Feelings are certainly part part of it, and hard to teach, so I appreciate the Captain's efforts. But music is also largely engineering and math, and it won't sound good if you haven't done a lot of intellectual homework (although plenty of good artists will claim otherwise, because claims like that are appealing).
Zappa did do his homework. There's some anecdote about him conducting an orchestra in the studio, and one of his musicians asked, "How did you learn to do that?"
> and it won't sound good if you haven't done a lot of intellectual homework
Before you can create a language or theory around music, there must be music. The math didn't come first. First came the music, and the math simply describes what is already there.
The first person who had a smidgeon of an idea that if they put two sounds together it might sound pleasing to the ear, probably didn't run to grab a pen to mathematically describe the concept of how frequencies behave together before discovering sounds that are pleasing.
You speak of doing intellectual homework in order to make music sound good, but the homework you mention required its own homework. Determining if something sounds good is not a mathematical operation, but a subjective and visceral one.
