eli5: why do we know a note is off key even when we’ve never heard the piece of music before?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

Have you seen the viral post about [the order of adjectives in English?](https://twitter.com/MattAndersonNYT/status/772002757222002688) It’s been floating around a while.

It’s an example of an ironclad rule in English that every native speaker follows, but hardly anyone actually knows (well, up until 2016 when that meme started going around).

Music works the same way. There are rules — or maybe we should say expectations —that music follows. When something violates those expectations, it sounds wrong to us, *even if we can’t name what we were expecting.*

Same thing happens in film, storytelling, design and other arts. There are conventions we have come to expect, but we don’t even recognize that we’re expecting them. We just know something is off when you break the rules, even if we can’t say what it is.