Download PDF Winter Bridge on The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering December 13, 2024 Volume 54 Issue 4 This issue features articles by The Grainger Foundation US Frontiers of Engineering 2024 symposium participants. The articles examine cutting-edge developments in microbiology and health, artificial intelligence, the gut-brain connection, and digital twins. An Interview with . . . Susan Rogers, professor, Berklee College of Music Wednesday, December 11, 2024 Author: Susan Rogers RONALD LATANISION (RML): We’re thrilled to be joined today by Susan Rogers. Susan, over the course of your career, you were a sound engineer for the music legend Prince, and then you changed directions and became an academic. You have a very interesting set of credentials, and we’re eager to talk with you. How about you tell us a little bit about your background and early career, and we’ll go forward from there. SUSAN ROGERS: Thank you so much. I’m from Anaheim, California. And I grew up on Lullaby Lane, which is in a tract of homes literally next door to Disneyland. Imagine being a little kid in the early ’60s right next door to Disneyland. That was back in the days when you could get into the park for $0.25, if you were a little kid. You couldn’t go on any of the rides; you had to pay extra money for tickets to go on those. But you could get into the park. I think my early interest in engineering might have been fired up then. Once you run around the park enough, which was much smaller in those days, you start to poke around behind the shrubbery and things like that because you wonder: Well, what is making Dumbo fly, and what is going on with Mr. Toad’s wild ride? Growing up, I had a deep interest in music. I had zero interest in being a performer or player but deep interest in listening to music, which spawned a career. RML: As I understand it, when you were very young you actually dropped out of high school. Is that correct? DR. ROGERS: Yes. My mother died when I was 14, and I had three younger brothers and we were just kind of adrift. My father remarried, and at that point it seemed like in my household there was no money for college. That just wasn’t going to happen. The grand plan was that my brothers and I would get a job at a grocery store because they had a good union. It seemed like the thing to do was to just get married and start a domestic life. I dropped out of high school and got married at 17. The good thing was that it was a bad marriage, so I was able to get out when I was 21 years old. No children involved. I moved not far, 45 miles away to Hollywood, California. And I began my career, self-taught in basic electronics, buying textbooks and studying electronics, principles of electroacoustics and magnetism, and basic acoustic construction, all the stuff you would need to have training in to enter the music business as an audio technician. RML: There’s a certain determination in your history that intrigues me. You actually did go back and get your high school degree, right? DR. ROGERS: When I finally decided I wanted to change careers and become a scientist, the first order of business was getting a GED. So I studied for that. I was 44 years old but I studied and aced it. I was up there in that 99th percentile, which made me very proud. And once I had my GED, I could apply to college, and I chose the University of Minnesota. It was nearby at that time. RML: To me, that’s a very inspiring part of your journey. There’s a certain amount of grit and determination involved in doing what you did. I mean to go back and get that degree and make the transition from a sound engineer to an academic, that’s a pretty laudable change of direction. DR. ROGERS: Thank you. It’s funny. We’re all engineering types and we recognize that if you’ve got a certain engine under the hood, it’s going to find a lot of satisfaction in solving problems. It’s just what you do. It’s the brain that you’ve got. I enjoyed being in the music business, but I began to feel a tug toward exploring the natural world. And if you want to do something badly enough, if you’re motivated, you’ll do it. I wanted it very badly. I thought I would like it. It turns out I was right. I love it. KYLE GIPSON (KG): To linger a little longer on your early career, what sparked your interest in sound engineering in particular? Was there any specific music you were listening to that got you fascinated by the engineering aspects of music? What prompted you to go into sound engineering? DR. ROGERS: Well, I loved records like crazy, like a lot of kids do. I was just really crazy about music. But, as I said a moment ago, I had no interest in writing it or performing it or singing it. That just didn’t feel right. But I knew I wanted to be somewhere where records were being made and help midwife them into the world. Prince was, as we know now from the study of the neurobiology of creativity, what we would label a hypercreative, which is extremely rare. Back in those days, in the ’70s, and it’s kind of still the case now, you didn’t see women recording engineers or record producers. It was extremely rare. It just wasn’t a place where women could be found in those technical roles then. But there was one thing I could do that I knew wouldn’t be influenced by my gender: repairing the equipment. So I became an audio technician. I was fixing recording consoles and tape machines. In those