The process is to model how to value, how to score, a system and then let the brain to the math.

For example:

* How much to I want to take this system home and Live With It for a long time? [Is it fun to listen to, but it is too much of a good thing and would sour quickly? Or does it feel like something you have wanted your whole life but did not know it?]

* What emotions does this system instill in me across several types of music? [Uncomfortable? Anxious? Got a headache? Looking around for a vomit bag? Or, perhaps, falling in love with each musician played, and oh how to break it to the spouse?]

* How does this system make me feel about the state of humanity? [Is there hope, or are we doomed with perhaps only days or hours before the end?]

* How does this system make me feel about the skill of the designer? the fabricator? [Is this contraption before your the apex of 10,000 years of civilization, that all the sweat and tears finally culminated in something worthwhile? Or perhaps, scopping back a little from the system because the speakers look like they might fall on you at any moment – and thank goodness for a remote because… are those sparks?!]

* How does this system make me feel about the musicians? [Are they real people? Are they supremely skilled? Are they filled with the emotion appropriate to the song they are singing? Are they just making a buck? Can you even tell? Sometimes this just says something about the musician, not the system. Frank Sinatra, in his later years, came across as bored out of his mind when he sang many songs – really turned me off to his music until I heard him sing when he still had the old fire in the belly]

This system is orthogonal, independent of yet works within the system of the categories of sonic preferences: Real, Impressive, Sweet, Emotive, Magical. It helps us answer: How Impressive? How Sweet?

It does require some introspection of the listener’s part. But the idea of mapping a quantitative question like How Real? to a emotional question, and letting the brains massive computational capability figure out how it ‘feels’ about the question, can help us put in relative terms measurements that we do not know how to measure yet.