Read: Harry Partch - Genesis of a Music. Or: Meyer - The Musician’s Arithmetic.
They explain music based on fundamental acoustic/aural/sonic principles, instead of all the accumulated cruft of western music theory. You first have to understand that the ratio of 3:2 is, after the octave, the maximum consonance that two tones can have, before you can treat it as a "perfect fifth" which is so-and-so many steps on the piano keyboard. They explain that "modulation" is the process of treating identical tones in different senses to go from a context in which one sense is dominant, to a context in which the other sense is dominant.
This is the kind of stuff that you'll probably pick up anyway from standard western music theory, but putting the aural logic front and center is what really made things click for me.
They explain music based on fundamental acoustic/aural/sonic principles, instead of all the accumulated cruft of western music theory. You first have to understand that the ratio of 3:2 is, after the octave, the maximum consonance that two tones can have, before you can treat it as a "perfect fifth" which is so-and-so many steps on the piano keyboard. They explain that "modulation" is the process of treating identical tones in different senses to go from a context in which one sense is dominant, to a context in which the other sense is dominant.
This is the kind of stuff that you'll probably pick up anyway from standard western music theory, but putting the aural logic front and center is what really made things click for me.