days we did component level repair. It wasn’t card swapping. You had the schematics, and with your oscilloscope and your tools you’d trace down the broken component and replace it. That was that old school technical work that it turned out I had an aptitude for, and I really enjoyed it. I was working for Crosby, Stills, and Nash in their recording studio about five years after I had started. I was up to speed. I was good. I was in Hollywood, so I was being trained by the entertainment industry’s best technicians, the top-of-the-line folks. Five years into my gig, I heard through the grapevine that Prince was looking for an audio technician. So he hired me to repair equipment for him in his home studio, but he straight away put me into the audio engineering chair, which was a dream come true. That’s what I would have preferred to do anyway, and he made that happen for me. RML: How did it happen that you became involved in the operations with Prince? How did you make that connection? DR. ROGERS: When I was working for Crosby, Stills, and Nash as their studio technician, a friend of mine, John Sacchetti, called. He was chief technician at a company called Westlake Audio and he was a former boyfriend. He said with his Boston accent, “Sue, your dream job is waiting for ya. Prince is looking for a technician.” John knew that I was a huge Prince fan and Westlake Audio, the company John worked for, had received a notice from Prince’s management that they wanted to hire someone who would leave Los Angeles and move out to Minnesota and be Prince’s full-time technician. None of the techs at Westlake were going to take that job. They were part of Hollywood. They weren’t going to leave to go to Minnesota for a relatively unknown artist. This was before Purple Rain. But when John heard about that position, he called me and said, “That’s your job. Talk to his management.” So I did, and they hired me. And off I went. RML: As Prince’s legend in music grew, his notoriety for his unbelievable work ethic also grew. Were you a part of all of that? You must have been. DR. ROGERS: I was a very exhausted part of that, yes. Prince was, as we know now from the study of the neurobiology of creativity, what we would label a hypercreative, which is extremely rare. A hypercreative person has a couple of actually faulty brakes in a couple of circuits in the brain, brakes that normally inhibit our thought process so that we can choose one idea and then build on it—move from art to craft. But folks who are hypercreative have kind of a firehose of ideas. Their ideas just keep coming and coming and coming. They don’t apply the normal breaks. With Prince, he didn’t just write music. If we had just finished a song, we would have been up for 20–24 hours; and yet, if he’s brushing his teeth getting ready for bed and he thinks of a new song, we’re going to go around again. We’re going to put up fresh tape and we’re going to keep going. A 48-hour day was not uncommon. We worked at a frantic pace in the ’80s when I was with him. RML: I like your analogy of a firehose. It turns out that at MIT one of our former presidents, Jerry Wiesner, once described MIT education as something like a drink from a firehose, but you seem to have lived it in another genre. DR. ROGERS: And by the way, congratulations to MIT: I saw in the paper the other day that you have two new Nobel laureates. RML: Yes, thank you. You had this wonderful career. You worked with Prince and then you went on to work with some other notable music legends, and then all of a sudden you made a decision to leave music, at least recording music. What prompted that change? DR. ROGERS: I don’t remember all the factors. Popular music is by, for, and about young people. It’s about flirting and it’s about romance—popular music, not classical and jazz, but the popular styles that I was working in. I had reached a point in my mid-40s where I was less interested in listening to the music I was making. Like a lot of adults do, my taste had shifted; I became more interested in jazz and classical at that age. So it felt like, oh, now I might be doing a disservice to my profession. The other factor was I began to feel that tug: curiosity about the natural world, you know, just plain old curiosity, which is what drives scientists. It just seemed like it’d be kind of fun to learn about consciousness and other systems and how they work, and the more I thought about the idea the more it started to seem like a really good idea. Then what needed to happen was that if I were to go to college for eight straight years and get a PhD, I would need money. I’d need something to live off of. So I needed a hit record. And it happened. I said yes to Barenaked Ladies in 1998 when they asked me to work with them. They were a pop band, and I just happened to work with them at the right time: The Stunt album we did together was a hit. Back in the late ’90s you’d get royalties, big royalties. Sorry, scientists, but the monetary rewards go to other fields. With a hit record, you’d get a six-figure royalty check, and six months later you’d get another one. That was crazy money back in those days. It would diminish with time, but it was enough money for me to live on while I did four years as an undergrad, dual majoring in psychology and neuroscience, and then went straight up north to McGill and got my PhD. KG: This is all super fascinating. While we’re on