Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Humans Need Music with Susan Rogers

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

What does neuroscience tell us about music’s impact on our species? And why do humans enjoy music at all? This week, sound engineer and neuroscientist Susan Rogers joins Adam to talk about the effects that music has on humans as a species. They discuss why records we listen to at a young age become encoded into our auditory cortex, how falling in love with a record is like falling in love with a person, and how music relates to the default network which is firing circuits in our central nervous system to contribute to our self awareness. Buy Susan’s book at http://factuallypod.com/books Hover Promo Code: FACTUALLY Listener Discount: 10% Vanity URL: hover.com/FACTUALLY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing shit that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together and we are going to have so much fun doing it. Now before we get going, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so at patreon.com slash adamconover.

Just five bucks a month gets you every episode ad free. You can join our community discord. It's a great time and I hope to see you there. Head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Now, this episode, we are talking about music. So look, music is the art form that most of us, I think, feel the most strongly, don't we? I mean, look, a lot of people go to the art museum and they're like, what the fuck am I supposed to get out of these paintings, you know? But when we hear music, I think almost everybody responds to it in a deep and profound way.

All of us have those songs that return us right back to our childhood, right? I have songs that I can barely listen to anymore because they remind me of past relationships or past times in my life. There are still times that I hear a new piece of music and I suddenly become obsessed with it. I need to know who made this sound and where can I get more of it? And when you think about it, all of this is a little bit weird and mysterious, isn't it? I mean, when we perceive music, what we're actually doing is perceiving different vibrations in the air at particular wavelengths, and those wavelengths have mathematical relationships to each other, right? Two notes that are an octave apart are literally double the frequency of each other. So why should that be? Why should we as humans be so attuned to the

physical properties of air vibrations that we find them beautiful and emotionally moving? I mean, this fact is, I think, one of the most fascinating and perplexing things about our species and about us as individuals. What is it about music that means so much to us as a species and personally, as people? Well, today on the show, we have such an incredible guest here to answer this question. Her name is Susan Rogers. She studies music cognition and psychoacoustics, but she has also worked as a sound engineer and record producer who's best known for her work on some of the greatest records of all time with the artist known as Prince. All right. So not only is this person an expert in psychoacoustics and how music works with our brain,

she has literally worked in the field at the very highest artistic level. This conversation, I just I don't want to spoil anything. I just have to tell you how much I loved it. It gave me so much to think about. And Susan's voice is so wonderful to listen to. You are going to flip for this interview. So without further ado, let's get to this conversation with Susan Rogers. Susan, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. It's really a pleasure to talk with you. So let me get this straight. You worked with Prince. You were the engineer of Purple Rain. Is that correct? Yep. I joined Prince when he was looking for an audio technician in 1983. He was just coming off the 1999 tour, and his whole operation was going to gear up to the next level. At least he believed

that it would. He was preparing to do this semi-autobiographical movie of his life. Now, keep in mind, he just turned 25 years old, but Warner Brothers gave it the green light. So great. He's about to do his sixth studio album at this tender young age. And he knew if this works, and there was an if, this is going to be amazing. So he told his folks out there, his management in Los Angeles, to find him an audio technician from LA, someone who had professional experience. At that point, I was a young woman myself. I was only two years older than him, but I'd been in the business about five years, well-trained by some of Hollywood's best audio techs. He was my favorite artist in the world. I knew as soon as I heard about that job opportunity that it would be mine.

So I got the gig. So yeah, that was at the beginning of Purple Rain. Wow, that's incredible. And later in life, you then became a neuroscientist. This is an incredible biography, I think. How did you get from point A to point B in that story? Yeah, it's, you know, the music business, it's kind of a circus. It's an outlaw profession, as we used to say. And practically no one in the business had a college education at that time or any kind of formal education. you learned by the old school apprenticeship method. Someone will take you under his, I have to say, because it was mostly men, someone will take you under his wing and bring you up through the system. So I started in 1978,

and that's what it looked like. But after I had success in the music business as a technician, then later as a recording engineer, as a mixer, and as a record producer, once I had success in the music business as a technician, then later as a recording engineer, as a mixer, and as a record producer, once I had success, I thought, okay, I want to hit the reset button and do what so many others do. I want to go to college. I loved and still love the sciences, the natural sciences, and I thought that I would enjoy exploring neuroscience, brain science. And I was right. I do enjoy it. Just before we logged on here, I'm reading yet another book on some empirical research reports from the world of cognitive neuroscience. It's very pleasing. That's a wonderful way to put it, that it's very pleasing to study that work. That's not a way that it's often put, but I understand that. There can be an aesthetic

pleasure in reading scientific work or understanding it. That's such a funny thing to me, and I'll never stop being curious about it. This sense that when we're little children, this sense that when we're little children, down deep inside, we know who we are. We know what we are. I think if you leave little kids alone and don't tell them what they're going to be when they grow up, don't even tell them what they're good at. Let them infer it or deduce it themselves. They'll do it. And as a kid, I loved music like crazy, but I could kind of sense being a performer or being some sort of record executive, it just wouldn't work for me. It didn't feel right. But as soon as I learned what engineering was, the technical side of it, my senses told me that's a good fit for me and I'd like it. And it was the exact same

impulse that I had when I was 44 years old when I began to think, you know, I think I'd really love studying neuroscience and I think I'd be okay at it. When we trust our instincts, we're often right. Oh man, I actually really relate to that in terms of my own experience that brought me to being a performer that I had a little voice inside when I was like, I could I could go be a writer behind the scenes. But no, I think I want to I think I want to be out there in front of people like I just had that had that sense from a young age, even when I didn't always take it seriously. It was there. But I want to ask, when you went into neuroscience, was there anything from your time as a music engineer that you brought with you into that new field that gave you insight

that maybe your peers in academia lacked? I was kind of hoping that there would be. And I didn't know for sure that it would work, but I completed my undergraduate education, University of Minnesota. Go Gophers. We were the golden Gophers. It's so cold there. Anyway, so neuroscience and behavioral psychology, and then was accepted into Daniel Levitin's lab up at McGill in Montreal. Daniel Levitin wrote, This is Your Brain on Music. And he wrote that that first year when I was in his lab, because Dan was a musician, because he'd been in the music business prior to his education. I kind of knew like, this guy is going to know what to do with me. He's going to be able to share my frame of reference. and he's going to bring out the best in me. So once I got to grad

school, I did have a sense that I might be able to pick knowledge and skills from these two different worlds, the arts and the sciences of music, and contribute equally to a unique perspective. And as a neuroscientist, you went on to study music and what music does to the brain? That was my training, yes. In undergraduate and grad school, I studied music perception. I studied psychoacoustics. A lot of times people ask what psychoacoustics is. Basically, that's the sensory system of hearing. That's the nuts and bolts. That's understanding what happens. And this is actually so beautiful when you think about it. You've got an acoustic pressure wave in the air,

