SUSAN ROGERS: Engineering for Prince, the neuroscience of music, and the psychology of success

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. Brought to you by tele Funken Electroacoustic Tele Funken. Electroacoustic has been following the tradition of excellence and innovation set forth by the original tele Funken GM BH of Germany that began over 100 years ago with one foot rooted in the rich history of the brand and the other in new microphone innovations for both stage and studio applications. Tele Funkin Electroacoustic is recognized as one of the industry leaders in top quality microphones. For more info, go to t-funk.com. And now your host Eyal Levi.

Speaker 2 (00:00:41):

Welcome to the URM podcast. I am Eyal Levi, and I just want to tell you that this show is brought to you by URM Academy, the world's best education for rock and metal producers. Every month on Nail the Mix, we bring you one of the world's best producers to mix a song from scratch, from artists like Lama God Shuga, periphery a Day To Remember. Bring me the horizon, eth many, many more, and we give you the raw multi-track so you can mix along. You also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of bite-sized mixing tutorials and Portfolio Builder, which are pro quality multi-tracks that are cleared for use in your portfolio. You can find out [email protected]. Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. My guest today is Susan Rogers, who is a very, very accomplished guest. She holds a doctorate in psychology from McGill University is now an associate professor and director of the Berkeley Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory. Her research focuses on auditory memory, psychoacoustics and the perception of musical signals. If that wasn't impressive enough. In her late teens, she taught herself audio engineering and electronics maintenance to go on to engineer for amazing artists such as Crosby, steels and Nash, bare Naked ladies, David Byron, and of course the legendary Prince. So Susan Rogers, welcome to the URM Podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 3 (00:02:10):

Hi, thank you. Thank you very much for having me and it's a pleasure to chat with you today.

Speaker 2 (00:02:15):

Likewise. So I know that you did a pre-interview with Ben. Those of you listening who don't know this guy, Ben Deal, who's really, really awesome, helps me prep these and you said something to him that I really want that caught my attention right away. You told him that you believe that you can be anything you want within reason, and I'm curious, what does that notion mean to you and how have you applied that to your continued success and growth, but also how do you communicate that to students who are coming to you at Berkeley who have big hopes and dreams in music?

Speaker 3 (00:02:59):

Yeah, we start off as youngsters, we are encouraged to fantasize and daydream. I think the more the better. I think that's a wonderful thing for kids to do. I don't think there's any good reason why we should stop doing it. As we grow older, I think adults should daydream and fantasize and embrace that, enjoy that time where we don't have any input. We're not watching tv, we're not on the computer, we're not reading. We're just letting our brain go off and do whatever it is it wants to do. Now all of us are the product of gene expression and all of us have a slightly unique set of genes. So that means our brain and mind and our bodies will do some things better than others. I think it's our daydreams that help us understand, one, what our fantasies and what our motives and desires are.

(00:03:47):

But two, I think if you pay close attention, you might recognize the difference between your motives and your strengths. And as adults, what we need to do is find an area where we can work that overlaps what we want with what we can do. So like all children, I fantasized when I was a kid, I might fantasize it, I'm a great athlete or I'm a great scientist and I've invented a cure for all of disease or I'm a great explorer or any number of things. But down deep inside I think I knew that those were just silly fantasies and that I was doing what I saw on tv, which is what the cartoons and the Gilligan's Island and those fantasy TV shows do just make belief. But there's another class of fantasies that on some level felt connected that felt within reach. So there were certain jobs that I might see on TV or certain things I might fantasize about for myself. That down deep inside I thought if you really wanted that you could have it. And I think that what that is is just an awareness of the stuff you're made of and the type of thinker that you are. So I think I was kind of aware that if there were things that involved sort of engineering or building things, things that involved systems and putting systems together, that on some level I could do that.

Speaker 2 (00:05:17):

Interesting. This is something that I feel really fortunate that my dad instilled in me at a really young age because when he was in university, he was studying to be a violinist and he got pretty good, but he said that he just couldn't get to that level

(00:05:36):

With his contemporaries like Hitchcock Perelman or whatever. He just couldn't do it. And that's what made him decide to become a conductor. And he totally won that. But it was because he understood his own weaknesses. And I've applied that in my own life. I realized that I wouldn't be a great guitar player or really a great producer. What I ended up doing utilized my expertise in both of those without having to be a virtuoso. And it came because my dad instilled that in me. But I guess the question I have is at what point do you think that someone is being delusional versus at what point should you keep believing in yourself? Where's that line?

Speaker 3 (00:06:31):

I think about that a lot. I've got students and we care about these people. I kind of think on some level there are some people who actually are okay with being delusional.

Speaker 2 (00:06:47):

I think you're right,

Speaker 3 (00:06:48):

Yeah, know that they're phoning themselves and are okay with that. And I've observed it enough and I'm curious enough about it to think about it a lot. I think there are some people who are okay with having that built-in excuse for failure who know on some level that they're not going to achieve the heights of success that they might have originally dreamed of. And yet they'll keep doing what they do and either tacitly acknowledge or not that they're just simply not going to get there from here. And they're okay with that. And then there are others who, like you described, who realize I'm never going to be as great as the greats and what's the point of doing this if I can't be great, let me find my place. Let me find something I can be great at. Some of us want greatness. I always knew that I did.

(00:07:45):

I always knew that what I do, I want to be great at it. That was a big motivating factor for me. But other people I think are okay with not great. They're okay with just okay. And that's a really good thing. We shouldn't look down our noses at that. We don't all have to be great. There's a song, there's a song. I wish I remembered who it was by, but I remember the chorus goes, do what you want, do what you want, do what you want, but be who you are. I think that's good advice.

Speaker 2 (00:08:15):

Yeah, but that's the tough part. I think I totally agree that no one should look down on people who are okay with not being great. And not everyone can be great and that's totally fine. But I guess what do you do about people who want it but clearly will never get it and are kind of an impediment to their own getting on with their lives because of this weird fantasy.

Speaker 3 (00:08:45):

And some people believe that they are great and don't see all of the evidence that they are not. It's a really difficult thing to observe. I think it makes us uncomfortable when we encounter people who are, as you mentioned earlier, delusional about their abilities and where they fit on the hierarchy of achievement. Talking just about the musical arts, now we have people who straight up claim that they are as great as any artist who's ever lived. I've had someone say that to me. I've had a former student, not with Berkeley on campus, but with Berkeley online say, he said, I'm as great as any artist who ever lived

Speaker 2 (00:09:25):

As any artist.

Speaker 3 (00:09:26):

As any artist. That's exactly what he said. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:09:28):

Just period. Just any artist.

Speaker 3 (00:09:29):

Right. And that includes, I suppose, Beethoven and the Beatles. And his music was just awful. Just really at the level of, I'm not exaggerating here, if a 7-year-old went to a keyboard and made something up, that's what this guy's music was. And he clearly had told himself a story in his own mind that he believed, but I think, and it was a false story, but he believed it. I think that's a very small percentage of the population. I think most people are like the ones I referred to earlier who might recognize I'm not great, but I'm good enough and I like doing this and I'm going to keep on keeping on and find my audience and find my place in this world. It won't be at the top, it'll be in the middle.

Speaker 2 (00:10:16):

Well, when you said that some people ignore the evidence, what do you think some of the evidence would be for knowing that something, whatever it is, is the right path? How did you know, for instance, I have always wanted to be great at something too, and I've always wanted to do something big and the things that I quit doing in the past, I quit because I couldn't see in my mind logically how they would play out in a big way. Every scenario I saw was just not satisfactory. I was looking at tons of evidence from how other people reacted to it, to how much actual money would come in versus all these gauges when you put them all together, you get a picture. But for a student who really doesn't have much of that, there's probably not a fan base yet. I mean, there might be if you're Billie Eilish or something, but that's kind of a freak occurrence. I guess for your above average, normal student who has some potential for greatness, who wants it, what kind of evidence should they be looking for?