this period of your transition into academia, I’m wondering if you could define sound engineering for people who aren’t familiar with that line of work. How would you define sound engineering? DR. ROGERS: The recording engineer on the record is analogous to a cinematographer for film. The record producer is responsible for the raw material, the melody, the lyrics, identifying the songs to be recorded. The producer works with the artist to decide on the arrangement, the style, the tempo, the key, all those sorts of things. What the engineer does is transfer the acoustic signal that’s being performed by the players and the vocalists onto a storage medium. In my day it was analog tape. Today it’s a hard drive. The engineer is responsible for all the technical decisions on a record. You get the sounds. You capture them in a certain way, conforming to your sonic signature and what the artist wants. You get them into the storage medium, ensuring that they come off of that storage medium and then blend the individual sound sources into a stereo record. Record engineering is the technical aspect of capturing, blending, and preserving all these individual performance gestures. RML: Sound engineering must then integrate with the stage production as well, right? You have people on stage performing, and it’s perhaps recorded as a video. How do you integrate with the things that are happening on stage? Or is that not an issue? DR. ROGERS: It depends a lot on the genre of music. For example, the marvelous Martha de Francisco at McGill University is an expert at orchestral recording. Martha’s job is to choose and position microphones in such a way, both on the stage and in the audience, that she captures the sound of an orchestra—so that people who listen to those recordings can imagine that they’re right there in the concert hall, hearing what actually happened on the stage in front of them. The same thing with jazz. If you’re capturing a jazz trio or jazz combo, those listeners want to be able to hear every instrument and to move their own internal spotlight of attention to whomever is soloing. But if you’re working in pop styles, you may or may not capture a realistic performance. You have the option, today especially, of creating records one instrument at a time using samples. Often records today don’t have any acoustic sources other than the vocal. It’s all just created on a laptop by combining samples. So the technique that a recording engineer will employ depends on the listener experience and the style of music. Who’s your audience and what sort of experience do you want them to have? And, in this way, it’s similar to film because some of our movies capture real human beings doing real things. Other movies involve dragons and, I don’t know, zombies and things that don’t actually exist. And then of course there are animated films. It’s the same thing in music as well. We span the gamut from realistic documentations to artificially constructed pieces. RML: The reason I ask is that last night, in preparation for our getting together today, I watched some of Purple Rain and some of Barenaked Ladies’ videos. The theater that’s involved in those videos is really quite remarkable, and the coordination between the action in the video and the music is absolutely fascinating. It just seems like such a wonderful marriage of technology and culture and human behavior. It’s wonderful to watch. DR. ROGERS: There are an awful lot of concerns in the field of popular music. And some of them are extra musical, meaning things that have nothing to do with the music, including the clothes that you wear and how you appear on stage and the fans that might be shown in an audience, all these things—it’s cult of personality. It contributes to the impression that the pop music listener is going to get. RML: Your work involved not just recordings but also live performances. Is that right? DR. ROGERS: Yes, as Prince’s full-time employee I did whatever he needed me to do. When I first joined him he had just started the preproduction for the Purple Rain movie. He’d already done some recording on the Purple Rain album. And one of the first things I was doing was, with a nice little Nagra stereo tape machine, providing playback on the film set. Playback at the club and all those music scenes needed an audio engineer to supply the playback. So yes, I did that. I went on tour with him. I did live sound at small clubs. I didn’t do front of house at the big arena tours. That wasn’t my level of expertise. But I definitely mixed sound for him in the smaller clubs. On tour I did live recordings with him in a mobile recording truck. In some of our bigger cities, like New York or LA, we had a mobile recording truck there. Same thing on his movie sets. He liked to have a mobile recording truck on hand so that during the lunch break he could be recording. Recording nonstop. KG: The way you speak about the work of a sound engineer really resonates with me as an editor: The sound engineer considers the experience of the listener and the editor considers the experience of the reader, and both work on ushering a cultural product out into the world. Also, I see similarities between the relationship between the sound engineer and the musician and the editor and the writer. Zooming out a little bit, could describe your relationship to the concept of engineering? If you look back over your