I Read a Book: This Is What It Sounds Like by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

Thinking about the different musical possibilities which make us happy

What kind of music do you like? This question has always left me stammering, with no answer forthcoming as I try to figure out how I could describe my relationship with jazz, rock, soul, blues, country, folk, and dozens of other genres. Now that I’ve read this book by former record producer Susan Rogers and computer neuroscientist Ogi Ogas, I think I’m ready to define what music I like.

I like music that’s more brain centered than heart centered, though I’m not a monster and I do connect emotionally with the music I like the best. I prefer musical skill to amateurish enthusiasm every time. I want music that sounds like a real performance but arranged in the best way possible to make it seamless, though I can certainly appreciate the human touch as well as the modern heavily computerized approach. I am very very interested in novelty, in things I haven’t heard before, or at least serious mastery of forms I know well.

I’m more melody oriented than rhythmic, but I can get intoxicated by music that features either one in the more prominent role. Lyrics are way down in my personal pecking order – I will never listen to a song for the lyrics over the music. My timbre preferences are for guitars, piano, and saxophone, with serious appreciation for any other sound that makes the music work.

Not a simple answer, I guess, but it does cover most of the wide range of music that gets me excited. Some thirty-five years ago, I tried to make a short mathematical equation – musical satisfaction equals talent times the square of the inspiration. I think that covers most of what I said in the last two paragraphs.

Rogers, who has moved into neuroscience herself after leaving record producing at the turn of the century, decided to take her two main interests and turn them into a book explaining the way everybody has a unique, individual listener profile based on their own history with music. This explains why no matter how many people share some of my musical taste, none of them agree with everything I like, even if we’ve both heard the same thing.

She lays out the ways people agree or disagree on spectrums in seven different areas: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre. These are not all as self-explanatory as they might at first seem. Authenticity concerns the feeling that the recording artist really means what they are performing, placing an emphasis on the heart vs. the head. She takes a big swing by using the Shaggs as the first musical example in the book, potentially alienating a big swath of readers who might listen in good faith and find themselves appalled by the impossibly inept skills of these untrained sisters of the late 60s. I get what she’s saying – there’s probably no example in music with even the possibility of putting belief in performance so far removed from ability. And if you do react to the Shaggs on that level, as Rogers convinces me she does, it’s obvious to you that the heart is way more important than the head to your listening habits.

Her co-author Ogas prefers a Bach composition, the Magnificat in D Major, which Rogers says is emotionally true, but which is also mathematically complex in design. Of course, Bach is not exactly a simple example of head music, precisely because he can make people feel deeply even while working within intricately designed patterns. My argument is that most of the best complex music functions the same way, from the improvisational rigors of Sonny Rollins to the heavy arrangements of King Crimson. Head and heart combined.

Ah well, I still get the dichotomy, just as I understand the differences in realism that she lays out in the second chapter. Here, she is more concerned with the old-school engineering goal of making a record sound live to the listener vs. the change in the last 30-ish years to a production style which uses digital technology to create many of the sounds being heard, and to “fix” the mistakes of non-digital voices and instruments. I grew up with the former approach, and almost all of my favorite music was made as if there was a performance live in my head. But I have no problem adjusting to the new approach, even if I sometimes have to push myself in that direction.

Rogers in this chapter talks about the ways people visualize when they listen to music, an idea which frankly stunned me. It turns out I’m one of the 9% of people who don’t visualize anything when listening. I don’t see the story of the lyrics in my head, I don’t see the musicians playing the music, I don’t see abstract shapes or colors. None of that appears – for me, music is a strictly auditory experience, which might help to explain why I can so thoroughly enjoy such different stuff. Rogers refers to the digitally created music as abstract, which is interesting to me since I’ve long thought free jazz was closer to the spirit of that word. But, she makes comparisons between painting and music, and explains that she’s thinking of the way the invention of the camera forced painters to come up with new ways of seeing the world as similar to the way the invention of digital technology gave musicians a chance to explore new ways of creating sound.

After going through seven elegantly argued chapters discussing the different aspects of our listener profiles, Rogers spends some time showing us how she worked as a producer. Her insistence that record producers had to decide which audience they were working to reach – critics, musicians, or average fans – kind of disappointed me. I’ve been in all three of those audiences, and I don’t think it ever occurred to me that the record was being targeted towards one or the other aspect of my experience.

I prefer to think that all records are being made for, if not specifically capital A artistic reasons, at least for the purpose of communicating life experiences of some sort or another. Rogers says critics and scholars of music ask “Who is doing the kind of work that contemporary culture could use right now?” and that “Critics assess music with more than personal taste in mind.” Nothing could be further from the truth in either my own work or the work of critics I admire. It’s all about trying to figure out our own personal taste and explaining what makes a record effective in that regard. I guess when Rogers aimed her records at critics, she missed the mark.

Oh, well, she hits the mark more often than not in this provocative book which challenges all of us to think a little bit more about the music we love. Why do we like what we like, and what are the things we like about it? I could think about that all day long.

Hat tip to Phil Overeem for the recommendation.