Instant Genius - The science and soul of music, with prof Susan Rogers

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Why do you love the songs that you do? Why does music have such a powerful hold over us? Can you love music without being musical? Neuroscientist prof Susan Rogers, who at one time worked with Prince as the audio engineer for Purple Rain, reveals what science can tell us about our musical taste, what our favourite songs might tell us about ourselves and, of course, what it was like to work with Prince. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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audio.com to learn more. For BBC, science focus, this is instant genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast four. I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor. And today, we're going to journey into the science and soul of music to find out what it is about our favourite songs that give them such a potent effect on our brains. I'm joined today by Susan Rogers, a former Professor of Music cognition at Berkeley College of Music in Boston, who, before becoming a neuroscientist, had a hugely successful career as a sound engineer working hand in hand with prints on the album, Purple Ray. Susan, together with her colleague Oggy Ogass, have written a new book called This Is What It Sounds Like, What the music you love says about you. And in it, they explore how we each form a unique music personality,

which goes on to define what music we like and what we don't like. In other words, it's why one person can be brought to tears by a piece of Mozart, while another can be left feeling cold. To kick things off, I asked Susan, whether humans are hardwired to enjoy music. It's an interesting question, and it's still debated among music cognition researchers. So the word hardwired is a euphemism for, do we have innate musical abilities? Or, as some would suggest, no, we've got innate language abilities.

And because our language abilities are so sophisticated, we have a capacity to use our voices to express ourselves emotionally without using words. We can use pitch changes to show that, oh, wow, I'm really excited right now. Or, oh, my gosh, that was awful. We're really good at both sending and receiving these non-linguistic pitch change signals. We're also good at synchronizing our bodies to a steady pulse. We're good at rhythm perception. So it is thought that perhaps music just emerged as a byproduct of our language processing abilities. Yet there are other researchers who say, no, no, no, no, no, no, that can't be true because it is possible to incur some sort of brain damage where your music abilities are spared, but your language abilities

are impaired. In other words, there's some leftover circuitry there that handles just music processing. So it is debated. Some, including Charles Darwin, thought that the music faculty evolved for sexual selection, using our voices and our bodies to demonstrate to the opposite sex. You should choose me. I'm the best of this whole pack here. But then there are others who say, no, no, that's not quite it. Music faculty evolved for emotion processing, just like a dog can whimper and cry to show you, I don't feel good right now, comfort me, or can growl to say to you, step back, don't come any closer. We also use our voices to transmit and broadcast information. So it's still being debated by theorists.

So the book starts off wonderfully with your sort of your induction, I suppose, into the music world and how you became recording engineer, who then went on to become and study neuroscience. I wonder if you could share that journey, and I guess in other words, what made you fall in love with recording and recording music, and then why did you sort of decide to study it at its kind of deeper psychological level?

When I was a kid, I loved music like a lot of children do. When parents see that a child is involved or interested in music, They'll often just straight away sign them up for music lessons, which mine did. But playing the piano brought me no joy whatsoever. And beyond that, it didn't even feel like music felt to me. My experience of music was record listening, just a fiend for listening to the radio and records. So I was one of many, many young children who have this attraction to music but have no desire to play it or write it or perform it. Those of us who feel that often become engineers or will become band managers or record executives

or we might own a record shop. We work behind the scenes. In my case, a good fit for me was becoming an audio technician. I like technology. I like systems and mechanisms. So studying audio electronics was a path to get me into the record-making world where I'd be valuable. I could make a contribution. It was my former employer, Prince, who transitioned me from the audio technician role into being a recording engineer. And after he did that, and the first record we worked on was Purple Rain back in 1983. After he made me an engineer, I had an engineering career. From there, I had a record producer's career. That all went really well. I had great success in the late 90s with bare naked ladies from Canada.

