One thing that often goes "wrong" with this is that the mathematics of frequency ratios is a huge barrier that's most often irrelevant to actual music making. If you literally know nothing about music, there's a good case for just letting the tuners deal with it for the time being, and starting from the old Do, Re, Mi etc. that teaches you both solfège (sight reading/aural skills) and the musical syntax of scale degrees. Then sing a whole lot of music in (movable do; fixed do is pointless except for specialists) solfège and try to make up simple embellishments and variations on what you sing. There's a "programmer's favorite" way of learning these too (these are called diminutions) based on the scale-degree leap that you're traversing, hypothetical elementary operations of musical syntax and whatnot; but good musical intuition will always be helpful. Guess what, now you're well on your way to improvising simple music at the keyboard, and later on you can even get started on learning counterpoint without being lost in all the details. Because, unlike actual college students who are forced to take a counterpoint class as part of studying bookish "music theory", you'll have the fundamentals down pat.

The problem with teaching them from the particular mathematical perspective taken in this work is that...it doesn't actually teach them, and it throws up it's hands and says I don't really know about fairly basic stuff. This isn't an alternate pedagogical route chosen by someone who has a different view of how to get people up to speed for the domain, it's a smattering of trivia that isn't directed at learning the rest because the author doesn't understand the basics, much less have a particular pedagogical approach to them.

I think that's a separate conversation from whether this article specifically should be the entire basis for someone learning how to compose music. I agree that I would not point someone at this article and say, "this will be enough to get you on the road to learning how to compose music", I would want something more involved by someone who has more experience.

But that's different from saying it's wrong for the author to talk about sound frequencies.

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To your point in specific, I don't see where the author ever claims that this is an alternate pedagogical route to learning music, the author actively discourages people who already know music from reading the post. The post explains a few basic concepts like what a scale is -- and fairly accurately (or at least about as accurate as most of the other explanations that you'll find online). It openly works through the stuff that the author understands, and openly admits what the author doesn't understand, while sympathizing with the target reader that it's hard to pick up a new subject when it sounds like everyone else is speaking a different language from you.

So basically, it is every single technical blog post written on any subject by anyone who is openly learning about a thing online, and that is something that should be encouraged, not derided.

I also still kind of disagree with people who are saying that this is just trivia or too basic to even talk about, commenters are still underestimating how little normal people know about music.

If people come out of this article understanding stuff like:

- There are 12 "steps" in an octave

- An octave is doubling the frequency of a pitch

- Written down on a staff, we compress those 12 "steps" into roughly 7 spaces.

- A scale is 7 different notes.

- Because of weird ratio stuff and social consensus about which "steps" in an octave are most commonly used, some parts of the scale move 2 "steps" and some move 1

- Transposition exists as a concept, you can play the same song starting at different pitches

- Notes like B# and C can overlap, except some really professional players might treat them differently because it turns out the math we use for different pitches doesn't completely work out correctly in all scenarios.

That's all stuff that people who are unfamiliar with music don't know. Okay, the author doesn't really understand what's going on with minor keys, but this isn't a textbook, and there is value even in something as simple as "an octave is doubling the frequency of a pitch."

I'm weirded out by how upset HN is being about an amateur blog post with reasonably correct information by someone who is actively trying to teach themselves how to write music. This is exactly the content that we should want people to write about online, and it's written in exactly the style that we regularly encourage bloggers to write in when they're exploring new concepts/domains.