goal is to make you conversational — to enable you to listen, process, and speak, to learn every time you listen, to find your voice.

Of course, the metaphor has limits. Music is also not like language. Music does not need to be practical or effectively communicate a specific thing. Music is about story telling, about wielding tension and release, expectation and surprise, to briefly lift the listener out of their current predicament and take them elsewhere.