There are many mysteries surrounding the writing, performing and enjoying of music. How do chains and sequences of seemingly random notes penetrate our emotional defences with such speed and power, even if we don’t consider ourselves ‘musical’? How is it that some composers’ work captures the imaginations of people living two, three, four hundred years later in societies that are radically different from those that gave birth to it? How is it that a child growing up in a small village in rural China, who struggles for years to wrap his or her tongue around the foreignness, the weirdness, the stubborn illogicality of a European language, can master totally, in just a few months, the apparent complexities of the sound and patterns of European music? How is it that some music is immensely, persistently popular in its own time and yet utterly abandoned half a century later, never to be loved again? All these questions are difficult to answer.

But the very nature of how western music works – its notation, its pitches, its structures, its moving parts, its habits, tricks and techniques – these are not mysteries. Nor should they be to any reasonably literate, interested human being. It has been my mission over the past decade to make music documentaries on Channel 4 that take this straightforward premise as their starting point.