career, how has the concept of engineering been important to you? DR. ROGERS: Audio engineers have their own sonic signature, as I imagine all engineers have a certain signature. You’re not merely trying to solve a mechanical problem, you’re trying to outdo your competition, and you’re trying to get hired and get gigs, and you want to be the person who does your job well enough that someone says, “Yes, I want you on my team.” The formation of your sonic signature is based on all the music you’ve ever listened to in your life, and your contribution as an engineer is to not only facilitate the producer and the artist’s vision but to employ your sound so that you’ll be hired again. Audio engineering involves developing your ear. Now, when we’re in the recording studio, the recording engineer has to keep a running stream of decision-making. For example, there’s piano on this record. Great. You don’t just grab a pair of your favorite piano mics and mic up the piano. The first thing you have to do is understand how this piano is going to be used. Because form must serve function, what is the function of piano on this record? Is the player just playing in the midrange of the keys and doing a rhythmic part? Maybe it’s salsa piano or something. Or is piano the main element on this record? Is this a piano ballad? You will solve the problem by choosing the correct form to serve the function on the record, which means you’ll employ your idea of what good is. What’s a good piano sound? Should those mics be close? Should they be further away? A big sound? A constrained sound? That is fascinating to me as a neuroscientist because, as they say, categories don’t exist in nature, they’re driven by a praxis. An apple and an orange couldn’t care less whether they’re the same or different. We decide that an apple and an orange are different, and likewise each engineer and record maker has an internalized psychological boundary between something that they would label good and something that they would label, “Oh, this will never work.” You’re not solving a physics problem. You’re solving an aesthetic problem. So there’s no right answer. To answer your question, and this is the exciting part, the formation of your sonic signature is based on all the music you’ve ever listened to in your life, and your contribution as an engineer is to not only facilitate the producer and the artist’s vision but to employ your sound so that you’ll be hired again. RML: At present you are a professor in the department of music production and engineering and in liberal arts at Berklee, and you’re teaching courses in subjects like music cognition, is that correct? DR. ROGERS: It’s partially correct. I wrote a book that came out two years ago so I’m semi-retired. I no longer teach at Berklee on campus. I only teach for Berklee online. My home department was music production and engineering, and I also taught music cognition and psychoacoustics. Now I’m out in Cairo, New York, teaching courses I’ve written for Berklee Online, namely psychoacoustics, music cognition, and music and neuroscience. RML: What does psychoacoustics mean to a layman? DR. ROGERS: Psychoacoustics is under the umbrella of the American Physics Association. It’s the psychological correlate of acoustical phenomena, and what psychoacousticians study is how acoustic pressure waves are transduced into sound in the brain. It’s the bottom-up process. Music cognition is its companion. That’s the top-down process of memory, learning, performance, and musical development, those sorts of things. Music in neuroscience is exactly as it says. It’s the infrastructure that supports thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. What we’re craving in our music reflects the most private aspect of ourselves. RML: I see. I like the title of your book,[1] This Is What It Sounds Like, and that subtitle, What the Music You Love Says About You. I’m going to ask Kyle what music he loves, and maybe you can help unpack his music tastes from your expert perspective. Kyle, what music do you like best? KG: Wow, I’ve been all over the place lately in terms of music. I’ve been listening to a lot of recent music, like Beyoncé’s latest album, Cowboy Carter. DR. ROGERS: Let me ask, when you were a teenager, what did you listen to? KG: I’ve always had such a wide range in terms of what I listen to. Back then I listened to everything from early Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child to indie rock music to electronic music. I also listened to hip hop music and female singer songwriters. I’ve always been pretty all over the place in terms of the music I listen to. DR. ROGERS: Now, most of us are, and there’s good reason for that. We choose a given record in any given moment in time to satisfy a particular craving. Sometimes we’re craving groove, sometimes we’re craving lyrics. Sometimes we’re craving style or ideas. Sometimes we’re craving complexity. And other times we’re craving simplicity. Sometimes we’re craving nostalgia. It’s true that most of us who love music have a varied music palette in our personal libraries. When we fall in love with music it’s very much like falling in love with a person. For me personally, my home base, as Prince would call it, is the rhythm. I’m primarily a rhythm-based listener. I also love innovation, and I love complexity. I’m not much of a lyric listener. It’ll be secondary to me, although