and the wee little air molecules are just dancing back and forth and doing their little thing because something caused them to vibrate. That's going to cause your eardrum to vibrate and the bones of your middle ear. And that's going to cause structures inside the cochlea to start moving up and down in frequency and amplitude. And then the most amazing thing of all is we've got our own little analog to digital converters inside our cochlea. We've got hair cells and they're taking that mechanical motion, and they're turning it into nerve spikes, analog to digital conversion. Then it's making its way up the brain, and once it comes up the brain, your knowledge areas of your cortex are deciding,

do I want to listen to this? Do I enjoy hearing this? Is this something I can safely ignore? And even cooler, all of that attention, motivation, knowledge, memory, learning, all of that, those top-down processes are coming back down the chain, back to the cochlea, and you've got a D to A converter in there. Those nerve spikes are coming back down, going to your outer hair cells, and the little outer hair cells are pushing and pulling on areas of the cochlea to help you hone

in on the thing you'd like to be listening to. It's utterly crazy. Oh, wow, really? Yep. Wait, wait. Hold on. I had no idea that your body does this, because I know your eye focuses on what you want to look at. Are you saying that your ear also physically focuses on certain sounds? homework assignment and what his job is to, he needs to transcribe this bass part or the saxophone part or pick apart the individual voicings in this choir. So what he has to do is his cortex, this intentionality, this goal, has to send that message somewhere. It sends the message down to the cochlea to a little structure that evolved to help us hone in on the sounds we'd want to hear and suppress the activity of the sounds we need to ignore right now. So the whole system works in a loop. It's got mechanical activity going on and it's got neurochemical and electrical activity going on to help you achieve your

listening goals. There are more parts actually in the auditory system than there are in the visual system in terms of neural way stations. Now, auditory processing is really, really simple and crude compared to vision, yet the signal has to go through a lot of different stages of processing. You know, what this reminds me of is an interview I read a few years ago, and I wish I could remember the name of the man who it was with, but it was with a man who goes out and does archival recordings of different soundscapes. Like he finds different natural soundscapes where, youpes where there's no human sound, which is very rare on Earth at this

point, and records the sound of a forest here or the ocean there. Do you have any idea who I might be talking about? Have you ever heard of this? I was going to say I thought at first you were talking about regional musicians, and I was going to say our Hooli Records, Chris Stickwitz, I think is how you pronounce

his last name. He may have passed on by now. But as far as environmental sounds, no, I'm afraid I don't. Okay, well, I'll have to look it up and send it to you later. But it's a, yeah, this is Environmental Soundscapes. And in the interview with this man, one of the things that he said was, you know, this is a man who's devoted his life to sound, so he's a little bit biased, but he says, you know, sound is much more important to humans than vision is. And his evidence for this is that you can close your eyes, but you can't close your ears. That it's, there is no, there is no human process for, you know, shutting your ears off, even when you need to go to sleep, right? You will always be,

you know, if there's a disturbing sound in your vicinity, the only way to blot it out is to walk away or to perhaps cover your ears. But even that only works in effect, you know, somewhat effectively. And that really stuck with me as, you know, evidence of, oh, yeah, there's this really deep way that sound is important to us. You're right that visual information, there's a lot more detail there. There's maybe more information coming into our brains, but the auditory information is somehow more important to us as a species. Do you agree with that? Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought that up. So in my neuroscience reading recently, I came up, or I discovered something that it's convenient to tell students. So imagine that

you're sitting in a chair and you're tied to that chair. You're tied to the chair. Someone shows you something you don't want to see. You can close your eyes. If they present a smell under your nose that you don't want to smell, you just don't breathe. If they put something on your tongue that you don't want to taste, you either swallow it breathe. If they put something on your tongue that you don't want to taste, you either swallow it really quickly or you spit it out. If they take a feather or something and they touch your body, you can flinch and you can pull away from it. But if they play a sound to you and your hands are tied, there's absolutely nothing you can do. And what that implies is that the human auditory system got really, really good at mediating and controlling what it's hearing. Because it's the brain that has to do most of

that controlling because we don't have a gate to shut off the input. So our attentional mechanisms have to decide, do I want to pay attention to this? Do I want to be hearing this or don't I? And that actually extends to music, believe it or not. Our brains respond differently. This makes me smile because I love it so much. Our brains respond differently to records that we like versus records that we dislike. That's really interesting. How is that? Explain to me how that happens. So our nervous system has, our entire nervous system has a subsystem that's called the default network. And the default network has only recently been described. It's a hot topic in neuroscience right now. Now, if you ask people, are you thinking about something

other than what you're doing right now? 30 to 50% of the time, people will say yes. What that means is we're constantly going back and forth between focusing on the external world and going into our own heads. So it's the default network that gets active when we go into our own heads. That default network includes circuits that are connected to or that represent your sense of self. So when you go in your own head, that's you. That's your self-identity, your self-awareness, your self-consciousness. That's your default network. Anyway, there's a little structure called the precuneus. A little precuneus is kind of back behind the middle of your head, and it's not part of the default network, but it connects to it. Studies showed

that when people were lying in an fMRI scanner and they're listening to music, it could be their favorite song that they brought in. It could be music that they like or music that they dislike. They rated these pieces of music before they got in a scanner. Anyway, when they heard music that they liked or their favorite song, the little precuneus increased its connections to the default network. But as soon as a record came on that these listeners disliked, the precuneus cut itself off from the default network. So what that's saying is the precuneus is acting as a little gatekeeper circuit to decide whether or not a record should be integrated into your concept of yourself, your self-identity.

Music listening is very effective at getting us to go into our own heads. And we have a little gatekeeper there that's deciding which records are allowed to do that and which ones aren't. So this is so fascinating. I mean, you have a new book out called This Is What It Sounds Like. And you write in this book that music activates our personal self more than any other art form. I found that really interesting, and you're getting to that now. So what do you mean by that, and why do you think it is? Well, music listening is highly personal. So if you are someone who appreciates the visual arts, you'll go to a lot of museums and galleries, and you'll stand there along with other people taking in paintings.

If you love movies and television, well, there's other people there too. That's also somewhat personal, but it involves the stories of other people. When we listen to music, a piece of music is three minutes long four minutes long and you listen to it these days anyway in private and you go into your own head deciding what this record means to you what it sounds like to you what does it make you think of what does it make you visualize what does it make you feel how does it make you feel? How does it make you move? Your response to it is entirely private and unique to you. Also, the other factor here is that our auditory system is the fastest of our five senses, which is a little bit surprising. But as we're processing

the sound on a record, it's lighting up other areas of the brain, downstream areas of the brain. Therefore, music listening is very personalized, very unique to us, and very private in a way. Yeah, when you, like, people have preferences in visual art. People have preferences in movies and television shows. But the degree to which even in my own experience, the music I listen to seems to be about me is really heightened compared to those things, you know, that people that I listen to when I'm alone, right? When I, uh, uh, when I feel sad, I listened to this artist or that artist, or, um, you know, there's, there's music that I, uh, currently actually have difficulty listening to because it brings me back to acutely to a previous emotional state in my life. Um, not even, uh, you know, uh, an old relationship or anything like that. Just it, it brings me back to my college years.

