Informative and entertaining, this book discusses a number of widely-accepted misconceptions about music and offers in their place practical and logical ideas regarding human perception of music and its relation to traditional systems of notation. The writing style is informal, humorous, and assumes little or no previous knowledge of music. Drawing on his extensive background in the music world, the author shares in a light-hearted but logical way the practical experiences and careful thinking that led him to his conclusions. Despite its folksy accessibility, the book is well grounded in scholarship. A basic premise of the book is that, like spoken language, music should be experienced as sound before it is learned in its symbolic form as notation, and that when music is presented this way, a learner is better prepared to navigate the tangles and perplexities of traditional notation.