I suspect this is true of all arts, but for me as a musician, I definitely connect to music both as an expression of emotion (the art), and the mathematics behind the art (the theory). Get a bunch of country or jazz players together, and you'll be listening to a conversation of numbers (the basic I-IV-V; the II-V-I progression; the flat 5 or 7; the augmented or diminished 9; etc etc).
It constitutes a vocabulary that means zilch to non-musicians, but to us it's a linguistic shorthand for discussing various scales, chord progressions and song structures, which for every musician is the essence of what we do beyond the outpouring of emotional information.
Now, it's entirely possible to be an illiterate musician, someone who can write and perform great tunes with little or no knowledge of the nuts and bolts of music. But you can bet, if they ever reach a larger audience, there's a producer behind their sound that does know the science of music.
Great post, BTW.
RE: INSIDE ART