And sometimes I don't have the emotional bandwidth to go there. So I don't want to listen to Belle and Sebastian, which was the band that I listened to a lot in late high school, early college. It's too wrapped up in myself for me to listen to casually. I need to listen to it very seriously. And there's plenty of works of visual art and television shows that I enjoyed at that time as well, but I don't quite have the same emotional, I don't know, and intertwining with them. They don't feel as much as a part of my being. And that's very strange and interesting that music feels that way. And you're explaining why. It's due in part to the effectiveness with which music

activates our default network and gets us to go into our own heads. You said a number of interesting things in there that I'd like to say more about. A lot of times people want to know, why? Why do so many people bond to the music that they liked in high school? And many people, their taste in music never changes. They like what they like in high school. And many people, their taste in music never changes. They like what they like in high school, and it's that way for life. As you said, if you're having a bad day in school, a terrible day, and you come home, you put a record on. And when I say record, it doesn't mean vinyl.

It can be CD, or it can be streaming, just whatever, recorded music. You put a record on, and you listen to that record. And that singer is telling you, here's the attitude you need to have tomorrow at school. Here are the words you need to use to talk to that girl or talk to that guy. And what happens is that we bond to that band, that artist, because they're taking care of us. We bond to people who take care of us when we're hurting. So we develop a sweet spot, a fondness for these artists who took care of us, who solved problems for us when we were young. Now, when we get older, the reason we might not want to listen to them, at least not all the time, is, as you mentioned, nostalgia.

According to some research that I did with my co-author, we asked people in the United States in a big survey, what do you see in your mind's eye when you listen to your favorite music? And across three different studies, the most common answer was autobiographical memories. the most common answer was autobiographical memories. 25% of people, when they listen to their favorite music, see people, places, and events in their lives. They see themselves. And they listen to music for that reason, to get that nostalgia.

The next most common response was 19% of people who said that this I love. They said they make up a story from the lyrics. They listen for the lyrics and they make up a story with themselves or invented characters or the artist. Me personally, ever since I was a little kid, all I've ever pictured when I listen to music is the band, is the artist. That's my go-to mental fantasy. I see the artist performing, and that's probably why I became a recording engineer. My co-author, on the other hand, he sees abstract shapes and colors, and he loves electronic music without vocals because it helps him have the fantasy he wants. Ah, wow. I feel like I picture almost like vignette images of people in places,

right? Sometimes autobiographical memories, but sometimes, you know, I'll picture like certain songs to me sound like driving down a road or riding on a train or someone on a bus. I guess I picture a lot of modes of transportation. I never realized that. That's interesting because I think it was about eight or nine percent of respondents who said they'll picture natural scenes. It could be people. One respondent said, this is so specific, I don't know if it was male or female, but this person said, I picture two people in a kitchen talking and fighting and then laughing and making up. That was really specific. But many people will say, I picture the beach or the mountains or the forest or something like that. Some younger people responded that, an interesting response.

They said, I see the room that would go with this music. And upon further investigation, it turns out that a lot of these young people were video game players. So when they hear music, they're imagining like a video game scenario that would go with this particular piece of music. What that tells us is that, one, when we listen to music, we do go into our own heads. We do conjure up imagery that goes along with what we're hearing, and that is very personal and very private. What I don't know, it hasn't been empirically

investigated, is just how variable that is. Now for me, anytime I tried to imagine myself singing or playing, and I definitely try, because it seems like it would be great to be a great jazz pianist or a great guitar player, a great singer. It seems like it would feel great. But when I try to imagine it, I can't hang on to that fantasy. I always go back to my go-to fantasy, which is I'm right there while the musicians are performing. This is what I was alluding to earlier when I said I think little kids kind of know who they are through these fantasies. know who they are through these fantasies. Yeah, that's incredible. Well, look, we have to take a really quick break. I can't wait to keep talking to you. We'll be right back with more Susan Rogers. Okay, we're back with Susan Rogers. I want to ask you one, I want to ask you the most basic question I have about music. And maybe this is even too basic for the work that you cover, but I'm interested to

hear your answer to it. Why do we as a species enjoy music at all? Like, I know that music is, you know, it's the, if you look at the fundamentals of music, it's the, you know, sound is the vibration of air and, you know, different notes happen at different fundamental frequencies of those vibrations. You know, octaves are a certain whatever fundamental frequency apart from each other. Why would that be something that we as a species enjoy and are drawn to? Do you have any theory or understanding about that? That is such a good question and it's a complicated answer. and it's a complicated answer.

It's not, researchers don't agree, and it's not fully understood yet why human beings have music. So the two most prominent schools of thought are probably complementary. So going back to Charles Darwin in the 19th century, he said that the music-making ability is an adaptation. So he said that human beings evolved this sophisticated mechanism of expressing ourselves through our voices and through dancing and synchronizing to a rhythmic beat, like someone beating on a log drum or something. We did that primarily to attract the opposite sex.

drum or something, we did that primarily to attract the opposite sex. So those early proto-humans who were really good at picking up on the subtle nuances in a voice or who had the lung power to sing all day and who had the brain power to remember the lyrics to their oral histories, those proto-humans who were good at music made it more frequently. So the music ability served our species. But the other theories, and this one's compelling too, other theories say, no, no, no, no, no, it had nothing to do with adaptation. It has everything to do with vocalizations and our capacity to use our voices to transmit and to broadcast. So if a dog wants to tell you how to behave, that dog can growl at you. And that vocalization means you don't come any closer. Or if the dog is saying, comfort me, I feel bad, I'm scared, the dog will whimper and cry.