We had a number one record, and that was all wonderful. But I had at this point reached my 40s, and in my early 40s, I began thinking, you know, I can really imagine a life as a scientist. I think I would really love wearing a lab coat and looking down through the microscope and studying the natural world and how the natural world came to be the way it is. and how things behave and how consciousness arises, that voice just started getting louder and louder and louder. And I knew I'd have to do it. And so I did. I switched careers. I left the music business in 2000, entered college as a freshman, did eight straight years, got my PhD, and then made a partial

U-turn because after getting the PhD, I ended up at Berkeley College of Music, which was great because I could teach both my virtual PhD, record production, and my actual PhD, music cognition and psychoacoustics. I've enjoyed that ever since. So you have to forgive me because I don't, as a science journalist, I don't often get to ask questions about prints. But you mentioned there that you were, correct me, I forget me, I forget this wrong, so you were an audio technician at first.

So you were essentially setting up the equipment in the right way to record a track And then Prince kind of, I suppose, took a chance on you, decided that you were going to become a recording engineer. I just wondered, you know, do you look back in that now and you wonder what it was that kind of made him make that decision? Or do you have any insight now into kind of that experience and what that moment was like? So an audio technician's role is to repair the equipment.

It requires specialized training in electronics, specifically audio electronics. And I was self-taught. I was also other taught. I worked for a company called Audio Industries in Hollywood, California, and those technicians there trained me to be a staff member who went out on service calls and repaired broken consoles and tape machines in the greater Los Angeles area. Because L.A. was the entertainment capital of the United States, I learned from some some great technicians at the top of their field. So I was pretty good. After five years in the

business, I knew my stuff. When Prince put out the word that he was looking for a full-time audio technician, none of the techs in Los Angeles wanted to leave their prestigious L.A. positions and moved to Minneapolis for this guy who was still a relative unknown. He had just had a hit with Little Red Corvette on the 1999 album. But yeah, they weren't going to leave L.A. But for me, Prince was my favorite artist in the whole world. And as soon as I learned that he was looking for a tech, I knew I had to have that job. So I did. I got the job and moved out to Minnesota. Now, Prince either didn't know or he didn't care that an audio technician normally doesn't use the equipment, they fix the equipment, but they don't employ the equipment in the service of

record making. They don't use it artistically. They don't dial in sounds and they don't make decisions about how much reverb or delays to add. But Prince didn't care about that because he had his own sound. He was his own producer. He knew exactly what he wanted. So all he needed to do for an engineer was just tell them what he wanted and that engineer who knew the equipment could get it for him. So in hindsight, I ended up being the perfect engineer for him in a way, because I knew the equipment like the back of my hand, but I had no preconceived notion of how to use it, and Prince taught me how he wanted it used. That was a very lucky break in my education. I'm going to ask one more unscientific question, which is, I just, I have to ask, what did that

feel like just to have one of your favorite artists and they go, you know, ask you for your profession to go and work with him? Like, I can't, was it scary? Was it exciting? It felt great. It felt like a dream come true. It might happen in your life that things you imagine would be excellent, are suddenly placed in front of you. And someone says, take this. And so you do. And sure, there's that thrilling feeling that, oh, this could all go really badly. But damn, I just got handed this. And I'm going to see if I can make it work. And you just, I did anyway, just shut your eyes and ears to the possibility that it could go wrong. And you just say, no, this is my chance. for it. So that's what it felt like. I felt incredibly fortunate. Every single day I worked for Prince,

and it was over four years of being almost joined at the hip. I never lost the feeling of awe for his talent and his abilities. Every single day knocked me out with what he was capable of. So I felt that the best I could do would be to work as hard as I possibly could to keep up with him and not let him down. And that's what I did for the time I was with him. So at the start of the book, and throughout the book, actually, there's lots of lovely stories of, you know, like you say, behind the curtains in the recording studios. There's one that you really single out, which is from none other than Miles Davis, who said to you that some of the best musicians aren't musicians. And so I wondered what you thought he meant then. And I suppose now, as a scientist and, you know, throughout your career,

you feel, you know, what you've come to understand that to me. So I described in the prologue of the book, an encounter I had with Miles Davis at Prince's house. Prince in his dad, Prince's dad, John Nelson was a jazz pianist. We're having dinner in the dining room upstairs with Miles Davis. Then Prince had called me in advance and said, Miles is coming for dinner. Can you pull these tapes, have them ready to go in the home studio downstairs? Be ready for us.