Speaker 3 (00:11:32):

Well, they should be seeing that consumers are apparently enjoying their product and that their audience is growing. They should also be examining some degree of ease, the ease with which they can do this. So you mentioned earlier, how do you know how high of a level you can achieve? When I applied myself to engineering tasks, I saw where I stopped. I saw what I could do easily and well, it took the least amount of effort for me, but I saw compared to some peers that there were some levels of achievement that were a apparently beyond my reach. I remember the first time I heard a mix in the control room by Mick Kowski was of Billy Idol, and that mix was so great. I remember thinking, I'll never get there. I don't think I'll ever be that great. My colleague, Sal Greco, who was the technician, he took over for me as Prince's technician when I was in the role of Prince's engineer.

(00:12:34):

And Sal Greco had a greater passion and greater abilities at audio electronics than I did. I was a better recording engineer, but Sal was a better technician. You could just kind of tell, and you ask yourself, would I put in the effort and if I put in the effort, could I achieve that milestone? I think somehow inside you kind of do the math and you ask yourself, can I get there from here? So back to the case of students. Students need to take a tactical view of their careers, a real business-like perspective on their careers. I think the majority of them, I think the majority of them consider their musical careers like a little child considers a lemonade stand. And I think that lemonade stand mentality goes like this. It says, if I make stuff and I put it out there where people can see it, it'll sell.

(00:13:31):

That's what a 10-year-old does when they set up a lemonade stand. And the only people who buy lemonade from the 10-year-old are the friends and family or the people who feel sorry for you. Oh, look at the cute kids. They're selling lemonade. So you give 'em a dollar and you don't really even want the product. You just feel sorry for them and you think they're cute. A lot of musicians take that approach. I've had them say that to me. They will say things like, well, I'm going to make my music. I'll make an ep. You ask 'em, well, whatcha going to do with it afterward? Well, I'm going to put it on the internet. And then you ask them, and what will happen if six months from now only 12 people have downloaded it? What will you do? And the answer is usually, well, I'll just make more stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:14:13):

Good answer.

Speaker 3 (00:14:14):

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The lemonade stand mentality says, I am going to be passive and I'm just going to wait for the fates to align and I'm going to wait for my customers to find me and I'm not going to make any effort to explore my audience what they might like. Do people want lemonade or maybe there's some other beverage they'd rather have. Is there anything that would prevent people from wanting this lemonade? Why wouldn't they want lemonade? Let me consider all these possibilities and you need,

Speaker 2 (00:14:40):

Maybe my lemonade sucks.

Speaker 3 (00:14:42):

Yeah, it could be. Maybe my product sucks. So you have to then take it from the lemonade stand mentality to the food truck mentality. There are a variety of items on the menu. It's not everything. I'm just going to make a few things and I'm going to find my audience here in this part of town and let's see. Let's compete with the other food trucks and let's see if we get people buying our product. And if we do, great, and if we don't, let's figure out what's wrong with our product. And then let's go ahead and say it's a safe assumption that if people like our product, they will be return customers. They'll come back and they'll tell other people, we should expect that our audience should grow if we're doing something right that people actually like. And then from there you can figure out how you can maybe get a brick and mortar restaurant or maybe a chain, or do you want to be locally known, regionally known, nationally known?

(00:15:33):

What are your ambitions? That is the kind of thinking that a lot of artists are loathed to do, but that's absolutely necessary. Music isn't music until it is consumed. Just like food isn't food until it is consumed. If you've made food and it's sitting on the counter, it's not really functioning as food, is it? Because food's job is to nourish and sustain. It needs to be consumed. Same thing with music. If you've made something, you don't really have music until consumers listen to it. And that pattern of neural activation in their brain matches the pattern of neural activation in yours. And now we've got people thinking alike and processing the same stimulus and the consumer is processing this stimulus and doing what consumers do. We're categorizing, we're judging, we're deciding, we're memorizing, we're filing it away. We might be moving to it or we might be singing along. Now we have music. Too many artists are concerned simply with themselves and with getting the product on the shelf. They should be concerned a lot more with the consumption of it. Who's consuming it and why

Speaker 2 (00:16:52):

Do you think that the consumer side of it is at all in the artists' control? And I guess thinking to a huge artist like Prince, in your experience, I guess I don't want to say people like him, there's only one guy like him, but people of that level just God to basically have you found that they think they can control the public or they're just really in tune with what the public is feeling and wanting?

Speaker 3 (00:17:27):

Yeah, it's the latter. I don't think Prince had any delusions. I never heard him say anything about having predictive power over an audience. He was smart enough to recognize human nature. That's what it takes. And to recognize what music consumers are likely to like. Because he spent so many years as an avid music consumer himself. He understood listening to music, the power of it. He understood what it's like to be a music fan and because he understood the consumption of music, he could make music that others would want to consume. It's clearly the human beings and human behavior is too complex to be able to predict with a hundred percent accuracy. We don't do that. But what we can do is predict that at least a portion of the audience will respond to what it is we do. The smart artist will understand who his or her audience is and cater to those people, cater to people who have that taste. Now, when it comes to food, for example, which is a good analogy, there's no way that a chef is going to make something that appeals to everyone.

Speaker 2 (00:18:43):

It's impossible.

Speaker 3 (00:18:43):

Yeah. Human taste doesn't work like that. And if you were to think, alright, let's think of just a beverage that appeals to everyone. It would be the blandest beverage. There is, it would be water. Anything else that isn't water is going to have audiences divided as to whether or not they care about it. I mean, some people don't like milk and some people don't like caffeine and some people don't like carbonation, I suppose. So yeah, we all have different tastes. Any music that would appeal to everyone would probably be the blandest possible music. So you have to pick a lane and you have to find your people, the people who respond to the same thing that you do and make music for them. You also have to be savvy enough to know when to target a different audience. For example, one of the biggest problems, well, it's a mixed blessing that an artist can encounter early in his or her career.

(00:19:40):

Well, let's say guys early in a guy's career is to have teenage girls be crazy about him. That happened with Charlie po. So Charlie PO's first record came out. Charlie PO is one of our Berkeley MP and e graduates. And Charlie put out this first album. And because Charlie's really handsome, he's really cute and he's sweet teenage girls just went crazy for Charlie. But Charlie was smart enough to recognize he was going to have a really short career. If it was teenage girls who liked him, he was in trouble. Justin Timberlake figured out the same thing. So did Justin Bieber because those teenage girls grow up really fast. And next thing you know they're going to be in college and they're going to be embarrassed to admit that they liked you. So Charlie did something really smart with his second audience. Charlie targeted critics, music critics and scholars.

(00:20:30):

He produced his second record himself, and he made it sophisticated enough that it wouldn't necessarily appeal to the teenage girls, but it might appeal to the music critics. And that's exactly what happened. The critics loved his second album, the photographs of Charlie in the New York Times magazine that came out, I believe last summer. There's some photos of Charlie PO in the New York Times magazine and Charlie's not looking too good. He's not looking at the camera in one of 'em. He's got his shirt unbuttoned and he kind of looks a mess in another one. He's sitting on the couch and he's doing that man spread thing where he is got his legs wide apart and his arms wide apart, and he kind of looks a little bit like a slob. What it looks like to me is Charlie looking at the camera and saying, teenage girls, not for you.

(00:21:18):

This is not for you, not for you. Find someone else, not for you. That's really smart. Prince did the same thing when Prince transitioned from his second album to his third album. His third album, dirty Mind was scandalous among his core audience of r and b, soul, funk, music lovers, prince scandalized that audience and deliberately spurned them in order to make a record that the critics would write about. He made the dirty Mind record and it worked. Didn't sell a lot, but it worked in that. Now everyone's writing about him in New York and Los Angeles and Detroit. Look at this artist, he's amazing. He combines punk and pop and rock and r and b soul that set him up once they're writing about you, that set him up to deliver his next record controversy, which would target another audience, the audience of his peers, other musicians, which set him up to deliver his next record, which was 1999, where he had his first crossover single. Now he can circle back to the public from a different perspective, a perspective of having been praised by critics and the perspective of having won the respect of other musicians. So there's a tactic that's involved when you're setting up any new business in finding your audience and knowing that audiences have different appetites. And if you develop a reputation for making fast food, you're not going to cater to the audience that wants a fine dining experience. We have to consider these things artists do.