And that's saying, you come close because I'm scared right now. So some researchers think we got so good at modifying our vocalizations to express emotions that ultimately we devoted brain regions to just that purpose. For nearly all human beings, we process pitch and rhythm, musical signals on the right hemisphere of our brain, and speech on the left hemisphere. So the sounds we're hearing, especially the sounds of our voices, comes up through the auditory brainstem and a person can choose to pay attention to the words we're saying or they can choose to pay attention to just the intonation in our voice, our emotional state. So it's thought that music is a specialized form of communication that humans

excel at compared to other species. As I said, it's probably a little bit of both, and it's certainly not fully agreed upon as to why music evolved in us. Yeah, the explanation that it is related to human vocalization, though, makes sense to me because it helps explain why music is so important to us emotionally, because the main thing that distinguishes humans from other animals is the use of language, or at least in my view, that's the thing that started our being distinguished from other animals. That's what

led to culture and led to the incredible diversity of ways that humans live and the amount of things that we've built on this earth, et cetera, et cetera. And so sound is therefore very deeply connected to what it means to be human and to our, of course, our emotions because we're social animals and sound is how we are social with each other. So it makes intuitive sense to me what you're saying. It does make sense to me, but because I have such reverence for Charles Darwin,

anything that he theorizes, I want to think is correct. Although, you know, he could be wrong. But here's an interesting fact. So human beings evolved to do most of their mating activity in the dark, in the dark of the cave or the dark of the jungle. So we evolved to have a very, very finely tuned mechanism for detecting what was going on with people through their voices. Anyway, it is thought that humans primarily choose a mate based on the timbre of the voice. Really? Yep. Research has shown that women with sexy voices actually have more sex measured in terms of when they start having sex, how many partners they have, whether or not they're faithful

to those partners. Women with sexy voices have more sex than women with sexy bodies. It's an, yep, it's an, Sarah Collins was the researcher there, if I'm remembering correctly. I could be wrong about that. I could be conflating it with a different study. But anyway, men have a preference for female vocal timbre. Women have a preference for female vocal timbre. Women have a preference for male vocal timbre. Now, in the case of female vocal timbre, the voice is actually very informative for women.

Women's voices change throughout their monthly cycle. So the voice is considered, in quotes here, an honest indicator of fertility in a woman. In men, it's a little bit more mysterious because women have strong preferences for male vocal timbre. But when women were asked to judge just by the vocal timbre alone, is this man tall, short, fat, thin? Does he have a hairy chest or a smooth chest? Is he old or young? When they were asked to choose, well, they definitely had preferences, but their choices were mostly wrong. The men's voices don't necessarily predict their physical characteristics other than age and perhaps weight, I think.

And despite that, women have strong preferences over which timbre they prefer, even though it's not an indicator of seemingly anything else. That's exactly right. Yeah. And I believe this one was Sarah Collins. And she wrote, yes, women have a preference, but it is unclear why that preference evolved, because it seems completely disconnected from actual physical attributes. Well, what our preferences are and why we have them is a really interesting question. And I know that a large portion of your book is developed around the concept of the listener profile that you have, that we each have a sort of profile of

what we prefer to listen to. Please explain to me what that is. So based on the things I've learned in college over a number of years, and the things I learned in the recording studio over two decades, and the things I learned at Berklee College of Music, it seems very clear that there are at least seven dimensions of music that can independently each give us a release of dopamine, a little treat. Four of those dimensions are musical, and three of those dimensions are aesthetic. They apply to all aesthetics, like visual paintings and movies and stuff. So the four musical dimensions are familiar.

There's melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre. The three aesthetic dimensions are things like authenticity. This is what record producers are really good at assessing. Authenticity is your perception of where you think that performance is coming from. Is that guitar player feeling it? Is that singer really imagining those words that she's singing? Is she really in the zone? That's authenticity and it can be perceived. Some of us have a preference for raw, gut-bucket emotion. Others have a preference for a more cerebral kind of virtuoso performance.

Then there's realism versus abstraction. Personally, myself, the records I love are made on real instruments, instruments that I can visualize, guitars and horns and things like that. But many people prefer electronic music, where all of these instruments exist only in computer code. They have no physical correlate. You have to use more of your imagination when you're processing abstract art compared to realistic art.

Then the third aesthetic dimension is, of course, novelty versus familiarity. Some folks have an appetite to hear originality on records. I've got a fairly large appetite myself for originality, new ideas, innovation. Other folks have a very large appetite for perfection, technical perfection, which I think is similar in my view to watching sports now i'm not into sports but i've got four brothers and they're all big sports fans and the game is always on they've seen hundreds thousands of games whether it's basketball or football or baseball over their lifetime and you look i look at it and i think yes it's a basketball game. You know how it's

going to go. What are you going to see that you haven't seen before? But what they want are the details of this particular game. And they want to see how basketball can be performed at the highest human level. Likewise, they love rock music, the rock music that was popular when they were young. And when they're listening to rock records, they're listening for those individual details in a very familiar form. So of these seven dimensions, each one of us has a preference on each one that I've just been referring to as a sweet spot. When you hear a record that matches one or two of your sweet spots, that's it. You love that record. A record that doesn't match your sweet spots, you can appreciate it, but it's just not, as we might say, doing anything for you.

It doesn't make you fall in love. Let me ask you, just one of those dimensions you mentioned was timbre, which you had also talked about with the human voice. And I think I know what timbre is, but I'd love to hear you explain it because I think it's one of the more ephemeral qualities of music that we don't talk about that much. Timbre is very mysterious. It refers to the individual acoustic profile

of a given instrument. So I was talking with one of my former students yesterday and he was telling me about this Bill Frizzell record and talking about the Telecaster. That's the guitar that Bill Frizzell plays. And Jeremy, that was the student, he and I were talking about how just sublime the timbre of the Telecaster is. It's similar to a Fender Stratocaster. It's a little bit different from the Gibson Les Paul, but each one of these timbres from these makes and models of guitars are unique. A DW kick drum has a slightly different timbre than a Gretsch kick drum.

A singer like Adele is going to have a slightly different timbre from a singer like Chaka Khan. It's that unique profile of a sound source. I'm fond of saying, I used to say this back when I was in the music business, that melody is the heart of a record. Rhythm is, of course, the hips of a record. Lyrics is the mind of a record because lyrics express ideas. But timbre is the face of a record because it's the identity of genre and the identity of the instrumentation. It's like when you hear that guitar solo and you're like, I just love, not that I love the melody. Sure. I love the rhythm of it. I love the drama of it emotionally. But I also love the sound that the instrument is making at this particular time, like the exact precise sound of it. Is that right? manipulating sounds and record producers as well, because in producing a record, you're blending

and choosing among an infinite variety of timbres. You're trying to, one, make something that pleases you aesthetically, but two, you're trying to make something that conjures up certain associations. For example, from my generation, if I hear a Stratocaster, a blues Stratocaster with a fairly clean tone, I'm going to be thinking of Eric Clapton. And if I hear a Les Paul through a Vox amplifier, well, that's Jimmy Page, that's Keith Richards. Certain famous artists become associated with the sound of their instruments, the timbres that they prefer, the timbres that they use. So even a lesser artist playing a setup with a similar timbre is going to, on some subliminal level, conjure up memories of these other artists who've used that timbre. Wow. And so we all have preferences. So I might have, what, a sort of special signature

of timbres that I prefer. And I'm not sure how we would quantify that, but maybe if you and I spent a few hours together with a notebook and a record player, we could figure it out. And I also have certain preferences with melody and authenticity and all of these. And put together, that equals my listener profile. And that's the sort of music

that I enjoy or that, or that hits me really hard. Exactly. So we all have our preferences and some preferences are stronger than others. Prince used to call it the street you live on. So I have strong preferences for rhythms. And I would tell the artists that I was working with in the studio my strengths and weaknesses. A weakness is I can't go to your instrument and sit down and show you what chord to play. I can't tell you use this inversion and not that inversion. It's not my expertise. But one thing I can do really well for you is I'm going to have a keen ear on the rhythm. And if you're not rhythm section, if you're not in the pocket,

I'm going to hear that right away and I'm going to be able to give you feedback. So my sweet spot on Rhythm Street is precise and strong. On Lyric Street, not so much. I'm not so much of a lyric snob. Some dimensions are more powerful for us than others. But here's a really cool thing that I only learned about fairly recently. So when we're young and we're listening to music and we're getting either rewarded or punished neurologically from the records that we're hearing, or punished neurologically from the records that we're hearing, those records that rewarded you in the past are actually shaping your auditory pathway.

