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Music theory is just a labeling of the grouping of sounds that sound a certain way, right? And the reasons why they do.

Like you could combine a bunch of random notes together and it would sound terrible. THe reason why a certain scale is a scale is that it all jives together in a way that makes sense to the human brain.

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Music theory is an approximation of what the aggregate human preference function for music is, where the aggregate is over a region and time. It's not really a theory per se, but you could definite "learn" many aspects of theory from enough labelled examples. Given many western music examples, you would easily learn circle of fifths and other common details; given indian music, you would learn microtones and other subtle touches that make indian music have depth.

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