I love good poetry. If the lyricist is truly great, I’m going to love their work. What we’re craving in our music reflects the most private aspect of ourselves. It turns out that when we’re listening to music that we love, it activates the neural network that’s responsible for our self-image and our self-awareness. So listening to the music you love the most activates a sense of you, and the marvelous thing about that is how private it is. No one will ever be in our heads with us; even the person who knows us best will never be in there. When we go into our private self and we have music as a companion, we feel very close to that music—because it feels like it’s representing us in a very real sense. KG: In that way, listening to music sounds similar to the experience of reading, which is also a very private experience. Susan, what are you listening to currently, whether it’s music that has come out recently or a while ago, that you think is really interesting? DR. ROGERS: I’m at an age where new music isn’t compelling to me because there’s so much old music that I love so much. I’m delving a little bit more into things that I didn’t listen to when I was young, namely classical. I started listening to jazz in my 30s and I still love jazz very, very much. I’m trying a little bit to get acquainted with styles that I don’t know too well. I’m listening to Latin jazz, to Eddie Palmieri. That’s interesting to me. I’m also delving into the blues a little bit, so I’ve been listening to more Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. Trying to get a little deeper into the blues feels right and I enjoy it. I’m much more inclined to listen to older artists than I am to listen to new artists. Occasionally, a Berklee student will turn me on to a new artist whom I like and admire. But I still don’t have the same urge to go explore their catalog and get into them. I prefer the music from my generation, as I think most of us do. RML: There’s a lot of contemporary interest in artificial intelligence and generative AI, and, in many respects, that’s a concern to the arts. My wife, who is a painter, is concerned about it. I have friends who are writers who are concerned about it. What is your take on how generative AI affects the music industry and people like yourself who have worked as sound engineers and production folks. What do you think the implications of generative AI are? DR. ROGERS: Well, my knowledge of business and entrepreneurship is next to nothing. So I don’t know how it will affect the business. As for how it will affect the art, there are serious concerns, of course. When we listen to older performers, let’s say an older Johnny Cash, for example, we’re hearing a performer put the weight of their life into his performance gestures and tone of voice. Older performers make music in such a way that listeners can recognize subtle aspects of tension, release, and experience that affect the voice, phrasing, and timing. Think of Frank Sinatra later in his life as well. Think of Ella Fitzgerald and all the real experts. Human beings recognize intentionality. The work of Ellen Winner at Boston College explores this in the visual arts. We recognize when someone tried to construct a specific visual object. And I doubt that that can be effectively modeled in artificial music performance generators, to the extent that I know about them. Robots that have been developed to play music or to compose music are somewhat stilted sounding, somewhat mechanical. I believe the reason it sounds so formulaic and stilted, just like with factory-produced hotel art, shall we say, is that we consumers can recognize the weight of the life behind many choices and gestures. RML: I think that’s a very telling answer and I’m sympathetic to that. For example, in terms of the arts, my wife grew up on the edge of the steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And when that company decided to go out of business, she became very nostalgic and arranged to have a three-week tour of the steel mill before it started being demolished. She’s been painting scenes of blast furnaces, and what’s interesting is that you can see the emotion that she felt in her paintings. I think that’s what you’re touching on. Whether it be a musician or a writer or a graphic artist or fine artist, I don’t think you can reproduce that emotion. I have a hard time imagining how a machine could do that. I know people are trying. And it may happen. DR. ROGERS: Let’s acknowledge that there are mysteries in this world. And they say that the most complex thing in the known universe is the human brain. I’ll give you an example. I have a colleague and friend, Diana Dabby, who’s an electronic music composer at Olin College of Engineering. She’s about my age, the late ’60s. Diana told me a story. When she was about four years old her family was going to go get pizza on a Sunday night. And little four-year-old Diana didn’t want pizza but she was four years old and she couldn’t articulate why she didn’t want pizza. So she went to the piano. She started playing chords to demonstrate to her mom and dad how she felt about having pizza. Now, for me personally, I’d much rather hear a music composition from Diana Dabby, who started at age four expressing herself with musical chords, than I would from a pure algorithm that says, “Well, this is how music goes so let’s just do it that way.” That human