We're going to come down after dinner. So I had the tapes and I was ready to go. And Prince came running down the stairs and he looked at me and he said in a soft voice, he said, you won't believe this. And coming down the stairs right behind him were two old men, Miles Davis and John Nelson. And these two guys were in the middle of this dinner conversation that they'd been having about clothing. And in particular, about pants. And John Nelson was telling Miles how much he loved.

a pair of striped pants that Miles had worn on TV. And now they came downstairs and they parked themselves right in front of me. And Miles was directly in front of me with his back to me. And he's facing John Nelson. And they're talking about whether or not back and forth, back and forth, do these pants exist? And Miles is saying to John Nelson that he doesn't own any striped pants. And John Nelson is saying, yes, you do. I saw you. I saw you on TV. Where'd you see me on TV? At the Grammys, I saw you. And they're going back and forth about these pants. And they're And then all of a sudden, Miles did this 180 degree spin and he put his face right up, I mean, right in front of my face. And he had this really intense face. He put his face right in front of me. And he said,

yes, I do. They're made out of eel like in Vietnam. And it was so odd. Like those words, I didn't, I wouldn't have put those words together, pants and eel and Vietnam. And I just held my face there and I said, eel like in Vietnam. And he kept. his face right in front of me, I mean inches, four inches away. And he started firing off these questions, who are you, where you from, what do you do, how long you've been here, blah, blah, blah. And I just held my ground. You know, I worked for that little five foot, three inch guys sitting over there with the high heels and the tall hair in the corner. And you're going to have to work a little harder if you're trying to intimidate me. So we went back and forth, back and forth.

And then finally he said, new musician? And I said, no. And he said, that's okay. Some of the best musicians I know aren't musicians. And he turned around. And that was the end of it. And at the time, I thought, is he messing with me? What does that mean? Some of the best musicians I know aren't musicians. But I had the occasion to meet players who played with Miles in the studio, Marcus Miller and others. And they said that he would say to them that he wanted them to play like non-musicians, meaning not sloppy, but with a naivety and a purity of intention that someone who is untrained has. Someone like a little child who does a finger painting of his house and mom and dad, the child has no technique whatsoever for drawing,

but the child is trying to communicate something with that finger painting, saying, this is my world, these are my people, the people who take care of me, this is the house where we live, this matters to me. If you can not be encumbered by your knowledge and by your technique, your pure intentionality can be shown. So after a while, it began to think, maybe I am musical, even though I can't play an instrument, maybe there's a musicality in my listening abilities, in my comprehension of music. As the years go by, more and more, I believe that to be true. So is that sense of musicality in you that you kind of reflected on?

Is that effectively what you talk about when you talk about our kind of musical signature, our kind of taste when it comes to music, something that you and Prince described as the street you live on? Yeah, so music is made in the actual real world, but music comes to life and it functions in the mental world of the living. listener. So these performance gestures that we make, these sounds that we make in the recording studio, mesh, come together, has a record. But that's only half of the job. When that record is listened to, in each and every listener, the pattern of neural activity will cause a different chain reaction.

Some people might focus in on the lyrics and ignore everything else. Some people will totally ignore the lyrics and focus maybe on the style. Others might just focus on the rhythm of this particular record. And each of those listeners is going to be making decisions about whether or not this record is working for them. That's actually shown in fMRI studies to happen really quickly. We are, our human brains are decisive. It's what we do. It's what we evolved to do, to categorize things and to make up our minds about whether something should be engaged with or should be avoided or ignored. So we're constantly assessing music as we listen to it and deciding, is this going to give me a treat? Is this the music of me or isn't it? And if it isn't, we tune it out, we move on to something else. We can get away from it. And if it is the music, of us, we go into our own heads in a manner of speaking. There's a recently discovered neural network that's termed the default network. It's an interconnected set of neural assemblies

that form a network and this default network is so named because it is the network that becomes active when we're in our own heads, so to speak, when we're not focused on external stimulate, and we're in our own thoughts. It turns out that the music we like is really good at firing up that default network and getting us to go into our own heads and shut out the outside world. What happens then is that music becomes a facilitator for our daydreams and our fantasies and those internal private places where only we can go, music facilitates that and accompanies that. That's a really beautiful thing.

