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
Music is a language. It has internal logics and rules. Like with languages, if you are exposed to it, you absorb these rules and ‘feel’ them, even if you don’t study linguistics.
Like there are different languages, there are different ‘musics’. You may be ‘native’ in one but not understand another. In those you might not detect a ‘wrong note’. Likewise, rules do not prevent musicians to deliberately use ‘wrong notes’ to some effect, like the poets invent or distort words sometimes.
If we talk about the Western music, the most common rule is the use of so called ‘modes’ (like ‘major’ or ‘minor’). A mode ‘selects’ 7 specific notes out of the available 12 in each octave (according to some logics we won’t go into here), and the piece is normally played only using these 7 notes. If a ‘wrong’ one is used, it’s easily audible.
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