Why am I unmoved by a song that someone else finds to be the Best Thing Ever? Why are other people unaffected by songs that I think are obviously brilliant?
The obvious component is taste. There are certain styles of music that I like more than others and if a piece of music isn’t in a style that’s to my taste, I’m much less likely to get on with it. Again: obvious.
Only it’s not that simple… sometimes there are songs that someone would enthuse and rave about and I will listen to it. I’ll think, “Well, it certainly sounds like the kind of thing I listen to, and I don’t find it immediately unpleasant, but for some reason whatever my friend sees in it just isn’t working for me.” Of course, it happens the other way, too - I get a lukewarm reception to a song I’m certain the other person would like.
Surely, then, taste runs deeper than just the surface stylistic considerations. So deep, in fact, that it becomes rather difficult to predict how different people will respond to different pieces of music with any accuracy.
Projects like Pandora on the Internet attempt to do something like this, but this ‘Music Genome Project’ doesn’t seem to have mapped said genome out with sufficient granularity. It looks at certain aspects of the music - type of vocalist, rhythms and so on, but to get the true picture I think you need to go even closer into how the music is constructed. Look at particular types of chord change, how the melody is actually put together. Is there a lot of chromaticism? Does it jump about a lot? What sort of melodic intervals are commonly used?
Of course, going that deep (and further) is a much bigger and more difficult project to pull off which is probably why nobody has done it to that level. But I think it’s at these subtle levels that musical taste truly operates. It’s a level that most people wouldn’t have the musical vocabulary to explain in words but nevertheless can intuitively understand.