So this sort of act, you know, the act of listening that sends you into this inner world. In the book, you outlined several features of that, several qualities of the music that we listen to and how they, in one way or in another, touch different parts of our brain and our memory and our minds and, you know, activate that thing that we all experience as enjoyment in music. And so there's, I should have counted them before. So there's, there's seven of them, no? Seven. Yeah. Seven. Tough question. But I wonder

if you could just briefly just describe, you know, tell us what they are as you do in the book. And then maybe we'll dip into one or two in a little bit more detail and leave the rest for people to read about themselves. Yes. So these seven dimensions are comprised of four dimensions that are musical. These are the familiar ones we know about. There's a dimension for melody, which is processed for most of us in the right hemisphere of our brain. There's a dimension for lyrics for most of us in the left hemisphere, the speech area of our brain. There's a dimension for rhythm, which is processed near our motor cortex, kind of near the top of the brain. There's a dimension for timbre. Tambor is sound itself. So you can play the exact same song on many different musical instruments.

The melody is the same. The harmony is the same. The notes are the same. The timing is the same. But what can change, of course, is the timbre of the instrument you choose. Each one of those musical dimensions has a mental module that can independently activate your dopaminergic reward system. In addition to those four, there are three aesthetic dimensions that apply to every art form, like painting and sculpture and things like that. So those three aesthetic dimensions are, one is the dimension of novelty versus familiarity. Now, some of us like our stimuli to be groundbreaking and to excite us cognitively with new innovative ideas. Earlier I mentioned the Mars Volta. That hits my sweet spot on the dimension of novelty because I like innovation, whereas others like familiarity

in their musical forms. They like their classic rock, their classic bebop jazz, they like their classic gospel or reggae. It's similar to being a sports fan. My brothers, I have a lot of brothers. They're all sports fans. They've watched hundreds, if not thousands, of football and baseball games. They know how the game's going to go. The fourth. form is well known to them, but they don't know how this particular game is going to go, and they tune in for the expertise of watching players at their best. And it's the same thing with folks who like their familiar forms of music. Another aesthetic dimension is the dimension of realism versus abstraction. And this is linked to what we picture in our mind's eye when we're

listening to our favorite music. Personally, my favorite musical fantasies, when I'm in my own head listening to my favorite music, is to picture the artist performing in the studio or on stage. That's where my mind always goes. Consequently, the records I love are made on real-world instruments. Instruments I know and can picture, like bass and drums and guitar and vocal. That's realism, and I like realistic records. But the opposite pole of that is abstraction. Abstractor. Abstract records are made, as we say now, in the box. They're made with computer software, and there's no physical instrument there for you to picture. It is what you think it is, similar to abstract paintings where you have to interpret what made that noise. Some listeners prefer abstract records

for the fantasies, the non-grounded, non-traditional fantasies that their minds experience to electronic and techno and abstract music. Then the final dimension is authenticity. And that refers to where you subjectively imagine the performance gestures to be expressed from. So we might say that someone is singing straight from the heart, or someone is expressing lust from below the waist, or someone has such perfect technique on that vocal mic. I'm thinking Ella Fitzgerald, that she is singing from the neck up, although Ella had such

tremendous soul and passion, we can tell when we're listening to her the tremendous control that she can exert over her voice. We have a sweet spot on our dimension of authenticity, where we have a slight preference for having our music come from. For me personally, I'll take sloppy music played with a lot of heart over technical perfection. Others feel the opposite way. So those are the seven dimensions that are discussed in the book. The seven dimensions are all sort of, I think, really profoundly interesting in their own ways. And so I'd urge anyone to pick up the book and dive into them. And I think also listen to the book is one of the key, key messages because it's punctuated with great records that you can go and listen to and understand.