So let's say you're 15 years old and you go to a friend's house and the friend puts a record on and you're having a great time and you like this record a lot. That acoustic pattern is being encoded along with those feel-good neurotransmitters. And now those sounds, those timbres, that rhythm, these performances, just the overall tone of this record is shaping your auditory cortex so that over the years you get better and faster at recognizing the music of you, the music you like. Just the other day, I put on a record, a song called 29 Ways by the blues artist Willie Dixon. I've been on this blues kick. I put on 29 Ways in one bar, one bar. I recognized,

bar, one bar. I recognized, oh, this is sublime. So it has this drum intro and I almost didn't want the vocals to come in because I was so in the groove of that rhythm. It felt so good. That was all the reward my nervous system needed. The lyrics could have been anything, vocal performance, it could be anything. Doesn't matter. I've got that groove going for me. I'm rewarded. That's all I need to love this record. It's going to be different with different records, of course.

Wow. I think about one of the bands that hit me the most over the last 10 years has been the band War on Drugs, which is, I remember the first time I heard this band, and this is one of the most popular the last 10 years has been the band War on Drugs, which is, I remember the first time I heard this band, and this is one of the most popular rock bands in America, so I'm not unique in this respect, but the first time I heard it, it hit me so immediately, like, what is this music? And even today, I could listen to the same first song that I heard from this band. I could listen to it over and over again on repeat and never get sick of it.

I've listened to that album that that appeared on countless, countless times. I never get sick of it. And it specifically, the strange thing about it was it reminded me of music that I liked when I was younger, but in an indefinable way. I'm like, I can't list another band that sounds like this, actually. I could maybe pull out some influences. Oh, it has sort of a krautrock motorik beat in the background, which is something I really enjoy. It's got some guitar solos, et cetera. There's maybe a Bruce Springsteen going on, but I was never a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. I don't know what it is, but when I listen to it, it makes me, the thing that actually I picture in my mind is driving around in the backwoods of Long Island

with a friend of mine from high school, even though we never listened to this band because it didn't exist yet when we were in high school. It just gives me that feeling. It sounds exactly familiar enough, but also exactly new enough because I can't list another band that sounds exactly like this. Like, you know, the melodies hit me. Like, it really does. The lyrics are very vague and I don't much care for lyrics, so that works as well.

Like, when you were listing out all of those things, I'm like, aha, this is sort of an explanation for why this hits me so hard. And it also connects to like an earlier time in my life in a really distinct way. I love thinking about the neuroscience of that. And I wish I could have talked to you as the book was being written in the yeah, in the final chapter. The final chapter advances the idea that falling in love with a record is like falling in love with a person. It's instant

physical attraction. And those features that appeal to you may not appeal to other people in the same way. So I found a dozen friends and colleagues, nearly all of them musicians, and asked them to describe in a paragraph a record they fell in love with at first listen, like love at first sight, that is still a record they passionately love today. And what was so interesting is these records are all different styles from different generations. Not a single one of them ignites my passions the way it does these people. And it's a little bit like describing the person you fall in love with at first sight. Someone else might say to you, what do you see in him? What do you see in her? And it's hard to describe. All you know is that they're not perfect, but in some mysterious way, this person or this record is perfect for you. You're able to overlook the flaws because

those things don't matter that much to you. It's the certain things that resonate with you just perfectly that make you say, this is the one. Oh my God. We have to take another quick break, but we have to keep talking as soon as we come back. We'll be right back with more Susan Rogers. Susan, we've been talking about how we often, so often, have a deep emotional connection to the music that we hear as young people. I was going to ask you why it is that, I've heard it often observed that music just sounds better to teenagers, right? When you're a teenager, you hear music and you're like, oh my God, this is incredible. You want to do nothing but listen to the songs, right? I feel that as an adult, I don't quite have that same, you know, intense attraction when I, or it seems that it

happens more rarely. When I, you know, that moment where I first heard the band War on Drugs at the age of probably 32, and I was immediately drawn to it, that doesn't happen to me as often as it did when I was 18 years old. And when it does, I treasure it because I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm having that profound musical experience. Why do you think that is? We have to acknowledge that among all the art forms, music is perhaps the most functional. So music doesn't appeal to us unless it works for us. And it's a little bit like food or fashion in that regard. There's a lot to choose from.

We can pick and choose and we can collect a self-curated library of the things that appeal to us. That is never more important and urgent than when we're teenagers. Because the most important problem that a teenager needs to solve is who are they in the social sphere out there. It's no doubt terrifying to parents, but studies have shown that a teenager's concept of him or herself has a tremendous amount of overlap with their concept of what they think other people think of them. Now in adults, what you think of yourself and what you think other people think of you, slightly separate regions of the brain. In teenagers, this is almost perfectly overlapping.

So if you're a kid, you need to establish who you are. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to align with a certain style of music. So music becomes very effective at helping us to forge our self-identity when we're young. This is why your interactions with music can, it doesn't happen for everybody, but it can, for many people, establish these really powerful bonds that feel really personal and feel really important. really personal and feel really important. I was one of those kids who believed that the music I was listening to and the music I loved was important. You grow up, you get older and you realize, no, it's just a rock band. But it doesn't feel like that when you're a kid. Not at all. Some of us experience that feeling so deeply and so often that we can draw upon that as older adults and get that feeling again. I'm in my 60s, and I still get that when I hear something that just wipes me out.