Speaker 2 (00:23:03):

Do you think that Prince had that planned out in some way?

Speaker 3 (00:23:08):

I'm sure he did over time. I'm sure over time he was such a high native intelligence that yeah, he was tactical and he recognized that if he was going to compete with the Michael Jacksons of the world, he was going to need to approach his career strategically. Very smart man. And I think he knew what he was doing.

Speaker 2 (00:23:31):

I guess that level of success requires you to know what you're doing. It's not accidental.

Speaker 3 (00:23:37):

Yeah, I'm not sure. You might not even be able to articulate it. Maybe you just know it down in your belly button. You just sense it. I really don't know. But he was a pretty sharp guy.

Speaker 2 (00:23:46):

I'm guessing that that's probably a common trait among the huge artists you've been around to some degree.

Speaker 3 (00:23:54):

Yeah, that's what I've seen. The artists who aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer tend to have shorter careers than the ones who are pretty bright. All the folks I've known who've been very successful, that includes bare naked ladies and it includes David Byrne. And well look at Greg Kirsten from Gita. GTA didn't have a lot of success, but Greg's career has taken off. He's won the Grammy twice now for producer of the year and his careers on fire at this point. These folks are really, really smart and ridiculously hardworking.

Speaker 2 (00:24:29):

Okay, so speaking of ridiculously hardworking, I want to circle back to something you said earlier, which I've kind of noticed too, kind of on the topic of innate skill or talent and hard work, specifically the things that you don't have to work as hard for to be really good at. And I'm thinking when you said that people should be aware of those things that might be out of your reach no matter how hard you work. It makes me think of being at Berkeley in the practice rooms or the dorms and some guys sitting in the practice rooms for 15 hours straight trying to practice guitar and never really getting any better, just getting frustrated or eventually injuring themselves or just being psychopaths. And then these other characters who played a few hours a day who just smoked everyone, they came in scoring sixes or sevens on their entry exams and just left within a semester two or three and joined real bands.

(00:25:42):

And now you know about them. One went on to play with Ozzy Osborne, for instance, a guy named Gus G who was on my floor. He worked hard, but he didn't sit there for 16 hours a day being an idiot. And I know a lot of dudes who would sit there for 16 hours a day being idiots and ended up going nowhere. So I do think that I totally have seen what you mean by you have to know what it is that you can do without killing yourself for it. But then on the other hand, like you just said, these mega artists are also the hardest working. So where's the line between that? Where should you be killing yourself with work and where shouldn't you be? Well,

Speaker 3 (00:26:28):

I think the perfect formula is when a person is born with the right brain architecture by right, I mean the correct set, not the right side of the brain, a certain brain architecture that gives rise to certain abilities fairly easily when that architecture is coupled with the personality traits of self-discipline and focus sacrifice, that ability for sacrifice when that is also coupled with the circumstances that give a child the opportunity to have a musical instrument in his or her hands or to take the time and to receive the encouragement to practice, practice, practice. When all those things come together in a perfect storm, you have a great chance of success. Let's examine them individually. The architecture itself refers to what kind of thinker we are. I give a lecture on campus called the Verplank Lecture. It was a fellow who gave this lecture at McGill when I was a grad student there.

(00:27:32):

And it just blew my mind and it really illuminated the music business for me, and it allowed me to see the difference between bare naked ladies and the great success we had with the stunt album. We sold 5 million copies versus ge. GE sold not even 500,000 copies of their record that had a hit single on it. What was the big difference? Big difference involved the different types of thinkers that bare naked ladies had on their team compared to the Thinkers on GTA's team. So Bil Plank from Silicon Valley, he's credited as being one of the inventors of the computer mouse. He talked about Apple computer and he talked about Microsoft and he talked about how great success happens when strong archetypes get together. And he talked about the archetype of the artist, the person who is a creative person, a creator, people who are visionaries and who see things de novo from the new Steve Jobs, who's a perfect artist.

(00:28:31):

And he talked about how the artist then has to go to another archetype to help him actually get something built. An artist needs an engineer. That's me, that's my people. That's what I do. Well, I'm not a musical artist. I've always known. I'm not that type of thinker, but I know I'm really good at building things. And when a prince or GE guitar or someone like that comes to me and says, help me make this record. Help me realize my vision, I'm your girl. I can get that done. I can wire up the studio and I can repair it if it breaks in the middle of the night. So you go to an engineer like a Steve Wozniak and a Steve Wozniak knows how to build and make real, the thing that the visionary has just described, the next archetype you're going to need, however, is somebody that's different from the artist and the engineer.

(00:29:16):

You're going to need an entrepreneur. You're going to need someone who really understands people and social relationships, engineers tend to be nerds. We're not too good at reading social cues. Artists have their head in the clouds, but the entrepreneur is someone who really understands people and knows what people want and knows how to lubricate the social conversations such that it's easy to sell records or sell software or computers or whatever, how to reach people. The marketing campaign of Apple was perfect at that, at getting us to believe that Apple, this is a company that gets me and they know what I like, they know what I want. But Gita had all three of those archetypes on their team and so did Bear naked ladies. But the one archetype bear naked ladies had that Gedo didn't have was the fourth one. And that's in Bill Plank's words, the bully. I prefer to call it the competitor, but the bully or competitor is someone who wants to win. That's what they do. That's the kind of mind they have, and all they care about is being number one and winning. These are competitive folks. Most artists don't think like that. Engineers don't think like that. Entrepreneurs don't necessarily think like that, but you need someone on your team who wants to have the biggest slice of the pie. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:30:35):

You need a killer.

Speaker 3 (00:30:35):

Yeah. Bare naked ladies had a manager. They had the great Terry McBride and ggi Todd made the rookie artist mistake of not wanting to associate with people who were unlike them, and that was a big mistake. So yeah, I forget what got me on that topic, but oh yeah, we were talking about the perfect storm of qualities coming together. So if you know are a strong artist and you are very creative, and by the way, creativity involves certain circuits in the brain. Some people are naturally more creative than others. I could go into greater detail about it, but I knew I've always known I wasn't an artist. That's not my strength. I've always known I was an engineering type. When people who are artistically inclined and are extremely creative get the opportunity to have a musical instrument or a set of paints or a movie camera or whatever, and they can spend the hours wood shedding to hone their craft, they've already gotten off to a great headstart.

(00:31:40):

Next, they have to be savvy enough to assemble a team of people who have strengths that they don't have, so that art can then become a product that is sold and promoted and all that in the marketplace of ideas. In the case of Prince, he had a jazz musician dad. He was very intelligent and sweet. I've seen his childhood report cards. He obeyed authority. He was a good kid, but he came from a home where he was pretty badly abused. His parents divorced and his mother married a man who used to lock Prince up in his room when he was just a young boy. And Prince would be locked up in his room with these musical instruments. And that's what he did. He taught himself to play, to play all these different instruments. And when he finally left home at age 14 and lived with his childhood friend, Andre Simone, Andre talked about how all the kids that come home from school, prince would go down in the basement where they had a little four track recording tape machine, and while the other kids would be eating dinner and watching TV and doing homework and playing, prince would be up all night, all night in that basement recording and writing songs.

(00:32:49):

And in the morning you'd see him in the morning, Andre would say, and he'd hand you a cassette and say, listen to what I did last night. So that kid put in countless hours as a child, as an adolescent. He had this high native intelligence, this extremely high level of creativity. I mean, songs just flowed from him so unbelievably fast. He had the self-discipline and the focus and the willingness to make the sacrifices to forego a social life. And for a teenager, man, that takes self-discipline because teenagers want to fit in more than they want anything else. I just read that in one of my science books the other night.

Speaker 2 (00:33:31):

I read and tell me if you know anything about this. I read that at that age, just because of the way their brains have developed, and again, I don't know if this is true or not, the concept of long-term isn't that concrete for them. So they can't really understand it the way that someone 40 years old can.