element has an element of mystery and unpredictability and error in it, and I like that error component in our creative works. RML: I want to ask you the same kind of question I addressed to Kyle in terms of his favorite music and get your reaction to my favorite music. I have very eclectic interests. I like Johnny Cash. I like Garth Brooks. I like the Village People. Symphony Hall is just a few blocks from Berklee, and I like symphonic music. How could I be so distracted by all this stuff? What does that tell you? DR. ROGERS: This is the main thesis in the book I’ve written: When we’re craving music, we’re craving a treat. And just like when we crave food, sometimes we want something salty and and other times something sweet. Sometimes you want a crunchy texture. Sometimes you want something smooth. Sometimes you want a full meal. Sometimes you want a snack. We have varied palettes—as we do with our music because we’re craving different kinds of treats. No one music can satisfy everything any more than one food or one fashion can. When we look into our closets, we’ve got formal wear, dress wear, sporting wear, morning wear. We choose the form of an object to serve the function. Music performs so many functions in our lives that it should probably take on a number of forms in order to scratch those different itches, or serve those different needs, at different times. The study of personality is a really squishy topic because personality is very contextual. There aren’t many reliable measures of personality but there are a few that have good test/retest validity. There’s a researcher named Adrian North who compared personality profiles, determined through the good tests, with musical taste, and one of his interesting findings was that there are two groups of people, separated by age and musical taste, who have an almost identical personality profile: young men who like heavy metal and older men who like classical orchestral recordings. They’re seeking the same treat. They’re seeking high complexity. Some of that heavy metal and hardcore music is really complex. Many of these pieces are eight minutes long, both in the hardcore music and in the orchestral music. These listeners want complexity and a challenge for their auditory working memory capacity. They’re active listeners, not passive. They don’t put music on in the background; they sit in front of the loud speakers, or wear headphones, and listen. These two groups are separated by merely age and culture. North predicts that when the young men get older they’re going to be seeking out classical music. We’ve all got the desire for certain kinds of foods and certain kinds of music. We know the treat we’re listening for, be it rhythm, complexity, or simplicity. And we find appropriate music to deliver that treat to us. The music can change throughout our lives and deliver the same treat, however. RML: That’s a very interesting response and I appreciate it. I can sympathize with everything you’ve said. I understand my own emotions in regards to music as well as food, and I think you’ve captured that. KG: This is mind blowing. I’m going to be reflecting on your analysis of both Ron’s and my music taste for a while, and I think our readers will as well. If you had to breakdown what the important takeaways are from this kind of analysis for music listeners, what would you say those are? Why do you think it’s important that we understand music in the way you are teaching us to? DR. ROGERS: Let me start with a caveat and acknowledge that there are folks out there who aren’t particularly interested in music, just like there are people who are not particularly interested in food or fashion. There’s nothing wrong with them. So let’s set those folks aside for just a moment, and now I’ll speak to the people who truly do love music. When we fall in love with music it’s very much like falling in love with a person. We can never argue that our beloved is perfect because, realistically speaking, they’re not. Every human has flaws, and every piece of music has flaws. So the music we love cannot be argued to be better than music we don’t like. Of course, there are objective standards that the musicologists talk about, but I’m talking about your personal relationship with music. What I would advise people do if they really love music is to get to know your sweetheart. Listen to music and, rather than let your mind drift to yourself or your own autobiographical memories, actually focus on that music and ask yourself what you love best about it. Is it the rhythm? Is it the lyrics? Is it the performance style? Is it the complexity of the arrangement? Or, like for most people, is it the autobiographical memories? You and this music have been through a lot together. And it reminds you of certain people or places or events in your life that are important to you, just like your sweetheart might be important to you because you and your beloved have been through a lot together. So it is with music. When we activate that default network of our private personal self, we’ve got a little buddy in there. You’ve got that music in there with you. Of course, we bond to it. But just like if someone asked you: What color are your sweetheart’s eyes? How tall is your sweetheart? How much does your sweetheart weigh? How much do you really know about them? What was the name of their elementary school? What was their mother’s maiden