An Interview with Susan Rogers
Have you ever found yourself listening to a playlist you’ve personally curated only to realize that you’re basically listening to the same type of song over and over again?
In my first semesters of undergrad, I once hosted a dinner party for my Berklee College of Music friends. You know the type: the really cool jazz cats with the perfect pitch and the multiple years of gigging experience. At the time, as a rather new composer, I was endlessly impressed by their knowledge and their musical insight. Anyways, as we’re eating dinner, my friend Steve says to me, “Sabrina, have you realized that the last four songs have had the exact same chord progression?” Now, at that moment, I wasn’t really paying attention to the music: I was probably playing songs from one of the multiple indie rock playlists I had mindlessly compiled throughout the day. I looked at him with my eyebrows raised, “Really? No. I doubt it. I mean it’s probably not the SAME EXACT chord progression.” So, Steve, being one of these cool, antsy jazz cats, goes to the keyboard, my cellphone in his hand, and starts picking out chords as he’s switching through the songs. “It’s the exact same!”
Maybe something similar happens to you, as you’re saving music into your favorite playlists: You begin to realize that there are commonalities between each of the tracks you listen to on repeat. Perhaps it’s a particular vocal style, a melodic contour, a production style, a genre, or maybe it’s the fact that you exclusively play “art music” of all genres. All of these factors make up your unique “listener profile,” a term coined by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas in their book, This Is What It Sounds Like. The seven principles that determine the type of music you are drawn to, or your listener profile, are authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre.
After reading this amazing book, I interviewed Susan Rogers, to learn about all of the fascinating work and research that went into writing it.
1) If you could summarize your book in just couple of sentences, what would that be?
This Is What It Sounds Like describes your unique listener profile. All people have a listener profile that refers to how music rewards us from listening.”
2) How long did it take you to research this book?
Well, the research has been ongoing. When I left the music business and decided to pursue life as a scientist, that’s what you do. You’re reading empirical research reports and reading textbooks. So, I began in 2004, eight straight years of college, and came to Berklee. And then, of course, as a PhD, I continued to read research reports. So, in a sense it’s been going on almost 20 years now. And the musical stuff, of course, started back when I started my career in 1978. So it represents decades of knowledge.
3) So, at the beginning of your book, you recount an anecdote from your past, in which you’re at Prince’s house, and you meet Miles Davis. And he said something to you, like, “The best musicians aren’t really musicians at all,” which greatly inspired you to write the book.” But other than that, was there a specific moment in which you thought, “I need to write this book”?
I wasn't thinking along those lines. My favorite thing to pursue is material that is new to me. So I think a lot and research a lot. That's my happy place. But I was approached by Ogi, who had just finished up a research project at Harvard, and he asked me to write a book on music. And I said, “You got the wrong girl here, because I'm not a musician.” And he said: “Well, yeah, but you know a lot.” And I said, “What I know is music listening. I can write about music listening.” So once he planted that idea I said, “Yeah, let's form a partnership. I'll put a ton of material on the table and you'll help me shape it into book form.”
4) Music-listening is fascinating to think about from a psychological perspective: “Why do we like what we like?” Do you believe that learning about this helps us explore more about ourselves?
That's what I hoped to do. I wanted to bring the listener into the conversation of what music is and how music works in the recording studio for all those years. You know, you hang around the studio afterwards and people talk about music. And for over 20 years I've been listening to people talk about the music that they loved, and I would talk about the music that I love. Those moments go a long way to deepen your own relationship with music and to allow you to express to other people. I wanted the music lovers who might be non-musicians out there to get a chance on the microphone to say, “This is what I like. This is the music of me.”
Listening is a musical act. If you or readers of this blog post want an example of that, you can go to the website: thisiswhatitsoundslike.com. And there's a link at the top that says “Record Pull”, just inviting people to share a record with us. You'll see, when you read those posts, all these different people talking about music that they love. And, and for the most part, these are records I've never heard of. They're not the Taylor Swift's, and Ariana Grande’s, and Nicki Minaj’s, it isn't the big names out there in the music world. No, no, no. These are artists that you'd have to hunt for. And yet, when you listen to them, you realize for someone out there, this music is perfect. I've gotten turned on to some new artists by reading those posts, which makes me really happy.
5) Do you think a person’s listener profile can change as they age?
Personally, I don't think it does. I think it remains more or less the same. However, the music that matches your profile can change because our taste in music is very much driven by context and by society or social relationships. So for example, this study was by a researcher named Adrian North, and he was looking at personality profiles and also musical taste and to study personality. There were a few tests that were really reliable, but there's only a few of them. So he collected these personality profiles from a whole lot of people of different ages and genders, and he collected a profile of what they liked, what kind of music. He found nearly an identical overlap between two groups: One group was young people who like heavy metal and the other was older people who liked classical music. They had the same personality profile, the same listener profile.
I would argue when you're young that heavy metal is arousing, but it's complex enough: You are an active, not a passive listener. You're drawn to complex stimuli that's very arousing and that you have to put some energy into in order to really memorize. Same thing with classical music. It's just that your social circle changes as you get older. You want the same treats, you get them from different music.
I'm pretty sure I've had the same listener profile my whole life. If you remember from the chapter on novelty, there's a bell curve of stimulus-complexity. And in the middle of that, that part of the curve is pop music, which represents what most people consider to be the ideal blend of familiar elements and novel elements. Personally, I've always been on the right side of that curve, not the far right. That's too much for me, but slightly to the right, because I like music with a higher degree of novelty than what you would find on the pop charts. And that has been the same for me in the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, the nineties in this century. I still like my music on the right side of the Bell Curve, and my brothers, who are right around my age, they like their music on the left side of the bell curve: More familiar forms like classic rock, classic indie.
You know, what's cool about that? Is recognizing that that's okay. That's okay. We've got to give people the freedom to tell us who they are by the companies they choose, the food they like, the music they like, or how they like to wear their hair. They're saying, “This works for me.” We humans quite naturally tend to be judgmental, but when it comes to musical taste, we've got to recognize that what works for someone else is going to be different from what works for you, for reasons having to do with where they were born, the music they were exposed to, the year they were born, the things that they might be seeking in their lives.
6) After everything we've discussed, I think readers would want to know what the value of knowing your listener profile is, even if you aren't a musician.
What people are saying in the This Is What It Sounds Like website “Record Pull” section is something that I had really hoped to hear. What they're saying is that learning more about their listener profile has helped them to appreciate their own music even more. And perhaps, more importantly, given them words to describe why they like what they like. Prior to reading the book, some people said “I knew what I liked, but I had a hard time saying why I liked it.” And now they can isolate and attend to individual elements on a record and say, “Well, I really like a certain kind of groove,” or “I really like a certain kind of vocal timbre,” or “I'm seeking a certain kind of complexity or familiarity that works for me.” So it's given them language so that they can describe their music to other people.
Interested in reading This Is What It Sounds Like? Head on over to thisiswhatitsoundslike.com to order it today!