One great example of this that really, I think, illustrated to me in a very discrete, specific way, the power of authenticity. And perhaps it was a thing I discovered about myself and the music I like was the example of breath. I think in a lot of the records I like, say something like Regina Spector, who's mentioned in the book, or even someone like Bonnevere, who uses a lot of electrical, but you can hear the breath. I wonder if you could just sort of elaborate on that, what difference can a breath make, and why does it sometimes, well, I hadn't realized until I read this in the book, but sometimes you don't hear a breath. This insight came to me from producer David Kahn, who visited Berkeley College of Music about 10 years ago, and he was visiting

my class, and he mentioned that to the students, he said, pay attention carefully to whether or not you kids working in your DAWs, seeing the music waveform on the screen in front of you, pay attention carefully to your decision to edit out the breath or not. So because today we're working digitally, we can take out things like the inhale that precedes the vocal line. But David pointed out, what happens to us, to us listeners, when you can't hear someone breathing? He said, it makes you tense because someone is expelling a lot of air, but you're not hearing them take any air in. He said, that's a feeling that makes you feel a little bit like you yourself are running out of air. It can make you tense.

And he said, when I produce records, he worked with Regina Specter. he said, when I produce records, I make certain that I leave those breaths in there. I thought that was insightful, and I agreed with him. Our students today, who are young record makers, often have a heavy hand with that mouse, and they're editing out subtle performance gestures like breathing that's actually conveying information to a listener. For Prince, for example, I would use a limiter setting that he would, liked that emphasized the breaths. Didn't take them out, emphasized them, because breathing,

your inhale and your exhale is a sign of virility. If you take a really deep breath, you're saying to your listener, all right, hang on, because I've got a lot to say here. And if you can be like Frank Sinatra and complete a really long vocal phrase and still have an exhale of air at the end of that phrase, what that's saying is, damn, this guy is virile, this guy is powerful. Sanatra trained himself to be able to do that. That subtext of virility was a big part of his appeal. So how was the work or the craft of the recording engineer changed during your career? There was a huge, huge revolution in music technology in the late 1990s as we shifted from the old style analog onto tape, recording the kind that I did, onto digital

in the computer recording. So from my generation, recording engineers were maestros of capturing reality. It was really hard to do. You had to select the right microphone and the placement of the microphone. The producers had to select the right musical instrument in terms of its timbre. multi-million dollar rooms were constructed for sound isolation or acoustic enhancement. You're manipulating the signal flow from the microphone to ultimately the loudspeaker in order to give the listener the most realistic impression you possibly can. It was like being a painter, an oil painter, let's say, back in the 19th century, where their job was to set up an easel and a canvas and get their paints and capture reality.

So you might hire a painter back then in the 19th century and say, do a portrait of me and my family. Okay, great. It's going to take about a week and you're going to have to wear the exact same clothes and sit in this exact same position. And by God, I'll get you. I'll capture you. Just give you a week. Give me a lot of hours. Damn, we're going to do this.

And they did until some guy came along with that little wooden box and said, no, no, wait, there's an easier way. And click the bulb and there's the flash. And suddenly we have a camera and we have a photograph. No, it's not going to take a week. You're just going to stand here and just let me grab this. Okay, you're done. Good. Go. Right. So this new technology rendered the art of painting, well, I won't say useless, but practically irrelevant. And likewise, the revolution. in digital audio recording, laptop recording, rendered all of those techniques that my generation had mastered, rendered them almost quaint. Why go to the trouble of getting just the right kick drum and tuning the heads exactly the way you want them, putting that mic in the exact right position, capturing it onto tape, which was really difficult because tape is tricky and it doesn't give you a perfect representation. Why go to all that trouble when you can just go to Splice or whatever these websites are now that have samples? And you want to kick drum? Oh, it's right here. Just click on it with the mouse. There you go. Perfect kick drum. Walla, we're done.

