In This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You, Susan Rogers (along with co-author Ogi Ogas) provide a scientific scaffolding for experience of falling in love with a song. At the heart of the book is the Listener Profile, a methodical framework that categorises our musical “sweet spots.” Rogers breaks down the listening experience into seven primary dimensions:

• The “What”: Melody, Lyrics, Rhythm, and Timbre.
• The “How”: Authenticity, Novelty, and Realism.

While Rogers’ background as a cognitive neuroscientist shines through, she balances this with various “behind the desk” anecdotes from her time engineering for Prince during the Purple Rain era and her work with Geggy Tah and Barenaked Ladies. These snippets provide a necessary human pulse to the clinical approach.

One of the interesting aspects was Rogers’ discussion of novelty and our appetite for musical risk. This is captured by a novelty–popularity curve: simplest, most familiar music on the left; boundary‑pushing, complex music on the right; sales/popularity on the vertical axis. This curve is ever evolving and what might be considered complex today, can easily become more familiar in the future.

Though its shape remains the same from generation to generation, the curve itself slides steadily to the right along the axis of novelty as different musical innovations become commonplace. The peak of the curve - along with the most popular style of music -retains a balance of familiar and novel elements, but what those elements sound like changes as audiences get accustomed to musical advances.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

I could not help but draw parallels to Raymond Williams’ theory on cultural evolution:

• Dominant: The music that defines the current “mainstream.”
• Residual: The sounds of the past that still shape our present.
• Emergent: The new, “novel” expressions that push boundaries.

Rogers argues that our “Record Producer Brain” is constantly scanning for these elements. However, taste is rarely static. You might find that your profile shifts as you age or changes depending on your social environment. This fluidity suggests that the Listener Profile is not a fixed DNA sequence, but a living document that evolves with our life stages.

The identities we construct for ourselves are reflected in the things we collect and like, so much so that when we unveil a drastic change in the food we eat, the hobbies we enjoy, or the genres of music we’re into, people who know us understand that something important about our identity has changed. Empirical research has shown that our conception of personal identity is linked to our musical choices.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

Another thing that stood out was tension between Rogers’ profile and the concept of guilty pleasure. When we align Rogers’ science with Donald Winnicott’s concept of the True Self and False Self, a “guilty pleasure” is often just a conflict between our True Self (the raw, emotional response to a melody) and the False Self (the persona we present to fit social expectations). Rogers’ intent with the framework is to provide the structures required to strip away the “False Self” and understand why a specific timbre or rhythm resonates with us, regardless of its perceived “coolness.” It was interesting thinking about this alongside Chilly Gonzales’ Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures and how it comes to grips with personal taste.

During quiet moments in the studio, I enjoyed asking record makers to name a guilty pleasure—a record you would be embarrassed to admit you liked. Such confessions can be deeply revealing. The records we treasure covertly reflect facets of our musical self that we’d just as soon not have others know about.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

I was once told that “no one likes your music.” Of course, the comment was said in spite, but ironically it is true for when it comes to the Listener Profile, we are all unique, there is no average. As a combination of neurological wiring, personal history, and emotional associations, our relationship with a song is unique.

If Michel Faber’s Listen - On Music, Sound and Us is a soulful, visceral exploration of the act of hearing, Rogers’ work feels like its intellectual counterpart - an exploration written “from the head up.”

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