It feels like, yep, that's what I'm talking about. This is me. It's a very powerful and a very welcome feeling. it's a very powerful and a very welcome feeling. So at the same time though, that, you know, music is very important to kids and you say we often imprint on a certain style of music or, you know, a lot of people's tastes don't change. I also noticed my tastes do change. You know, I've listened to jazz throughout, you know, since high school through college,

but when I was younger, you know, the first jazz album I fell in love with was Miles Davis's kind of Blue, not a original album to fall in love with it. And, but I remember spending years trying to find another album that sounded like that one. You know, the first time I heard it, I was like, oh, this is the most incredible music ever made. This is what jazz is. And then it took me forever to, you know, it's so rare to find anything that sounds similar. But now at that time, also, you know, freer jazz or, you know, more exuberant, like the jazz that was being made in the late 60s and 70s, I had less of a connection to. Now that I'm older, I looked around and I was like, wait, that's what I listen to now is the sort of squonkier, you know, wilder. I love Pharaoh Sanders. I love Alice Coltrane. I love these sort of like, you know, freer spiritual jazz players. And the stuff that

I listened to when I was, you know, in high school and college, I'm like, oh, that sounds a little square to me now. Sounds a little bit old old fashioned in a way. And I'm interested in I don't know if there's any profound reason for why that happens, but I'm curious what your thoughts are. Yeah, I believe that our listener profile is fairly constant over our lifetime. And all we do is look for new, innovative examples of our sweet spots on the listener profile in different styles of music. That's a little bit supported by research. The social psychologist Adrian North and David Hargreaves did this mind-blowing study that I love so much. They looked at the personality profiles of groups of people, and they found almost a perfect match between the personality and cognitive profile of young men who loved heavy metal music and older men who loved classical music, which was really interesting.

What it's saying is this is the same type of listener. I believe this. Yes. This listener is craving complexity and intricacy and wants an active, not a passive listening experience. So that mind usually, this has been mapped out, usually high IQ, high verbal ability. That mind, when that mind is young, says, yeah, hardcore. That's what I'm talking about. Converge, Jane Doe, that's what I'm talking about. Glassjaw. And then when they get older, it's Penderecki or it's some other complicated Mahler, maybe some other complex classical composer. Scratching the same itch, only using different musical timbres and gestures and features in order to get that same satisfaction. That's fascinating. I want to ask you about one of the other criteria on your listener profile list. Can we talk a little bit more about realism versus abstraction? So you described this earlier as there being a dimension from real instruments to electronic music.

But I'm curious that electronic music has only been around, oh, what, 70 years or so? Certainly in the 19th century, there was no electronic music. Is there another way of understanding realism versus abstraction in terms of what you mean by that? Yeah. So again, from neuroscience, we know that specificity and generality are a tightrope that certain circuits in the brain can traverse. the brain can traverse. So for example, back in my day, the analog era, if I wanted a great kick drum sound, I could customize that kick drum by tuning the head. I could change the head, maybe from a coated head to a clear transparent head. I could change the head, I could change

the beater. I could go from a padded kick drum beater to a hard beater. I could change the head. I could change the beater. I could go from a padded kick drum beater to a hard beater. I could have the drummer play it differently. I could take off the front head. I could choose to put a pillow inside the drum and weight it down. So I could take this instrument and I could sculpt it to be a specific thing. It's just this DW kick drum with this Remo pinstripe head and blah, blah, blah, the hard beater or just whatever. Now, when the youth of today are making records, all they have to do is go through a sample library that says kick drum and pull up a kick drum. The kick drum that they pull up from a sample isn't a specific kick drum. It's a general kick drum. It's the idea of an acoustic instrument more than the instrument itself. So back in the olden days,

in my olden days in the studio, we had to work, most of us, when we were making records, from the materials to the vision. So if you're making a record with a band or even with a solo artist and you're calling session musicians, you've got a limited budget. And that's going to limit what instruments you have, how much studio time you have, how much space you have in that studio. You're limited. You're working from the materials you have to the vision on this record. But in the modern era, these days, people can go from the

vision to the materials because everybody has everything. Everyone with a laptop and a sample library has all the kick drums, all the snares, all the horns, all the patches, and they can modify those so that they become audio chimeras, musical instruments that don't physically exist anywhere and actually couldn't possibly physically exist anywhere. In this next generation, the records that are going to dominate and earn the most money will be made by the people who are the greatest visionaries, not necessarily the people with the most money

or the people with the greatest materials or the people with the greatest materials. This happened with the advent of the digital audio workstation, and it presented a tremendous revolution to the musical recording arts. The exact same revolution happened right around 1840 with the invention of the camera. As soon as the painters, the early painters in the 19th century, saw their first photograph, they must have thought to themselves, I'm totally screwed because this little wooden box can capture reality in an instant way faster than I could do in a week with my paints and my canvases.

It was the same thing for recording engineers right around 1995 or so when we realized this little silicone box, the laptop, the computer, can capture in an instant a perfect kick drum that takes us hours and a lot of specialized knowledge and skill to capture. So the revolution has happened

and now we're in an era where records can be far more abstract than ever before. And they don't necessarily have to reflect what actually happened in a studio. Things can be pitch and time corrected. Things can be invented. And you have no idea, listener, whether or not that really happened in real time, or if someone took a computer, took a mouse, and just moved notes around to make that happen. But wait, if realism versus abstraction is a dimension of preference that people have, isn't it something that we can detect on a recording to a certain extent? I mean, I have a, there's a bluegrass band that I really love, not a very famous band,

called Spirit Family Reunion. One of the things that I love about them is that their recordings are made, sung into a single mic, right? They play, you know, all of their recordings are, or actually, I don't know if it's a single mic, but I know, because I know one of the members of the band, that, you know, their albums were recorded

in a single live session, right? Not even multi-tracked. They're just sort of playing live in a studio. But I can detect that on the record. It's one of the things I love about the record is that it has that sort of immediacy to it. And it has, I guess what I would call realism because I can tell there's a real fucking banjo

in the room there, you know? And it is being played simultaneously with the guy singing into the microphone. And that's something that I like. I also enjoy abstraction of music. I enjoy electronic music and I love an extremely detailed, you know, studio composition. You know, I enjoy that as well, but I also enjoy its opposite. And I mean, is there not still maybe a sublimated desire that lurks within the public for a less sculpted digital audio experience in their music? There certainly must be.

So in the era of painting, we went from extreme realism, these maestros that could capture reality on paint. We went from that era to increasing gradations of greater and greater abstraction. In the 1940s, we had Jackson Pollock and these splashes of paint on a canvas. And there's no there there. There's no object there. So when it comes to viewing abstract art, your brain has to use its imagination.

It is whatever you think it is because the actual details of what it's representing are vague. So it's up to you. of what it's representing are vague. So it's up to you. We've got James Turrell, and his art doesn't even involve a canvas.

It just involves light. So a similar process is happening now with music. So you mentioned that you like both. You like electronic music and you like realistic music. People can have more than one sweet spot, it would appear, on a given dimension. However, let me give you two examples. I mentioned earlier that when I listen to music,

my greatest rewards come from a capacity to imagine what it was like in the studio when that work was being created. I like the new album by Pharo Pharaoh Sanders and DJ Floating Points. That record is amazing. And Floating Points, Sam Shepard is actually a neuroscientist himself. When I listened to... Yep, he's a neuroscientist. I believe he's a PhD. When I listened to that record, though, I'm going, my mind is making a beeline for what happened in the studio? What happened in the studio? What happened in the studio? Where's the fantasy I like?

