I'm not sure whether it's related, but I've also been told by a number of musically-trained friends that they can't work with music at all, because they can't help but analyse it as they listen: for them, listening seems to automatically involve processing work that it doesn't (seem to) for me, precisely because I'm not capable of such processing.

I find that very interesting too, since I am in fact the opposite of your musically-trained friends: I am quite rubbish at anything musical, am hard-of-hearing, and have great difficulty analysing music & songs. (In part that's why I listen to so much J-pop: since I often can't understand the lyrics even if they're in English...)