Hi - I’m a largely self-taught musician/music teacher/producer of 15 years+ experience …played in loads of bands in many different styles and am a huge fan of the Beatles... Both you and the article are misguided in your assumptions about music theory IMHO. Whether they consciously know/admit it or not, every decent musician benefits from and needs to know about some sort of ‘music theory’ at every level of playing. I guarantee you that Paul McCartney and the Beatles knew/know rather more about music than you allow (or possibly than they recognise/would like to admit...). Granted, they could not perhaps sight-read musical notation and so on or arrange an orchestral score (though if you look into P.M./other Beatles’s background/family you’ll see that it was indeed very musical and he has done some pretty spectacular stuff with the hel of others…), but even if you want to play rock-n-roll covers in different keys you kind of need some understanding of eg. how a basic twelve bar blues format works, V-I change, some idea about scales/arpeggios/which notes ‘go together well’ etc. You don’t need to know the proper terminology for it or be able to do a full formal/Riemannian analysis or something, but you are using and systematising a kind of music theory directly, even if just on your own idiosyncratic terms... Theory and an ability to work out/make up /remember/categorise song’s etc. by ear or otherwise is more linked than you might superficially think I would suggest. Music theory across different cultures is not a science (as I presume computer science is?), but is based on kind of formalised aspects of that culture’s understanding of ‘common practise’. On a fundamental level you could look at it as being informed by how human beings perceive sound/frequencies/mathematical/aesthetic ‘rules’, but a large part is also based on conventions …so, even in the process of learning new songs/repertoire and seeing commonalities between them/remembering them, you are learning a type of music theory you could argue… Anyhow, I get where you’re coming from and there are some similarities, but sometimes I can’t help feeling people do tend to talk an awful lot of bunk/received nonsense about music and music theory… (the idea of ‘natural talent’ - although no doubt people have very different mental furniture/natural aptitude’s - is one of those things that can be very damaging to people progressing/learning about stuff I have found…)