For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
That one took me a moment as well … why is there a difference between 2/2 and 4/4, or 6/8 and 3/4 …
It started to make sense once I saw it as an abstraction. It denotes a certain emphasis on certain notes that would look really awkward and hard to read if it was repetitively written out for every note (not that I can really read music anyway).
I have a much harder time with harmony theory … like, I get that some successions have a “resolving” feel but other than that I never got why I shouldn’t just jumble up pitches any way that sounds ok to me. Ultimately I decided that I’ll spend my life composing music, deliberately ignoring harmony theory as material …
Other things that elude me a mostly social nature … like, some people are just amazing at striking up some or another deal or barter their way through life at a discount, simple because they connect well to people. I never got how they do that … not sure whether it’s something you can learn
Well, we have a word for jumbling them up however you feel like: jazz 🙃
Okay, more serious response, at the end of the day it is all about having it sound good. No one’s going to question why you did things a certain way, if it sounds good.
I try to see it more as a shortcut for making things sound good. It’s just a set of known-good strategies that you can apply, if you feel like it.
Like a tube with premixed color. Yes, you can mix your own color, and many times it is necessary to get it just right, but sometimes you just know that a few dots of khaki are what you want.
Well the beauty of music is that you can do exactly this and it’s fine.
Pretty much all “music theory” is Western-dominated anyway and far from all-encompassing.
There was a really good YouTube video about this a few years back, by I think Adam Neely. Let me see if I can dig it up.
Edit: here’s the link - “Music Theory and White Supremacy”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
Very good video.
One thing this reminded me of is Bootsy Collins explaining funk. How when you’re playing bass you put the root on the one. https://youtu.be/H2MMuNkCLZY
The time signature is about emphasis, and there are common ones. I’ve bolded and italicized big and small emphases on the beat numbers.
Common time: 1 2 3 4 , 1 2 3 4 ,… example peter gunn theme
Cut time: 1 2, 1 2, … example stars and stripes forever
Waltz: 1 2 3, 1 2 3, … example the blue danube
6/8: 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1 2 3 4 5 6,… example the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald
5/4: 1 2 3 4 5, 1 2 3 4 5,… example Mission Impossible theme
Some time signatures are very similar, like waltz and 6/8, the difference is where the emphasis is placed. Waltz has just one big, emphasis placed on the one, where 6/8 is also groups of three, but has a big emphasis on the 1 and a smaller emphasis on the 4th beat. An alternate way to count in 6/8 time is 1 2 3, 2 2 3; 1 2 3, 2 2 3;… which emphasizes how 6/8 time feels like two groupings of three, within one bar, with the biggest emphasis on the one.
This is the basic version – composers will play with expectations and add their own accents on top, etc., so you won’t always hear the emphasis as I described. Reasonable people might even disagree about whether a piece of music is better described by one time signature or another, because they can be so similar.
I was in band growing up and i also couldn’t explain time signatures even though i was able to read music and play them; it is something you learn without necessarily being able to verbalize, since it is about how the music feels, based on subtle emphasis.