How many times a minute does the Chef count to 30?

Sure, not as frequently as a musician. So what? We can play this game with the chef asking how often does a musician need to quickly scale a whole collection of different things by the same factor, or more by almost the same factor (since some spices end up scaling in what amounts to a non-linear rate).

After I finish, another guy asks if he can play. Broken English, he tells me after he's done "I know nothing about music, I have my own formula".

Anecdotal evidence, and not even very relevant: no one here is arguing that one can't use math in music. That's not the same thing as the claim you have been making.

Face it, you're arguing with me because you don't like my views on materialism, not because you know what playing music is like.

Attacking people's motivations is generally rude. If you want to claim I have a particular bias we can go and check that. I've spent the last few minutes introspecting, and I'm pretty sure that there's a serious failure to model going on here, since I had to go back and reread a bunch of your older comments to even remind myself what your attitude was on materialism (and after reading them I'm not actually completely sure what it is). There are statements that I had more of an active memory disagreeing with you on (especially your heavy other optimizing in the life-hacks thread) but I'm fairly confident that that wasn't a substantial impact. I'm not aware of a single viewpoint you've asserted that is anything I'm emotionally attached to one way or another (and I'll readily acknowledge that there are many issues that I'm attached to emotionally when I shouldn't be).

But if you want to make this personal, we can. Your statements in this subthread, together with many of your other comments (like your aforementioned comments in the lifehack thread) show that you have a serious bias in terms of assuming that other people think the same ways you do. You are underestimating human mental diversity in a way that is generally termed engaging in the typical mind fallacy (which now that I think about it also covers thinking that I care strongly about attitudes about materialism because it is an important issue to you)..

And you still haven't addressed any of the objections I listed earlier and repeated again in the last paragraph of the above post. I'm not going to bother retyping them, simply noting that you still haven't responded substantially to them.

Finally, if we are throwing personal experience in here, which you seem to want to focus on (despite its general lack of reliability), I'm a post-doc in number theory at a decent university. I'm not musically gifted at all (and probably below the average musical ability) and playing music doesn't feel like it is accessing almost any of the same parts as doing math. For every anecdote there's an equal and opposite anecdote; that's why that sort of argument isn't terribly helpful.