name? You can do the same thing with your music. Ask yourself what it is about this music that makes this record, not that record, perfect for you. Why this record? I’d like to share with you a little poignant story. A couple of weeks ago I was invited to a record pull. A record pull is where you sit around with a small group of people and you take turns playing a record for them that you love more than anything. And your job is to explain why you love this record. At our record pull, there were some older people and some younger people. And the youngest was a young man who was very quiet and very shy. Now, this particular group of people belonged to a very strict religious order, a monastery. But they are very lovely people and they invited me and we took our turns in our record pull, and there was this quiet young man who didn’t say a word to anybody. It was finally his turn to play a record that he loved. When I say young man, I’m talking 20–21 years old, grew up in a monastery. And the record he chose to play was Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” And I thought to myself, I’ll bet this kid wants to dance with someone. I’ll bet he does. The lyrics are, “I wanna dance with somebody, I wanna feel the heat with somebody.” This is a beautiful young man in a loving and beautiful environment. But playing “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” suggests to me that this record is meaningful to him because it’s expressing an aspect of himself that maybe he’d really like to express. Why this record and not some other record? I didn’t know him well enough to be able to ask that question, but I would advise people, if you’re close to your friends, to your family, to your kids maybe, have a record pull with them. Get them to play a record and describe to you why they love it so much. They’re going to slide open that little window to their inner self, and you’re going to be seeing a glimpse of what they want or who they’d like to be on some level—an aspect of themselves that they don’t express outwardly but might be really feeling inwardly. RML: All of what you just said just reinforces my sense that music is not just a major part of our culture but it’s part of human emotion and human aspiration, and every characteristic of human beings finds its way into music. There are times that I turn on music just because I need something calming to calm me down. There are other times that I need it to get energized, and it’s really remarkable how we respond. Is that music cognition, in a sense, or how would you describe that? DR. ROGERS: It’s very exciting. Our nervous system oscillates at multiple frequencies throughout the day and night. We’ve got a circadian rhythm. We’ve got some very slow rhythms. We’ve got the theta band of oscillation, which is around 4 to 8 Hz or so, and that helps regulate our speech patterns and a number of things. It’s involved in dreaming. When we listen to music, it’s shown to amplify activity in the beta band of oscillations, which is roughly 15 to 30 Hz. That’s our feel good band. We have dominant activity in the beta band when we’re awake and moving—not too fast, not too much cognitive activity, not too much stress, not too much physical activity, but we’re not sleepy either. When we first wake up in the morning, in that lower frequency alpha oscillation, we’re in an alpha state. We’re feeling logy and slow. You put some music on, and you can raise that dominant neural oscillation frequency to get you from that alpha band up to that beta band. It wakes you up in the morning. You feel good. When you’re stressed and you need to calm down, the dominant frequency is faster. It’s in the gamma band of oscillation. You’ve got to bring it down, bring it down, bring it down. And listening to music can help diminish the amplitude of that gamma band frequency and raise the amplitude of that beta band neural oscillation so that your system gets into that feel-good zone. Music is incredibly functional, not only for releasing memories or buried emotions but for simply regulating our nervous system and getting us to feel at our best. RML: I think I’m going to get a copy of your book and read it carefully because I suspect that all of what you just said is somehow incorporated into that. DR. ROGERS: Well, I’ve got to tell you, I love audio engineering. I love making records. It was the love of my life, but I felt like I would like the sciences and it turns out that I was right. The same brain that contemplates a system like a tape machine or a console can also contemplate our nervous system and be intellectually satisfied by understanding how these systems work and the great mysteries that remain to be explored. RML: I want to just return for a moment to an aspect of technology that was really monumental in terms of your career: the evolution of the vault. You did this at a time when we didn’t have the electronics that we have today to record and save and archive what we’re producing. What inspired you? What motivated you to create the vault for Prince’s music? Because that was really a monumental decision. DR. ROGERS: The answer is fear. When I first joined Prince in 1983, I was a brand new employee. I had moved from California to Minnesota. I knew no one and was his only engineer. And sometimes late at night he’d say, “Can you bring me the tape of ‘Bambi’ or ‘Baby’ or something like that.” I don’t