So just as we had this revolution in the visual arts from reality to abstraction, we also are now experiencing a revolution in the recorded musical arts from reality to now we can create musical worlds that don't physically exist. And yet, that is offering opportunities for those music visualizers who really prefer to not see the real world in their mind's eye when they listen to music. My co-author, for example, almost never listens to music with lyrics because he doesn't want to see the real world. He listens to electronic music for the most part.

wants to see the world of his imagination. Particularly interesting. One of the things that you mention is when that transition happened, a lot of producers felt like digital music was cold. And it's still sort of when you talk, when people talk about listening to vinyl as being warm and listening to digital music as lacking something. I just wanted if you could help explain whether that is a real phenomenon on that we feel like music recorded as an analog and played on an analog has a certain quality and whether digital music does feel a bit cold, or is it simply an artifact of how we produce the two? It is a real perception. There are physiological components for that impression of

warmth and coldness. So analog is to audio signals. Analog tape is to audio signals. What film is to visual signals. So when you shoot something on film, what's happening is you're adjusting the aperture of the lens so that photons can saturate the film stock. So the stimulus, the photons, are sinking into the storage medium in film. In contrast, in video, a pixel is either there or it isn't. And that is projecting at you. Nobody's sinking into anything. It's a one or a zero. There's a pixel there or there isn't. So digital video, has high contrast, deep saturation, but it projects at you more than allows you to sink into it. When you're watching film, you're better able to see light slowly transition into shadow.

There's a beautiful gradation from light to shadow. Likewise, in analog tape, the magnetic recording head is wrapped with very, very thin copper wire, and that input signal comes into that copper wire, and forgive me, I'm an audio technician, so here I go. So the signal excites the copper wire, which is wrapped around the magnet. The magnet of the head is then going to cause parallel activity in the wee little magnetic particles that form the coating on the tape. And they're called domains, these tiny little magnetic particles. So they're excited now. The domains are excited. When that happens, if you whisper a soft little signal into the tape machine, it's only going to move the surface of those domains.

But if you're Jimmy Page and you fire up your Les Paul and you hit a power cord, it's going to soak those domains all the way down, through the layer of domains all the way down to the backing of the tape. Now, when you play that tape back, process happens in reverse. The activity of the domains in their alignment excites the magnitude. excites the magnet which excites the copper wire and you hear the signal. What ends up happening is if you're in the studio and you're listening on your loudspeaker, Jimmy Page plays that heavy power cord and you listen as that guitar gets fainter and fainter and fainter and the tail end of that chord is going to sink into the chaos of background noise, of hiss. What that sounds like to us is in a certain way closer to the natural way that sound actually behaves than what happens in digital.

In digital, when you hear a digital recording of Jimmy Page's guitar, that guitar is going to sink, sink, sink until it says, okay, we're done here. You're not interested in hearing anymore. And there are no more ones and zeros. It's the abyss of nothingness. In the grand scheme of things, that distinction between sinking into chaos versus sinking into an abyss of nothing can be perceived on some level. I mean, often you have to be an expert listener in order to tell, but still on some subliminal level. We understand these things and we feel these things.

We've got an impression. An analog, whether it's analog tape or its vinyl recordings, can sound to many of us warmer than digital. Another factor involved, and I'll be brief here, but another factor involved is harmonic distortion. It's the byproducts that are, integer multiples harmonics of the fundamental frequencies. In a sense, it feels like, in a crude sense, it feels like our analog equipment is singing along with us. That doesn't happen in our digital

equipment. That's a brilliant. That's a brilliant answer. And I think that's maybe understand it in a perhaps to a level I didn't understand it quite before. Another question actually that we often get just about sort of music and tastes quite often is, is to do with our relationship with music as we age. And I wondered reading this book whether the idea of your musical profile, the street you live on, do we know or do we have a sense of whether that kind of calcifies as we get older? Do we become more set in what we like and don't like? And that's why we find it harder to connect to new music when we get older.

There are quite a few explanations for why our taste tends to solidify. our youth, our youth is when our brains are most flexible. If you happen to be at a party or a concert or you're at a dance or you're just out hanging out with friends and you're experiencing those feel-good neurotransmitters of being with friends and there happens to be music playing in the background, that music is going to hitch its wagon to the star of those endorphins. You feel good this music is playing and you're going to link that music with feeling good as your brains develop and as your life develops, you don't necessarily feel motivated to seek out new music because you have music already. You know where to go to get that dopamine release. You know where to go

