Brought to you by Penguin.

Despite being unable to play an instrument, Susan Rogers became an extraordinarily successful record producer—and certainly one of the most successful women record producers in history—because of her ability to listen. (She was an engineer on Prince's "When Doves Cry", which inspired the title of the book.)

This Is What It Sounds Like distils a lifetime's expertise as a producer and an award-winning professor with a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, to present a new theory of listening for everyday music fans. Each person has a unique identity as a listener, she explains, determined by seven influential dimensions of musical listening: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm and timbre.

In helping listeners understand and embrace their personal musical identity, Rogers explores the different ways music appeals to our mind and body, how falling in love with a song is a lot like falling in love with a person and what your preferred music reveals about what you need to feel whole. Told in a lively, empathetic style, with fascinating stories of encounters with musicians from Prince to Miles Davis to David Byrne, This Is What It Sounds Like will change your musical life.