Cognitive load is what matters

I loved hakunin’s take in the sibling comment — it touches on a profoundly important insight that has informed all music and software I’ve written since I was a young EDM producer / guitarist.

I was thinking of something else in my original comment however; teaching someone to make music is easy, but teaching them to make _great_ music is almost impossible, because the bottleneck to quality art is always one’s “taste” — or “ear” as it’s often referred to by musicians. I think this concept is synonymous with “talent”, a somewhat mysterious phenomenon.

These ideas seem to run parallel to those explored in this thread related to programmers with and without “taste” as it pertains to the quality of one’s code.