I can picture Pharaoh Sanders, but I can't picture anything else. But I've got enough of a reward there that I love it. And I know that there's a neuroscientist there in the room and I enjoy that. Now, Ogi, who's the co-author on this book, and a colleague of mine at Berkeley, her name is Dr. Erica Knowles. She's a cellist. Both of them cannot stand hearing vocals on record because if they can visualize the performers, it ruins the enjoyment for them. When I found this out about Erica, I said, Erica, what happens when you go to concerts?

She said, I don't go to concerts. If I can see the performers, my pleasure is diminished. So I think what our brains are doing, I suppose I could say I know what they're doing, is they're sending out feelers and they're searching for where, when we're listening to a record, where the treats are buried. Give me a treat. Give me something that's going to resonate with me. And if you scan that record and you scan all the different dimensions of it and you can't find a treat, you can't find a source of reward for you, you can like that record.

Fair enough. But you're not going to want that record. Wanting and liking are very different, and when you want something, it means you'll sacrifice to get it. Being aware of your listener profile and what causes you to want a record makes it faster and easier to bond to the records that you love the best. and easier to bond to the records that you love the best. Yeah. It's fascinating that you describe it as being so personal to individual people that we imprint on a piece of, you know, a type of music that we heard when we were young.

Our tastes, you know, only change to a certain degree. We each have a very specific listener profile. Everybody pictures different things when they are listening to music. And yet, music is one of the most archetypical communal activities for humans to engage in. Going back into human history, people making music together, gathering together to listen to music, certainly concerts are one of the archetype communal gatherings in any human society, people who get together to listen to music. And so how do you square those two things, that your idea of the listener profile is so

intensely personal, and yet this is the ultimate coming together thing that people love to do in a group and lose themselves in a large experience? in a group and lose themselves in a large experience. Yeah, our personal identity is inextricably intertwined with our social identity. Who you are, who you think you are, who you want to be is in part a reaction to who you'd like to be in society, who you think you need to be for the people that you love, your place, your role in this society. We treasure our individuality and our individual brains, but man, it feels so good to go to a concert

with 14,000 or 15,000 people and a groove starts up that everybody's into. You've got 15 15 000 people all responding to the exact same thing i mean the classic example is queen's clap clap stomp clap clap stomp we will we will rock you what does that feel like when you listen to it alone in your room no big deal you listen to it atbley Stadium, and it's a huge deal, because all these people are feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time. That gives you the feeling of being a member of the tribe. These are your people. A similar thing happens when you sing in a choir. It's actually shown to be good for our immune system. When we join our

voices with other people, you're joining your voice to something that's bigger than you, and that's protective in a way. And it's actually really good for your immune system, especially in the elderly. It can help stave off disease and sickness because it releases so many feel-good neurotransmitters. So to answer your question, it's a little bit of both. We need that personal, private, intimate relationship with music, just like we need an intimate, private relationship with our romantic partner. But we want to be seen in public with our romantic partner. You want somebody that you're not embarrassed to introduce to your family and friends.

Same with music. Well, it's fun to be in public with your romantic partner as well. Yes, exactly. Same thing. Yeah, I think about some of the most profound musical experiences that I've had. And what that reminds me of is I love the pop singer Robin. And I've thought about her a lot, actually, while you were talking, because you were talking about authenticity and the feeling that, you know, the musician is really feeling it. And one of the things that I love about her is that, you know, when I hear her sing, even on a record that I know is highly produced, I'm like, oh, she really it sounds like she's experiencing the emotion that she's singing about. oh, she really, it sounds like she's experiencing the emotion that she's singing about.

Like, I believe that she's experiencing heartbreak in the moment that she's singing about heartbreak, even though I know that's probably a little bit ridiculous. And I don't get that feeling from, I apologize to fans, Carly Rae Jepsen, for example. I don't feel, I don't get the sense from Carly Rae Jepsen that she is experiencing what she is singing about. She sounds like a pop singer singing a written song.

To me, again, I apologize to all the Carly fans out there. Um, but, but she has this moment when if you see her live, uh, where she, uh, sings, you know, one of her big hits dancing on my own, which is one of my favorite songs of hers. And the core, it has this incredible chorus. And whenever she performs it, there's a moment when she just, all the music drops out, the entire band stops playing. She stopped, and she just allows the entire crowd to sing the entire chorus of the song. And that's what everyone has been doing the entire song anyway, because everyone loves the song and knows all the words by heart. But it's this ecstatic moment where, you know, everyone who has been listening to this song on their headphones and singing it alone in their apartments or on a jog or in their car is suddenly singing it simultaneously together. And it's such

a powerful, I mean, it's just people singing along to a pop song, but oh my gosh, it's like a religious experience when that happens. I know exactly what you're talking about. Music listening tends to be private and intimate, but music itself, its whole purpose is to form a connection with other people. It doesn't have a purpose if it doesn't connect with other people. In thinking about the origins of the music faculty, I wondered, suppose there's a hermit way out in the woods and that hermit doesn't have a radio, doesn't have any device for playing music. If that hermit had a cello, would that hermit make music all alone? Music that no one would ever hear? Music in a vacuum, not heard by anyone else? I don't think you'd be

very motivated to make music if you were the only one that ever heard it. Music doesn't really become music until the magic happens, until that pressure wave gets out there in air, is picked up by a receiver, someone else's ears, is converted into a pattern of neural activity that is similar to the pattern that was happening in the musician's brain, and then a decision is made. I like this. This is great. This is the music of me.

Of course, it's just as likely or more likely to be, yeah, this is okay, but it's not me. But when that transfer function happens and you say, yes, this is me. I love this. You and that musician now share something that feels very intimate and very private and very, very precious. Man, I need to ask you about one more thing before we end. It's something I've been thinking about a lot in terms of music and aesthetic experiences. And I'm going to start by talking about cooking and I'll make my way to

music. I've been thinking a lot lately about how home cooking to me tastes better than restaurant food. Not just my own home cooking, not just the home cooking of my mother, but like home cooking, like generally just like food made by a person, I think has a quality to it that tastes better than anything made in a restaurant. And I think part of it is due to, you know, it's a single batch, right? Anything made in a restaurant is made in a sort of factory environment. They're making dozens of dishes every hour. Something made at home is made in a small batch. But there's something about the roughness of it, the, the you know the fact that it's made in a home kitchen i don't know what it is i've been trying to put my finger on what that is and it's

connected the thing that i connect that to is you know a number of years a couple of years ago uh my girlfriend and i got a piano for our home an acoustic piano um and you know she plays i used to play as a little kid i don't play. She played as a kid, but continued it. And she plays in our house and she doesn't play. She says, oh, I play so terribly. I don't know. I want to get better. But, you know, for her, it's a hobby. It's not even very high on her list of hobbies that she does. It's her fifth most important hobby to her, right? In terms of how much time she puts into it. She doesn't take lessons once every month, once or twice a month. She pulls out the sheet music and she practices a piece by by a piano composer that she likes. To me, the sound of her playing the piano is like the most beautiful music that I could possibly hear.