Speaker 3 (00:33:51):

Yeah, yeah, that's very, very true. I'm reading Robert Polsky's book called Behave the Biology of Our Best and Worst Behaviors. I love Robert Polsky. He's so funny and so smart, and I'm just on the chapter now that's talking about adolescents on the frontal cortex. The connections just aren't there, and they won't be there until our mid twenties. So what you've got going on is your amygdala, your hippocampus, your limbic system is firing away like mad, and it's going full steam ahead. And in spolsky's words, the frontal cortex still hasn't finished with the assembly instructions. The frontal cortex is going, wait, wait, I got to tighten this bold. I got to add this part. Wait. There's a circuit called the ventral te mentum that is also involved in music processing. The ventral te mentum is down there in the limbic system and it says, okay, well I'll help out.

(00:34:43):

The ventral teum gets involved when adolescents and young people are making decisions, not when adults are, but when young people are. But in the words of polsky, the ventral mentum is working above its pay grade. So the thing is like, alright, now dude, I'm going to try to help you make the right decision here, but trust me, I'm not the one who should be advising you. And this is why young people are so vulnerable to peer pressure and why they do just about anything to fit in. They're smart enough to know this is a really stupid idea, but they don't have those connections in the frontal lobe that would drop down those inhibitory gates and make them say, no, no, no, I'm not doing this. These other circuits are saying, go for it dude. And they harm themselves. They can often harm themselves because they haven't learned yet how to reason. So when I think about Young Prince

Speaker 2 (00:35:41):

Sounds like an abnormality almost.

Speaker 3 (00:35:44):

When I think about the focus and he had to have to put himself in this position, I realized that that kid achieved escape velocity based on the pressures that the world and that his own internal reasoning applied on him on some level. He said, this is going to work. I just have to work really, really hard for years before it finally pays off. But it did pay off. He got a record deal when he was 18, 19 years old, and he was a millionaire by the time he was in his early twenties.

Speaker 2 (00:36:19):

So what do you think about the people who say that there's no such thing as talent? Because everything that you're saying to me, obviously there's hard work, but no talent. And if there was no talent involved in the print situation or any of these situations, I don't think anything would've happened. There's lots of people who came from a fucked up background who play an instrument, who got locked in a room who never did anything. There has to be that X factor. However, I've met a few, I guess intellectually smart people who argue against the idea very, very hard. And I definitely think there's talent. I don't think we're born with equal abilities or anything like that, but some people do

Speaker 3 (00:37:16):

And we have to define our terms. What is actually skill is sometimes labeled as talent. We've got to make sure we make the distinction there. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:37:25):

For sure.

Speaker 3 (00:37:25):

Yeah. Talent is an emergent property. That's a combination of skill and personality traits that allow that skill to be expressed. So

Speaker 2 (00:37:38):

An aptitude basically.

Speaker 3 (00:37:39):

Yeah, kind of. It involves original thought. So a talent involves skill plus art. And art is original thought of things that other people haven't thought of. Where does that come from? That comes from a couple of circuits in the brain, the right precuneus and the right parietal temporal junction in very highly creative people. Both of those circuits show reduced deactivation and most of us mere mortals when we're putting ourselves on a creative task, it's hard work. Cognition thinking is hard work, creativity is hard. And so you're trying to write a song. Let's say you're trying to design a poster or just whatever, it's got to be creative, it's got to be something good and it's hard work and you're burning up a lot of calories there. But as soon as you get what you think is a fairly decent idea, what we do is we shut the gate. Alright, I got an idea, I'm going to going to work on this idea. And you start writing or you start creating. And what you're doing then is a running decision-making process where you're rejecting anything that doesn't compliment this original idea you had. But in folks who are highly creative, they don't drop those gates down so rapidly. So they are open to more possibilities.

(00:39:03):

Their range of possibilities for what this song can be about or what this poster can look like is much, much broader. They're open to many more ideas and once they have an idea and they start working on it, they are far less likely to reject things. They are much more open and flexible when it comes to separating relevant from irrelevant information. So we don't consciously activate or deactivate these circuits. It just kind of happens when you have to be creative. But the highly creative people have what I just call a leaky faucet. The two of them that I've known were Prince and Tommy Jordan, the TA of gta, Tommy's ideas never stopped flowing to a fault and his ideas were insane, incredible original things that no one else would possibly think of. So if you have a mind that works like that, if you're creative and you can combine that with the high skill level of actually having your hands or your mouth, your voice represent what your brain is thinking of.

(00:40:16):

And on top of that, you've got the self-discipline and the focus and the persistence to actually get something made. What emerges is what we label talent, but it's really a number of different factors. The difference between genius, creative folks and schizophrenic folks is the ability to actually make something. So creativity. Researchers say that to be creative, something must be original, but it must also be useful. So it needs to have a function in this world and it needs to be productive. You actually have to make something. So an original thinker who's a philosopher isn't really considered great until that person writes a book, comes up with a thesis, you have to make something.

Speaker 2 (00:41:01):

It makes me think of movies where you have the crazy character who spends all their time creating some machine that has no purpose

Speaker 3 (00:41:11):

In

Speaker 2 (00:41:12):

Real life, but it was super intricate and took a ton of thought. Something that won't work like a time machine or something.

Speaker 4 (00:41:18):

Just

Speaker 2 (00:41:19):

Like obviously a genius had to create this and thought it out, but it's absolutely crazy that they even bothered with it in the first place.

Speaker 3 (00:41:29):

So creativity researchers, and I think this is wise, are careful to recognize that creativity can't just be original thought, that it needs to include a product that you've made and it needs to be reproducible, it needs to be practical. All of us have friends that we probably knew when we were in high school who we thought were geniuses because we get high and sit around, maybe drink a beer or something like that, and they would wax poetic about all kinds of things and you just thought they were great. But a lot of these folks never went on to actually do anything. The real philosophers, the real thinkers are going to have a thesis and it's going to be cogent and they're going to be able to express it in the written form.

Speaker 2 (00:42:10):

They're going to create something in the real world that other people can get some value out of.

Speaker 3 (00:42:16):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And we don't know that. We don't recognize that. We think our friends are geniuses when we're teenagers, but as we get older, we begin to see no, the actual, the real work isn't actually making something. Prince was extraordinary in that ability. So I think he's a nice template for what talent is. So back to the question of whether it's born or made. Well, you're born with certain genes that give you certain personality traits. You're born with a native IQ and it helps to have a high one. You're born with these circuits that are implicated in creativity. Some of them are more active than others. So in that sense, the substrate of what ultimately becomes talent is something you're born with, but you can't control for the circumstances and you can't control for your ability to solve problems. A life in the arts is a life in problem solving. Suppose Prince was just too afraid. Suppose he was just too afraid to even try or suppose he met someone and fell in love and decided to just get married and have kids and live a quiet life. Any number of things, chance, shall we say, go into a person's life. I like how the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman says, luck is always a factor. It's always a factor.

Speaker 2 (00:43:43):

I agree.

Speaker 3 (00:43:44):

Yeah. He talks about how Google early in its development was nearly sold for $900,000, but the person who was going to buy it thought the price was too high.

Speaker 2 (00:43:53):

Amazing.

Speaker 3 (00:43:54):

I know.