to get music that you like. Many of us, especially those of us who work in music, continue seeking out new forms of music because our professions depend on it. So we are motivated by money to keep looking for new styles of music. But I admit to myself, once I no longer was in the music business after the year 2000 or so, I felt like, okay, I'm good. I know where to go for good music and I don't really need to seek out new forms. But what happened, and this can still happen for adults of all ages, is if you've got a guide who can walk you through a new art form and point out to you, here's what's great about it, here's what you should pay attention to, that knowledge will influence your perception of it. Also, if your guide just happens to be someone you really care

about, those good feelings of love and affection and social belonging will also lubricate that transfer function and cause you to feel affection for a new style of music. That's what my students did for me for American hardcore, turning me on to converge and Dillinger Escape Plan and Glassjaw. Yeah, I never would have sought that out for myself. At that time, I was a post-menopausal woman in her 50s, who's going to go, you know, listening to hardcore. But these kids that I love taught me, here's what's great about it. And I genuinely love that music now. Another student did that for me me with electronic music and techno. He showed me, here's what's great about it. Those kinds of experiences can uncalcify, can release from capture your musical taste and allow you to integrate new

forms into what it is you like. Okay, so here's a tough question for you. There's one artist that I think consistently divides opinion. Depending on who you ask, he's either a musical genius or a bit of an idiot. Now, personally, I'm a fan, but I struggle to explain to others what it is that is so great about Kanye West. Maybe you can help me out. Kanye West is objectively speaking, brilliant. He's a musical innovator and he's influential for other artists. He's always been ahead of the curve. He puts together musical elements in a way that most others don't think of. That was similar to Prince in Prince's Day. Many of us, as I mentioned earlier, have a strong appetite for musical innovation and we are rewarded by hearing brand new constructs from someone. And we can develop a strong appreciation for anybody who's,

who's bringing something new stylistically to the table. And it's the same with food or fashion. People can go out to a restaurant. Some of them just want, you know, whatever is the simplest and plainest. Is there a cheeseburger on this menu? Because that's all I want. Whereas others will see something on the menu that they've never heard of before and they'll think, oh, I've got to try that.

They're very adventurous as foodies. Same thing with fashion. Some of us, it's jeans and T-shirts the whole way because anything else is just a little bit too risky, whereas others would never be caught dead in jeans and a T-shirt. They've got to have something innovative. So Kanye is valuable and important for those of us who are on the right side of that bell curve and seeking out innovation in music. He's managed to make innovation not just experimental for experiments' sake, but appealing, musically appealing. And that's groundbreaking. That's, as we used to say, pushing the envelope. That's

advancing the state of the art of music. Now, for those folks who don't like Kanye, well, that's also perfectly valid. Lately, I've been thinking of this notion of the listener profile in our seven sweet spots. The same way a cosmologist would regard the universe. So the universe is so vast with these billions and billions of stars. Pick seven of them. Pick seven of them. And let that be your constellation. Now, those seven stars, imagine a record, any record, landing somewhere in the midst of that constellation of seven stars. If it's a record that's just kind of equidistant from every one of your stars,

it'll be a good record, but it won't light up your world. But if that record just happens to be close enough to your rhythm star, to feel its gravitational pull, You're going to love that record. And it might be some distance from your melody star, or maybe it's some distance from your stylistic star with novelty or with realism. But that's okay. You're getting all the reward you need from that record on that one dimension.

This happened to me recently listening to, I'm on a blues kick these days. I was listening to a Willie Dixon album, and the song 29 Ways came on. and it's got this doom-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dha. When that groove comes on, it hits me so hard. I almost don't want the vocals to come in because I love that groove so deeply. Same thing with the drummer, the late drummer, Al Jackson Jr., who played for Al Green. That pocket is so deep to my body, Bamo. That record was within the gravitational force field of my rhythm, sweet spot,

a mixing metaphor. here and I'm rewarded. I've got my record right there. So Kanye, for a lot of people, doesn't land anywhere near any of their sweet spots for what music is and how music is rewarding. But for many others of us, Kanye is sublime. That was Susan Rogers there, explaining the science behind the power of music. If you'd like to figure out why you like the music you do, I can't recommend and this is what it sounds like strongly enough. It's on sale now and published by Vintage,

a subset of Penguin Random House. Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, do come find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio,

focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. In a place like Los Angeles, people don't stop being who they are.

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