know where this stuff is. I’ve only just joined. So the first order of business was to have all of his tapes catalogued and in a physical location where I could get him anything he asked for in the middle of the night. That started small enough, just gathering everything I could find that were his magnetic tapes, getting them all in a safe and secure location, and then having his office staff, with an early PC computer, come up with a database and a way to store all these tapes. Then I got kind of bold. I started calling studios where he had worked in Minneapolis and also out in California and asked them to go into their tape closet. Recording studios will hang on to the tape for you. I’d say, “I’m Prince’s engineer. Here’s our FedEx number. Can you send anything with his name on it? Send us all his tapes.” And they would. And then I got even more bold and I started calling Warner Brothers Records, his label in Burbank. I asked to speak to the tape vault people there. Now, Warner Brothers legally owns the master tapes until the artist has recouped their advance. And then after that, the ownership, in many cases, reverts to the artist. I would call and ask the tape bank/vault person, can you send me Prince’s stereo masters? The guy working in the tape vault didn’t know. He just knew the name Prince and FedEx number, so he’d send it to me. I began collecting all of Prince’s tapes. As we designed and built Paisley Park Studios, the design incorporated a natural bank vault down in the basement, which is a big room with a big bank door on it, a foot thick with a round wheel. And that’s where we put all of his tapes. When the 2008 Universal Music Group fire happened in Southern California, there weren’t any Prince tapes, as far as I know, in there that got destroyed. RML: That was not only a good decision but a monumental decision because you preserved a lot of history that would have been lost. How do musicians handle this kind of issue today? DR. ROGERS: Prince didn’t concern himself with the physical location of his tapes until we started a vault and he began to see that that was his legacy. Of all the artists I’ve worked with in 22 years, I don’t know a single one of them who was concerned with the location of their tapes. They knew the location of the songs they were still working on, but I don’t know that they cared all that much about the older tapes. And bear in mind, tape is heavy. Those 2-inch, 24 track reels of tape—they’re pretty heavy. They take up a lot of space. So I think a lot of people just leave it in a studio or let a record label have it and not worry too much about it. With Prince, I worried about it. That’s why I said fear was my motivation. I just had to have everything; if he asked me for it, I needed to be able to get it. RML: I think your approach is the right one. Susan, this has been a wonderful, informative conversation. It just reinforces how important music is in our world and culture, and today we need it more than anything. The world today is pretty uncertain and I think having some source of confidence in our musical bearings is important to us all. So I thank you for that, and for joining us this morning. DR. ROGERS: Thank you very, very much. I would say that having a relationship with music is like having a relationship with yourself. Get to know yourself and your deepest, most private, shall we say, desires and fantasies. The music I love is in large part made by people whose lives are very different than mine. R&B and soul music is the street I live on. I like funk music. Most of the music in my collection is made by male artists. I love many female artists but the majority of it is made by men, and these are people whose lives aren’t the same as mine. And yet, when asked for music that I love with all my heart, I must have something in common with them. I must. Because that music just feels so right. This is why musical love can expand our minds and get us closer to a broader sense of self, all the various aspects of ourselves that we don’t show on the outside but that we sure as hell feel on the inside. This is good for us. This is mentally, emotionally healthy. KG: I echo what Ron said. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been such a fascinating, engaging, and fun conversation. From my perspective, one thing that is so great about this conversation is that I think music, especially now, can slide in and out of people’s lives without them really thinking too much about it, in the way that a Netflix show might or various elements of popular culture. But you are enriching our understanding of music and encouraging us to be more thoughtful about it, and, in turn, you are enriching our understanding of ourselves as well. So thank you for that. DR. ROGERS: Thank you for saying that. I really appreciate it. And, again, I feel tremendously flattered that you invited me to talk to this august group. In another lifetime, I would have loved to have joined you and been a member and done the kind of engineering that you opted to do. So it’s great to talk to you. RML: This has been our pleasure, I can tell you. Your passion and devotion to music is inspiring and it’s something that we appreciate very much, Susan. [1] Rogers S, Ogas O. 2022. This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You. W.W. Norton & Company. About the Author:Susan Rogers is a professor at the Berklee College of Music.