Speaker 2 (00:43:55):

So when people say in a bitter sort of way, it was luck. That person's lucky, they are kind of right, but maybe not in the way they mean,

Speaker 4 (00:44:06):

But

Speaker 2 (00:44:06):

I think the luck is that you were born in this time period in these circumstances and met the people you met and didn't get yourself killed and all those intangible things. You met this person that introduced you to that person who then introduced you to that person or 20 people later who then gave you the opportunity. It's all those things that are way too complex for you to plan out or predict. That's the luck factor,

Speaker 3 (00:44:38):

And you have to be where luck can find you. I tell students, quite honestly, we talk about where to move after graduation. The music business is in Los Angeles and to a lesser extent in New York and in Atlanta and in Nashville. So certain careers are going to be much more feasible where the music business is in Los Angeles and New York and Atlanta, Nashville. But music is made anywhere on planet earth. So you can have a music career anywhere on planet earth. You can take a field recorder to Antarctica and record penguins, and you're a recording engineer for all intents and purposes. But I don't even know if penguins make any noise. I'm just thinking about that, what that sound like. Well,

Speaker 2 (00:45:23):

Splashing into the water. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:45:25):

That's too, they do. And maybe they make some noise. Yeah. So yeah, you can apply your trade anywhere, but you have to consider if you want to reach the highest levels of success of commercial success, then of course it's going to be a lot easier in an industry city where luck can find you. I always say how lucky I was at getting that job with Prince, but I was right where Luck could find me and had done all the work. I had been preparing for that opportunity for five years and had worked tirelessly, tirelessly to be as good as possible at what I did for a living. So that when luck found me, I was ready to roll, it would not have found me in Boise, Idaho, and it would not have been a successful transaction if I had not done all that preparation.

Speaker 2 (00:46:15):

Alright, so I think there's a perfect time to talk about how you set yourself up for luck to happen. You got with Prince at a very young age, from what I understand, like early twenties?

Speaker 3 (00:46:29):

No, later twenties. I had just celebrated my 27th birthday. I had just been hired by him. My friends gave me a going away party, which was also a birthday party, and I was turning 27.

Speaker 2 (00:46:41):

Okay, and you said you basically had been engineering for five years at that point?

Speaker 3 (00:46:48):

I had started my career at age 21 wanting to contribute to record making in some capacity. Didn't even know how to begin, but I knew that I studied audio electronics so that I could contribute, so that I could do something that was of value. I studied on my own a self-taught in electronics and the principles of recording and all that. And then when I was just turned 22, I suppose I saw an ad in the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper Help Wanted ad that said Audio trainee wanted. It was for a company called Audio Industries Corporation on LaBrea right across from a and m Studios. And that was right up the street from me and I applied and I got that job. They hired me as an audio trainee.

Speaker 2 (00:47:35):

What does that mean?

Speaker 3 (00:47:36):

So what this company did is they sold and serviced MCI consoles and tape machines in the greater Los Angeles area and MCI was the most popular console and tape machine brand. It wasn't the best one. It was kind of like a Ford or a Chevy or a Dodge compared to a Cadillac, but it was the most popular because it was affordable. So they had a crew of three or four audio technicians who wired up the recording studios and repaired this equipment and audio industries was looking for a beginner that they could teach their methods and they could teach a beginner, they could teach and a beginner who would assist with wiring up the studios and things like that. And that was me. Now they hired me. They saw I had enthusiasm and I had a burning desire to be good at this and that I was working really, really hard on my own.

(00:48:26):

And they hired me and they taught me soldering and they taught me equipment repair. And in no time at all, I was with them for about three years. I was working as a repair technician, repairing consoles and tape machines in the greater Los Angeles area. Then there was one studio owned by Graham Nash and David Crosby called Rudy Records, and it was just up the street and their stuff was breaking down quite a lot and they kept saying, quit your job and come work for us, come be our studio, maintenance tech. And eventually I said, yeah, that sounds great. And I joined them as the studio maintenance tech. My job was to keep their studio running, but also to serve as a second assistant engineer when our regular assistant was busy with other clients. So

Speaker 2 (00:49:10):

What did you know about engineering at that point?

Speaker 3 (00:49:12):

Absolutely nothing. I knew signal flow. I knew the console easily and well. So I knew signal flow and that was my job. But the actual practical steps involved in record making or the art of using audio equipment, I did not know at all. Not at all.

Speaker 2 (00:49:29):

And they just figured that you would learn.

Speaker 3 (00:49:32):

Well, I didn't need to be a recording engineer because my job was to be the maintenance tech. Got

Speaker 2 (00:49:37):

It. And

Speaker 3 (00:49:37):

The maintenance techs, they don't use the equipment, they keep the equipment running. So that was all I was hired for and that was basically all I did. When the call went out, the Prince was looking for a technician. I received that information from Westlake Audio. They were over there on Santa Monica Boulevard. And my former boyfriend, John Sketti was the chief tech. And John Sketti taught me so much about audio electronics. And John called me with his thick Boston accent and he said, Sue, your dream job is waiting for you, your dream job. Prince is looking for a technician. Call Glenn. The Glenn he was talking about was Glenn Phoenix, the president and founder of Westlake Audio Prince's management had contacted Glenn and they said, do you have any technicians? Do you have anybody who'd want to leave their job and move to Minneapolis and work for this prince guy full time?

(00:50:29):

So Glenn put the word out and all of Glenn's technicians are like, oh, hell no, they're not going to leave their LA jobs. We are working in the entertainment capital of the world, and they are among the most prestigious technicians you're going to find anywhere, anywhere on earth. They're not going to leave their jobs and move to Minneapolis to work for this freaky kid. But when I heard about that job, I thought, oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's my job. I'm getting a job. That's my dream job. So Glenn interviewed me. He realized that, yeah, I knew what I was doing, that I would serve, that I would do, and Prince's management hired me. So in the summer of 83, I moved out to Minneapolis to be his tech.

Speaker 2 (00:51:11):

How big was he at that point?

Speaker 3 (00:51:13):

He had just had his first crossover single. So Little Red Corvette had crossed over from the r and b charts where Prince normally charted to the billboard top 40, top 40 hit.

Speaker 2 (00:51:27):

Got it.

Speaker 3 (00:51:27):

So he was just getting the attention of the Rock pop audience. Little Red Corvette was a pretty big single for him, his first crossover single at the time. I had no way of knowing this, but Warner Brothers had just given him the green light to do the Purple Rain movie. And when I think about it, that was really courageous on their part. So you've got this 25-year-old kid who wants to do a semi autobiographical movie of his life. He's 25 and he's just had his first crossover single. I mean, really, Warner Brothers. Really? Yeah. They believed in him. They believed in him. The geniuses of those guys, Austin and all of them, they believed in him. They said, yeah, let's go for it. They gave him the budget to make this movie, and it was a huge success. He won an Academy Award as well as Grammys, and it did not derail his career. It launched him into the stratosphere.

Speaker 2 (00:52:23):

Did you think it was strange at all that all these technicians who had a lot of, I guess a lot of experience on you, were turning it down and basically passing up a huge, huge gig? Did you see it that way? These guys are idiots. I'm taking this.

Speaker 3 (00:52:44):

Yeah, I didn't think they were idiots, but I did think you guys don't know what it is you're turning down. He was my favorite artist. So I'd been a Prince fan since he first came out, and especially when the Dirty Mind album hit, I realized this is my favorite artist in the world. This guy is remarkable. He's extraordinary. I had seen him play live a couple of times and he's just my favorite artist. So when the opportunity came up, I recognize that these technicians don't realize how great this guy is, and I do so lucky me. Good, I'm taking this gig.

Speaker 2 (00:53:16):

Do you think that there is something that happens when someone, I guess they've been around for too long and get a little jaded, too jaded to see opportunities?

Speaker 3 (00:53:27):

Oh, I suppose. Don't we all get comfortable? I go through this exercise with students who are about to graduate, and I go around the room and I ask them questions. I ask them to do something that's really, really hard for them to do. I ask them to describe themselves 20 years from now. So I'll ask a kid, how old are you now? 21. Let's say. All right, so in 20 years you're going to be 41, 42 years old. Tell me where you live. Tell me, do you live in the city? Do you live in a suburb? Tell me what you do for a living. Who pays you? Is it record labels? Is it film companies? Is it independent artists? Where do you get your money from? Are you married? Do you have children? Do your children go to public school or do they go to private school?

