After earning his Ph.D., Gasser connected with Tim Westergren, one of the three founders of Pandora (the music app) and became head of music operation and architect of The Music Genome Project. “It really got me thinking (maybe not in a conscious way at that point) about how varied people’s tastes are, and how people of the same age group could gravitate to different styles of music.” Your music library, explainedĪs composers tend to do, Gasser would dissect various songs to better understand what might appeal to an audience. “I had people asking me to play a rather eclectic repertoire - everything from Scott Joplin, Mozart, and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ every single day,” says Gasser. A professional pianist since the age of 11, Gasser’s very first gig was playing cover songs at his local mall food court on weekends. Luckily, musician and musicologist Nolan Gasser wrote “ Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste” to answer these kinds of burning questions. Did certain key signatures or chord progressions across genres draw me in? Did I have a greater affinity to songs written in certain time signatures? Was it the subject matter or lyrical content? Or some wizardry involving all of the above? As I learned to play music and my music geekery bled into other genres and subgenres, I began to wonder why some songs resonated with me more than others.

When I was a kid, there didn’t seem to be a rhyme and reason to what music I loved - my tastes spanned from art rock, to show tunes, to hard rock, pop and funk classics and disco deep-dives.

Skull music art notes