No music without a listener
As it is a construction of the human mind, music may be said to be absent in nature. That reality is one of the reasons for the existence of musicology, which studies the forms that construction may take. For example, there is no rhythm, no pitch, no timbre per se. Each music listener will have personal views on what is a quick and a slow rhythm, a fast and a slow tempo, etc. Not that the values of these elements are not defined precisely in the field of sound engineering, they are; however, music listeners, depending on their own musical experience, feel them in an individual way.
What one listener will find rigid, another one will define as fluid. What one calls tender, the neighbour calls tacky. Between two music listeners, everything may differ: moods, inner time, musical knowledge and activities, etc.
Musical tastes partly rely on society and culture, but also on individual tastes, that is why musicology cannot pretend to describe the meaning music has for individuals; it is not its purpose. It is hardly the purpose of music psychology. What the humanities may say on music is that the music listener produces one global meaning attributed to each piece on music, that meaning being based on some objective factors (like musical structures as they are produced by composers, each one in its genre), the other ones being subjective. That is why music is described as polysemous. The music listener only produces local meanings, each one related to smaller elements included in a piece of music.
Music listeners and their specific tolerance range
Musical tastes have a clearly individual character that is not primarily linked to labels like genres or decades, but to musical criteria like intervals, rhythms, tempo, chords, harmony, etc. For that reason the music we love may be compared to a lover: what do people love first in their lover? Not only the color of their hair, and they did not fall for their DNA (and not, one can hope, their professional situation or network). No, they love the unique way the other speaks to them, how they take their hand and how they take care of their emotions.
In music as well as in love, it is not just a question of age, name and gender. Everyone has a specific tolerance range: music listeners decide individually what is consonant or dissonant to their ears, naturally. As an acoustical phenomenon, a sound is natural and unique and there has been no standard classification of musical sounds until now. Furthermore, the human auditory system is a complex physiological system which is far from being totally understood. Finally, not everyone shares the same hearing ability, and it is the same for music listening habits.