I love putting on a record of a great pianist playing. But as soon as she's just, you know just stumbling through a piece, practicing, making errors, going back and playing, I'm like, let me pull up a chair and grab a book to read or something and just chill out in the room while that's happening because it's like, as a musical experience, it is intensely beautiful to me. And I've been trying to figure out why that is. And I wonder if there's some dimension on your listener profile list that that is appealing to, or if you have any thought about why that is, that the amateur at-home personal performance can be more powerful than the professional one. That's an interesting thought. And you've kind of launched me here because I don't know

if that aspect of music performance has actually ever been studied. In the book, the closest I come to describing that is the chapter on authenticity. And the very first record that I offer to readers in the book to listen to and assess is by the Shags. People in the music business know who the Shags are, but if you don't know, the Shags were three teenage sisters who lived in rural New Hampshire in the 1960s, and their dad believed that they were going to form a mighty rock band. And in order for this to come to pass, dad pulled these three girls out of school, made them study at home, didn't let them date boys, didn't let them have friends. He gave them musical instruments, bass, drums, and guitar, and he forced them to write songs and play and sing.

And dad raised a little bit of money and took them down to a recording studio just outside of Boston. And as soon as the recording engineers heard the Shags play, they were just rolling on the floor laughing. There was no technique there at all. The shags could barely tune their instruments. They couldn't play in time. From a technical standpoint, it's god-awful. But in the music business, the shags serve as a touchstone for authenticity. Just as you began by talking about home-cooked food, when someone goes into their kitchen and they prepare something for consumption by others, And they prepare something for consumption by others. It's easier in the absence of professional technique.

It's easier to assess the intentionality. What they meant to do. What they meant to do was feed you. And they wanted to feed you something good. So when you're hearing someone you love play piano, it doesn't need to be technically perfect. It can be. Fine. Good. What you're responding to is the intentionality of someone sitting at a musical instrument

and expressing what's going on with them inside on this instrument. It's an intimate view into an aspect of their psyche that they can't express in words if they could express it in words they wouldn't need to sit at the piano they're expressing something else having been around musicians my whole adult life as a listener

I've become highly highly highly attuned to listening for what's in those gestures on guitar and piano and drums and horn and vocal. That was my job for many years. What are they trying to let me know with this signal that they're making? You do feel intimately connected to someone who's right there in the room with you, creating that sort of a stimulus. Yeah, the intimacy is, that is maybe the word that I was missing in both food and a home-cooked

meal and a home performance. The really close intimacy with the person making it is something that can be really powerful. Thank you. That's really fascinating and clarifying for me. I wonder if a good place to end would be just to ask, again, you began as a music engineer, you became a neuroscientist. First of all, I'm interested, do you ever still engineer music? And secondly, when you go back to experience music, do you experience it any differently? Because now you know so much about it. Or do you propose that, you suggest that people listening at home

pay attention to music any differently when they listen to it, given the knowledge that you have of it? Yeah, I'm not engineering anymore, but I've just recently retired from Berkeley. I still teach for Berkeley Online, but I'm not on campus anymore. So I'm thinking that in the future, given how much time I spend around musicians, I'll probably be doing some recording at some point.

And do I incorporate any of this knowledge of understanding what the brain is doing on music when I'm either engineering or producing or listening? And the answer is, hell no. No, because all the science is doing is allowing you to, should you choose, walk over to a certain vantage point and look at it that way through that vantage point, should you choose. But listening isn't about knowledge. Listening to music is about feeling. And when I listen to music, I want that experience. I want that

feeling. I want what I've wanted since I was five years old. I want musicians to perform, to play and sing for me. And I want to be the listener. And I want to soak that in. Analyzing their work in terms of what my brain is doing, I could not care less. I'm enjoying it. I'm feeling the love and the joy of hearing this music that I love. That's all the treat that I need. That is so incredible. And I think that's what we all aspire to when we listen to music,

is just to be carried away by it and to forget ourselves. I love that so much, and it's been a joy talking to you. The book is called This Is What It Sounds Like. And of course, if you want to get a copy, you can check it out at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. And I assume it's for sale wherever you can get your books, though, at your local bookshop or anywhere else. Susan Rogers, thank you so much for being on the

show. Thanks, Adam. This is a great conversation. I really felt like I was talking with a kindred spirit here. And I loved our conversation. So thank you for this opportunity to talk with you and provide some insight for your listeners. Oh my gosh, I felt the same. Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much to Susan Rogers for coming on the show. If you want to pick up her book, head to factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producer, Sam Roudman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. Now, I read all of those names on this show, but the name list is getting a little bit long. I'm going to do it this week, but in the future, I might have to, you know,

cut down on the number of names I read. I'm going to do it this week. But in the future, I might have to, you know, cut down on the number of names I read. I'm going to figure out some kind of plan, all right? But here we go. Thank you to A, Adrian, Akira White, Alexey Batalov, Allison Lipparato, Alan Liska, Ann Slagle, Antonio LB, Ashley, Aurelio Jimenez, Benjamin Birdsall, Benjamin Frankart, Benjamin Rice, Beth Brevik, Black Cat Jackster, Brian Gregory,

Kamu and Lego, Charles Anderson, Chase Thompson-Bowe, Chris Mullins, Chris Staley, Comrade Crunchy, Courtney Henderson, Daniel Holsey, David Condry, David Conover, Devin Kim, Drill Bill, Duck Moo, Dude With Games, Eben Lowe, Ethan Jennings, George Rohack, Garner Malegis, Harmonic, Hillary Wolkin, Jay Sal, Jim Myers, Jim Shelton, Julia Russell, Caitlin Dennis, Caitlin Flanagan, Kelly Casey, Kelly Lucas, Kevlar, Lacey Tyganoff, Lacey Garrison, Larry Stouter, Studenmund, Lauren Sanborn, Lynn Nguyen. On to page two, here we go. Matt, Miles Gillingsrud, MomNamedGwen, Mrs. King Coke, Neil Gampa, Nicholas Nicholas Morris, Nikki Battelli, Noah Dowd, Nuyagik Ippoluk, Paul Malk, Paul Schmidt, Rachel Nieto, Richard Watkins, Robin Madison, Ronald C. Waits, Rosamund Sturgis, Rosie Gutierrez, Roy Ziegler, Ryan Shelby, Samantha Schultz, Sam Ogden, Sasha Chu, Sean Smith, Señor Bolsa, Scooper, SuperDuper, Spencer Campbell, Susan E. Fisher, Tim Kearns, Tim Esroot,

Vincente Lopez, Vornack, WhiskeyNerd88, Will Bogey, and Zach Zim. Thank you all so much. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover, and I will be gratified to read your name as well. As always, thanks to Falcon Northwest for building me my beautiful custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on.

And thank you to Andrew WK for our theme song. If you want to find me online, you can do so at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time on Factually. I don't know.

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