(00:54:13):

You tour? Are you gone for long periods of time? Is your spouse in the same business as you? Do you want to be able to have pillow talk and talk with your spouse about how your day went? Or would you just as soon prefer your spouse to do something completely different? Do you have a studio in your home when you wake up? Are you at work or do you drive to work? Do you have a studio somewhere else? Do you have employees? Asking them these questions helps them explore what it is they want, and I really want them to recognize that odds are we won't get everything we want. And the future is a big place. You can't see it all from here, but you're going to be walking forward into the fog and you're going to be hitting obstacles. And at some point you're going to hit forks in the road where you can take the left fork, but you're not going to have the stuff that you'll find down there at the right fork.

(00:55:09):

So it really helps in advance to know what you really want. So yeah, I think a lot of these technicians, they might've thought, well, yeah, that sounds pretty good, but to give up my job in Los Angeles and move to Minneapolis to be a full-time technician for this guy means I'm leaving my social network and maybe I'm leaving a wife or girlfriend, or maybe you've got a nice apartment or something. You've giving up quite a lot. When you're young, you've got nothing to lose. But as you get older, you develop roots and you don't necessarily want to uproot yourself.

Speaker 2 (00:55:41):

That's why I think that young people should risk things often before you have a life to destroy. Try to risk as many things as you can. I mean, I don't mean jumping cars off cliffs, but intelligent risks.

Speaker 3 (00:56:00):

Yeah, because the clay is going to harden the clay that is your brain and what kind of thinker you are and your appetite for risk and for novelty. All of that is going to diminish as you get older. So if you're going to take any risky steps, it needs to be when you're young. I have had two careers now. I had a music business career and I had a science career. And a lot of times students come to me and they'll say they're interested in both. And I always tell them, do the music business one first. Have the arts career first because it's so much riskier. Do the riskier one first. The science will be there.

Speaker 2 (00:56:39):

Did you know that you were going to switch careers?

Speaker 3 (00:56:42):

Not always, but in my thirties, I began getting a second calling, and that second calling felt identical to the first calling I had had. So the first calling that emerged when I was 7, 8, 9 years old was a calling to be involved in music, in popular music. I felt that so strongly. It felt like a calling. It felt like a vocation. It felt like a voice saying, this is who you are. This is who you were born to be. This is what you want. This is you. But as I hit my mid thirties, I began feeling a second calling, just a very strong curiosity about the natural world and how it works. And I began fantasizing about laboratories and field studies, and I began fantasizing about the things that I would come to learn were actually science experiments, and that's the kind of life I wanted to be doing. And that calling just got stronger and stronger and stronger. So by my mid forties, I recognized I'm going to have to do this one way or another. I'm going to have to do this because that inner voice is telling me who I am, and it's telling me I am a scientist. So now I got to figure out how to be one.

Speaker 2 (00:57:54):

Hey, everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast, and you should know that it's brought to you by URM Academy, URM Academy's mission is to create the next generation of audio professionals by giving them the inspiration information to hone their craft and build a career doing what they love. You've probably heard me talk about Nail the Mix before, and if you're a member, you already know how amazing it is at the beginning of the month. Now the mixed members get the raw multitracks to a new song by artists like Lama God Eth Shuga, bring Me The Horizon Gaira asking Alexandria Machine Head and Papa Roach among many, many others. Then at the end of the month, the producer who mixed it comes on and does a live streaming walkthrough of exactly how they mix the song of the album and takes your questions live on the air.

(00:58:43):

You'll also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of dozens of bite-sized mixing tutorials that cover all the basics. And Portfolio Builder, which is a library of pro quality multi-tracks cleared for use of your portfolio. So your career will never again be held back by the quality of your source material. And for those who really, really want to step up their game We have another membership tier called URM Enhanced, which includes everything I already told you about, and access to our massive library of fast tracks, which are deep, super detailed courses on intermediate and advanced topics like gain staging, mastering loan, and so forth. It's over 50 hours of content and man, let me tell you, this stuff is just insanely detailed. Enhanced members also get access to one-on-one office hours sessions with us and Mix Rescue, which is where we open up one of your mixes on a live video stream, fix it up and talk you through exactly what we're doing at every step. If any of that sounds interesting to you, if you're ready to level up your mixing skills and your audio career, head over to URM academy slash enhanced to find out more. You went to college for the first time at 44.

(00:59:58):

You know what I think is amazing about that is so many people, especially in music, think that if you're past 25, it's over your future's over. I may as well, I don't know if you encounter those people, but I've encountered them a whole lot. I mean, maybe as far as being a pop star goes, it's tough, but I think that even the concept of restarting a career past a certain age is really, really scary for a lot of people. And we're just talking about how you should risk things when you're young. Were you at all fearful about just doing it?

Speaker 3 (01:00:42):

No. Fearful would be way too strong a word. I had the excitement of a new adventure when you're going to go on vacation to a place you've never been before. There's that excitement. But no, I didn't have any trepidation. I was a little bit afraid like, oh, what if I can't do it? But something inside me thought, well, I'm going to try really, really, really, really, really hard and I've got a pretty full can of whoop ass, so I can probably do it. I didn't have any serious doubts that I couldn't, but I have to say something, and this is really important. I'm single and childness. When you're single and childless, your life is yours to do whatever you want. With my actions, my choices would not impact anyone else's life in any appreciable way. When people, we talked about this earlier, that fork in the road, when you decide to get married, you are acknowledging that any substantial choice you make from now on is going to have an impact on someone else's life.

(01:01:48):

And when you have children, that's even bigger. I would never have left a solid career to pursue college. If I had a spouse and children, it would be irresponsible. Yeah, it'd be irresponsible. You can't do that. So yeah, it was doable because in part because I had the freedom to do it, I think it's clear, very, very clear that adults can learn that we can acquire new things. In many ways, it was actually easier being a college freshman at age 44 than at age 18 because I didn't have any of the social pressures. I didn't have any of the hormonal pressures. I was happy to study and do homework, whereas a lot of kids, they're like, oh my God, I got to study. I was loving it. So yeah, it's great being an holder student. Mentally we can do it. It's just circumstantially. Whether or not we can do it, that's the bigger problem.

Speaker 2 (01:02:45):

It's interesting how, I guess what you call real life is one of the biggest factors in people's slowing down whatever it is that they're working on, that they're passionate about. That might be a little risky or not that stable real life, just, I don't know. It just gets in the way, and I've always thought, and I've known quite a few people who have done extraordinary things, and most of the time they found a way to push that off or just not do it at all, because it is a sacrifice. You only have a finite amount of time in this world, and what you do with it is what you do with it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):

Yeah, and this is why I have students go through the exercise of examining what it is they want, and we started talking about this earlier, your motives, your desires, what you want, what you want informs your personal definition of a good life. Some people would probably be really, really unhappy without a spouse and without children. Others of us, like myself are not very happy to not have those things. I think if you know what it is, you need what you absolutely need in order to be happy, and you can do the math with what kind of thinker you are, what your strengths are. You can then set yourself up to have a really good life that allows you to get what you want, doing what you do naturally. Anything you do naturally you can do for the longest amount of time with the least amount of effort, just you doing what you do naturally.

(01:04:34):

Had I set myself up to have a life as an artist or a songwriter or a performer or something like that, I would've been bitterly disappointed. I don't have, I'm not cut from that cloth. I don't have the substrate to be that person. I'm not that creative. I'm not that kind of thinker, the kind of thinker I am as an engineering type, so setting myself up to perform engineering tasks or even to think about neuroscience, which is very much like engineering. I'm good at that. That's easy for me. That allows me to have a good life, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):

Have you found during that exercise ever that some students were like, I realize that I need to leave music, audio school altogether and do something else,

Speaker 3 (01:05:23):

And I really applaud their courage in saying that. There was one young man who said, he started describing himself, and I think he was going to live somewhere in the Midwest, and I asked him, what do you do for a living? And he said, I just have a job. He said, what kind of a job? He says, just a job. He was so

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):

Just a job,

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):

Just a job. He was just so happy about it. That really takes guts. It really, really takes guts. Here's another scenario, was a student who graduated came to see me a couple times and was really, really nervous about his future, visibly nervous. He was actually shaking, and the second time we met, I asked him, what's going on? What's going on with you? He was just shaking. And then I said, okay, I'm going to ask you a question and I want you to blurt out your answer right now. Here's your question. What do you want? And he just blurted out, I want to stay home and watch TV with my girlfriend.

