Following that experience, Chapman did what any smart Internet-connected 23-year-old* with a question for a crowd would do: He turned to Reddit, asking, "I can hear music for the first time ever, what should I listen to?"

The response was tremendous, running more than 14,000 comments and garnering the attention of Spotify, which gave him six months of free membership and a 13-hour playlist that covers a huge range of music. In the Reddit conversation, bands like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin figure in prominently, as do classical composers such as Beethoven (side note: can you imagine listening to this for the first time?). Overall, Chapman said to me over email that Beethoven's Ninth was the top most recommended piece.

There's more music suggested in those comments than it seems possible to consume in a lifetime. Chapman says he's going with the recommendation of one GiraffeKiller: "This is like introducing an Alien to the music of Earth. I wouldn't know where to start. Once you're through your kick on Classical, I might start with music from the 50's and progress through each decade. You can really see the growth of modern music like that." Except he's going to start earlier -- way earlier -- with Guillaume de Machaut's Agnus Dei which dates to the 14th century.

But first, Chapman writes, "I did the only sensible thing and went on a binge of music." From that binge, he composed his top-five list:

1. Mozart's Lacrimsoa... I know it's a depressing song but to me it represents the first time I could appreciate and experience music.

2. The soundtrack to Eleven Eleven... I can see how this comes off as narcissistic, it being my own film and all but it's such a personal work that when I listened to it for the first time I broke down. I felt like I was truly seeing the film for the first time ever. I'm grateful that Cazz was able to capture the tone perfectly. We discussed the film and specific scenes with essay-sized reasoning/deliberations on what should be conveyed. The critical response to the film surprised me and I still didn't quite get it until seeing the visual images coupled with the soundtrack.

3. Sigur Ros's Staralfur... The first song I had to listen to again, over and over.

4. IL Postino-Luis Bacalov

5. Minnesota's A Bad Place [original by Shotgun Radio featuring Mimi Page, remixed by Minnesota]

I wanted to better understand what this experience was like for Chapman. How much of our experience of music is the cultural connotations we have absorbed and how much of it can be conveyed to someone who is hearing everything for the first time? How do you develop preferences when everything is all so unmoored from the taxonomy of genre or the nostalgia a song can evoke?

I exchanged emails with Chapman to get more of a sense of what music he is enjoying and what he hasn't quite warmed to. The first and clearest thing that comes across: Taste does not take long to develop. Right from the get-go Chapman had a very strong (and, in my personal estimation, very good) sense of what he liked and did not. Top of the like list? Classical music, which he said was "the most beautiful genre to listen to." Country was, so far, his least favorite. "It's very heavy on vocals and since I can't clearly understand the words, the story is lost on me. Instead it just sounds like a man or woman crying for a couple minutes."