Music Theory Is Not Difficult—Chinese Terminology Makes It More Complicated Than It Needs to Be

As a child, I loved both music and mathematics. Logically, music theory
should have been one of the easiest subjects for me. Ironically, it
became the one I disliked most in school.

Many years later, I realised that what frustrated me was not music
theory itself, but the way some of its concepts are translated and
explained in Chinese.

I still remember my music teacher struggling to explain dotted notes. We
were told that a dot adds half of the previous note’s duration.
Naturally, I started calculating. A quarter note is one quarter; adding
half of it gives one eighth more, so the result is three eighths.

Then the lesson moved on to a 3/4 time signature. As a student who
enjoyed mathematics, I naturally interpreted that as “three quarters
make a complete bar.” Yet the teacher insisted that one bar is a
complete whole. At that point, everything became confusing.

The teacher thought the students were slow to understand. The students
thought the teacher could not explain it clearly.

In fact, neither side was wrong.

The real problem was that Chinese music terminology presents two
completely different concepts using the same fractional notation,
without making it clear that they belong to different reference systems.

The “quarter” in a quarter note describes its duration relative to a
whole note. The “3/4” in a time signature describes a bar containing
three quarter-note beats. Although both are written as fractions, they
refer to entirely different things. Students with a strong mathematical
mindset naturally place them into the same mathematical framework, and
the more carefully they calculate, the more confused they become.

A similar issue appears in interval terminology.

In English, second is an ordinal term describing position. In Chinese,
however, the character “二” is easily interpreted as a quantity. To make
matters worse, the Chinese term for “interval” is often used in teaching
to mean only the interval number.

These may seem like small terminology issues, but they influence the
entire learning process.

One of the most fundamental principles of mathematics is that units and
reference frames must remain explicit. Yet some expressions in Chinese
music theory constantly shift the reference frame without telling the
learner. Music lessons begin borrowing the language of mathematics while
quietly abandoning its logical consistency.

I call this pseudo-mathematics.

It borrows the symbols, fractions and calculations of mathematics
without preserving the conceptual discipline that gives mathematics its
clarity. For students with strong mathematical intuition, this does not
make music theory easier. It creates unnecessary ambiguity and
confusion.

When I later studied music theory in English, many concepts that had
puzzled me for years suddenly became clear. This is not because English
is inherently superior, but because its terminology preserves the
original conceptual structure more faithfully and is therefore less
prone to misunderstanding.

Music theory itself is not difficult.

What makes it unnecessarily difficult are those expressions in Chinese
music theory that wear the clothing of mathematics while abandoning its
logic.