(01:06:26):

And we just both laughed and I said, well, there you are. There you are. What was troubling him so much is that the poor guy had completed this MP and e program and he had the student debt and all that. He told everybody, family, friends, everybody, I'm going to go off and be a recording engineer. And he fell in love. He fell in love with a woman who was in graduate school in Boston and he didn't want to leave her. He didn't want to go to Los Angeles or New York and be an assistant engineer, and he found a woman he loved, and we talked about that, and I said, obviously, the right thing to do is be with this woman, get married, have a life. It's what you want, it's your life. And then he confessed. He said, well, I'm just so afraid to tell people that I've changed my mind.

(01:07:12):

I'm so afraid to tell them that I don't think I want to be an engineer. I just laughed at him. I said, whose life is it? It's yours. You can have a really good life and you deserve to, should have a really good life. And what you've acknowledged is that a good life involves being with this woman and having a nine to five job so that you guys have your nights free. Why shouldn't you have that? That's success To me. That's success. My brothers have that. They have good marriages and they have working. They are working men, they work commercial construction, and one of them's retired, but they've got good marriages and they have good lives. Different from my own, but good.

Speaker 2 (01:07:53):

This goes back to what we started talking about, which is delusion and knowing, kind of knowing your place in the universe and being honest about it, what you were just talking about made me think a lot of, when I was in a touring band, and we'd be around lots of other bands, obviously, because we were on tour and I feel like something happens after 30 where a lot of people start wondering what their future is going to hold or if they should stay in bands or not. And some people jumped ship right away and made really, really smart decisions and figured out the next steps. Some people stayed in the game and continued to be successful and more power to them, but there was this other group of people who you could tell they were over it. You could tell they were scared about the future, but they had put so much of their identity into being that musician character that everybody knew from that band.

(01:09:03):

Everything that they knew and said about themselves to other people, the entire story they told everyone in their lives involved that. So to then quit, go back to school and become a quote, normie was kind of killing themselves in a way. It was killing a huge part of themselves. And so a lot of people that I knew would just get older, get older, get older, and be stuck in this dead end band and I'd be miserable. Then I'd see the other guys, myself included, who jumped ship because we saw the writing on the wall doing fine in life, and I wish that that they could have done your exercise. I've seen it many, many times. I think the earlier that you can figure that out, the better too.

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):

Yeah. I have a friend who's a very, very close friend. We've been friends for 35 years. His name is Tim Bruckner and he's a sculptor, and Tim dropped out of school when he was 15 and just, he's an only child, and he would just go to the library and draw and paint and read. Tim got success very early as a sculptor and a painter, and then he met a woman and he fell in love and Tim had multiple gifts. He was also a musician and songwriter. He was signed to a demo deal with Casablanca Records, and he was working for hypnosis, the album cover art company, and his life was just poised to be a rock star and to be an artist. And then he met this woman and he fell in love and they got married, and when she got pregnant with their first child, they decided they were going to move to a Marie Wisconsin, which is where she was from, and they were going to be near her parents and they were going to have this kid, and Tim's life took a very different turn.

(01:10:55):

He did not have success as a musician. The demo deal just went nowhere. He did not have success as a painter. He has great success as a sculptor. He sculpts action figures for DC comics and Marvel and all that, very highly collectible action figures, but that's what Tim does for a living, and Tim is one of the happiest people I know. He married the woman that he loves, had two incredible children, and he says to me all the time, sometimes you don't get the dream you want. Sometimes you get the dream you didn't know you had. If Tim had been successful as a musician, he's pretty convinced he would've been dead by the age of 35. He's pretty convinced that drugs and alcohol would've taken him out, and he would've had a very short career, and it would've been pretty damn miserable. He got the dream he didn't even know he had. I go through that exercise with students to help them realize what they want and to help them realize that a good life might not necessarily include a lot of money or fame or accolades, or it might even not include using your talents to the best of their abilities. There are many, many, many definitions of a good life, so be open to the possibility that you might get a different dream than the one you have.

Speaker 2 (01:12:20):

It's funny you say that. He said that he'd be dead by 35. I've always told people that it's a really good thing. My band didn't get just 15% bigger

Speaker 5 (01:12:31):

Because

Speaker 2 (01:12:32):

Then we would've wanted to keep going, and my future would've been completely different. I'm in a really good spot and it's all been because I quit that and started moving on to other things. But if we had just been a little bit bigger and been a little bit more motivated to stay together because we were just that one level up, who the hell knows it could have been ugly. The

Speaker 3 (01:13:00):

Rewards of this life are varied and multiple. There are just so many of them. There's so many ways to be happy, so so many ways to be happy. Sometimes what looks like a really great life on the outside, being in a touring band, it's not so great. After you've done it for a little while, it's not always great.

Speaker 2 (01:13:22):

Yeah, once you've got it out of your system. So I want to switch gears here for a second. I want to talk about your doctoral thesis. It was on consonance and dissonance and whether or not the brain could make categorical physiological differentiation between the two types of simultaneous intervals. Can you talk about what you found in your research as well as what the implications are on the perception of phony versus cacophony?

Speaker 3 (01:13:50):

Yeah. I was interested in the origins of consonants and dissonance. A lot of thinkers over many, many millennia have been, and I wanted a way to test it to see if the brain would make a natural distinction between a tritone, let's say, and a perfect fifth. As one of my advisors, Evan Ban said to me, he says, what does the brain care? And I thought, well, that's a pretty good question. What does the brain care? We know what music theorists care about, but does a brain give a shit? Are these different to a brain? So I designed a running memory task, an auditory short-term memory task where I threw a whole lot of musical intervals sequentially at the brain and ask people to retain them in memory and then recognize them when they popped up again later, like that card game of concentration where you take two decks of cards and you spread all the cards out and you have to try to remember where you saw the last nine or the queen of hearts or whatever.

(01:14:43):

So I created a set of 72 diads dyads being two tones simultaneously. There were minor seconds and major seconds, minor thirds, major thirds, and so on up to octaves across a couple of different octaves. So I've got all these dyads, and in the experiment you'd sit down and sit at a computer screen and he would say, ready? And then it would play you a dyad and it would ask, have you heard this before? And your task is to say yes or no. And of course the first few, you're hearing it for the first time, so nope, I haven't heard it before. Nope. Press the key on the keyboard. No, I haven't heard it before. But then eventually that dyad that you heard the first time is going to pop up again, and if you recognize it, you'll say, yeah, I have heard that one before. So it's just an auditory, short-term novel familiarity task, and it turned out that I segregated musicians and and it turned out that musicians could do it a little bit better than the non-musicians, but the non-musicians, myself included, could still get around 71%. Correct. And the musicians got about 75, 70 6% correct.

Speaker 2 (01:15:49):

That's really not that different.

Speaker 3 (01:15:50):

Yeah, it was pretty damn close. I was able to do the statistical analysis to show that the non-musicians were guessing a little bit more. The musicians knew. A lot of the non-musicians were just guessing, and there's some very clever statistics that allow you to determine that.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):

What was the variance for guessing?

Speaker 3 (01:16:08):

Well, I don't remember the exact variance, but I remember that when you compute the hit rates and the false alarms, the deep prime scores were higher for the musicians, for the non-musicians, the musicians just kind of new, but no one was using perfect pitch because I screened for that. You would've gotten a perfect score if you did, and people were having to use relative pitch and they were having to use short-term memory. What the results showed was that the brain held on to and retained dissonant intervals a little bit longer than it did consonant intervals for musicians. It was pretty much all the same, but for non-musicians, the interval that was the hardest to remember was the octave and what that tells us.

