Whenever I hear someone play an instrument, I can always tell when they’ve played the wrong note even if it’s my first time hearing it, why is that?
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Others have mentioned that you’re recognizing patterns that your brain has been used to hearing since birth – if you grew up listening to western music you’re likely used to listening to music based on the influence of Beethoven and other major classical musicians, who established standards for tuning instruments so that a work performed in Leipzig would theoretically sound the same when it was performed in Paris or London. Musical notation has been around since Ancient times – Aristotle described the math behind musical scales. But ancient notation was relative to an arbitrary starting note – the lyre or other instrument had one string tuned to a pleasant pitch, then the rest of the strings were tuned relative to the first string. There was no ancient canonical equivalent to the modern standard of tuning an A to 440 Hz.
One of the reasons that traditional Japanese music or music from other non-western traditions sounds odd to Western ears is that it doesn’t always follow the same rules for tuning and chords. It breaks the rules you’ve grown up with, so the pattern recognition parts of your brain get surprised by notes that seem out of place
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