One thing that often goes "wrong" with this is that the mathematics of frequency ratios is a huge barrier that's most often irrelevant to actual music making. If you literally know nothing about music, there's a good case for just letting the tuners deal with it for the time being, and starting from the old Do, Re, Mi etc. that teaches you both solfège (sight reading/aural skills) and the musical syntax of scale degrees. Then sing a whole lot of music in (movable do; fixed do is pointless except for specialists) solfège and try to make up simple embellishments and variations on what you sing. There's a "programmer's favorite" way of learning these too (these are called diminutions) based on the scale-degree leap that you're traversing, hypothetical elementary operations of musical syntax and whatnot; but good musical intuition will always be helpful. Guess what, now you're well on your way to improvising simple music at the keyboard, and later on you can even get started on learning counterpoint without being lost in all the details. Because, unlike actual college students who are forced to take a counterpoint class as part of studying bookish "music theory", you'll have the fundamentals down pat.