Speaker 2 (01:16:51):

Interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:16:52):

Yeah. What that tells us is that deviant stimuli are retained longer by the brain because the brain needs a little bit more time to check out what this weird thing is. So the tritones and the minor sevenths, the minor sixths, the major seconds, they persisted in auditory short-term memory a little bit longer, more robustly than the perfect fifths and the octaves did. I continued the experiment. I used pure tone dyads that had no overtones. I used complex tone dyads in a second experiment that were saxophone dyads, and then just to rule out music theoretic knowledge, I created a set of quarter-tone dyads that didn't correspond to any known musical intervals, these quarter-tone dyads and perform the same experiment. These dyads did differentiate along a continuum of being more complex or less complex. I got the same result.

Speaker 2 (01:17:46):

Does this translate at all into genres and what's popular? Just wondering because there's some genres that use much more dissonance versus pop, for instance, like jazz versus papa. I'm just wondering if you even thought about that or if it's just unrelated.

Speaker 3 (01:18:09):

It is related to music. What we can say, and then in other disciplines as well is that complex stimuli are more cognitively taxing. They take more energy to process things that are unusual. Now for us in western society, a minor sixth is not especially unusual. A tritone is we don't hear tritones that often, the minor second. We don't hear that that often. So things that are unusual recruit more neural resources to be able to deal with them, and that takes energy. So a lot of folks who really simple pop music like it because it goes down easy. If we go back to the food analogy, it's like having your slice of cheese pizza or your hamburger or something that is familiar and goes down easy, and you don't have to think much about it. Many of us, myself included, have pretty simple appetites for food and would just as soon have the same thing several nights in a row. We're not especially adventurous really. It just needs to serve. Right,

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):

Just works. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:19:14):

I don't worry about food too much, but when it comes to music and art, I've got pretty highly developed palette. I need my music to be challenging. I need it to be intellectually stimulating. I need art, movies, books. I need that to be kind of hard to digest because I want something new. I want novelty in my art, not in my food, but in my art. So I'm currently exploring where those natural appetites come from. Researchers have looked at music and personality, and we know that music listeners fit, we all fit under a bell curve and that right side of the bell curve. Those of us like me who like our more complex stimuli, I like jazz and I like complex stimuli, but not so complex that it's like Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton or Noise Pop or Glitch Hop. That's too far on the right side of the bell curve. For me, that's just a little bit too new. But pop music, which is in the middle of the bell curve, is just a little too safe and predictable for me. It just doesn't engage me intellectually. The left side of the bell curve is where you're going to find your classic forms. That's where you find your classic rock, your bluegrass, your folk, when those records sell, they sell based on more craft than art, so they're not putting forth brand new artistic original thought. What they're putting forth is a really high level of craftsmanship, and that's what buyers in those kinds of records,

Speaker 2 (01:20:51):

And I mean, that's really hard to do too.

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):

Oh, hell yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:55):

Yeah. The pop writing is tough. Very tough. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:00):

Pop music strikes the perfect balance between novelty and complexity for a given day and age. I mentioned Greg Kirsten earlier who's on top of the world right now and his successful pop productions. I've known Greg since he was 23 years old, and Greg is a highly accomplished jazz musician. He started his career studying at the new school in New York under Jackie Byard. Greg is a very accomplished jazz pianist, but he takes that ability and then applies that mind to arranging pop music. And there's genius in his work.

Speaker 2 (01:21:35):

I mean, honestly, I think that the best pop writers are geniuses like Pharrell or whoever. I think the ability to serve up something so simple and perfect is it's so difficult. It's so damn difficult. One thing about your doctoral thesis that I was just thinking about and tell me if I'm on the right path or not, but lots of times musicians or artists or basically people with a certain skillset take a big us versus them mentality, which it seems like a very natural thing to do, but in the case of musicians, they tend to look at non-musicians. I don't want to say as lesser than, but they typically don't take them very seriously as far as their musical opinions go, unless they're just trying to make the girlfriend happy or something like that.

Speaker 4 (01:22:38):

Right.

Speaker 2 (01:22:39):

But from your research, it sounds to me like maybe they should take the opinions of non-musicians seriously because they react to musical stimulus almost the same way.

Speaker 3 (01:22:54):

Well, it's really interesting that you say that. It's a running theme in all of my classes, the difference between musicians and non-musicians. So you're right that they are different. Musical training in childhood develops the auditory path to create auditory athletes. The nuclei that the auditory signal passes through get fatter and thicker, either dendritic spines, which are the little subbranches off the limbs of the trees, the neuron trees, you get more of them as a musician, and your auditory cortex develops in such a way that you can make faster and more subtle distinctions across different types of sounds. So that applies to all kinds of sounds, not just music, but also speech and environmental noise. So musicians hear differently than non-musicians do. There's an exercise that I show students on campus that I love every semester. I love their reaction. It's a demonstration of analytic versus synthetic listening.

(01:23:51):

And there are two, there's a pair of tones, right? They're played back to back, and the task is to indicate with your thumb, do you hear the pitch go up or down, and every semester I play this pair of tones. It's repeated four times, and I'm holding my thumb up, and the kids are all holding their thumbs down, and I get the same reaction every time. The kids all look at me and go, no, no way. No. How do you hear that go up? And I ask them, how do you hear it go down? So what's actually physically happening is the first tone is 750 hertz combined with 1000 hertz, and that is followed by a second tone that keeps the 1000 hertz the same, but it takes the seven 50 and it moves it up to 800 hertz. And maybe I think I've gotten this backwards, but it doesn't matter if it goes up or down, but anyway,

Speaker 2 (01:24:42):

It just gets closer.

Speaker 3 (01:24:43):

Yeah, seven 50 goes up to 800 and the 1000 stays the same. The kids can listen analytically because they have musical training and they hear that go up. I can't do it. I hear between 750 and a thousand hertz. I'm hearing that that corresponds to F three and F four of a tone complex at 250 hertz. And then when that's followed by the 800 and the 1000, I'm hearing F four and F five, meaning the overtones of a 200 hertz complex. So I'm hearing it go from two 50 down to 200, and they're hearing it go from seven 50 up to 800 or the other way around. I don't remember which tone comes first, but whatever. All I'm able to do is listen synthetically to the global whole, I'm hearing two 50 and 200 hertz. They're hearing seven 50 and 800. I can't resolve those components.

(01:25:37):

So it's true that musicians physiologically do process music differently than non-musicians. But think about the advantage for the record producer who can be in the control room and can hear music the same way a non-musician does. Synthetically to the global whole, I'm not paying attention to whether or not that chord change was clever. I'm not paying attention to how hard it was to do that drum fill or to go off time there and then come back in time. I'm not paying attention to any of that. I'm just paying attention to whether or not it felt true and felt honest. Is it communicating something to me?

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):

I just had a Tom Lord algae the mixer on,

(01:26:21):

And we talked about this. It was very interesting. He's not a musician. And we were talking about how nowadays the template for a producer has changed a bit in that since so many people come in through home recording because they want to record their own music and they get a small interface and go from there, it's kind of a new pathway to production that didn't exist before. You're starting to have a majority of producers that are musicians first. Whereas in a previous era, a musician and an engineer producer were two different things, and he stated that he has an advantage over musician, producers, musician mixers because he can hear it for what it really is, like a listener from the public. Exactly what you just said.

Speaker 3 (01:27:12):

Yeah. The global whole, many years ago when I was working at Rudy Records for Graham Nash, I had the chance to assist on a Stephen Bishop session, and the producer was the late great Gus Dudgeon. Gus Dungeon was a British fellow who did all of those Elton John records in the heyday of Elton's career from the early seventies and eighties by the late seventies and eighties, and I mean, it's Gus Dudgeon, he's pound for pound, produced more successful records than just about anybody ever had, and a lovely guy. And I got to ask him about that. He mentioned that he was a non-musician, and I asked him, how did you do it? How were you a successful producer while not being a musician? And he said, I didn't need to be a musician. The people on the other side of the glass were the musicians. My job was to be a listener.

(01:28:03):

That's what a producer does, and most of the listeners are not musicians. It was an epiphany for me when he said that I realized that could be me, that could be me, that maybe there's an opportunity for me to contribute more than what I gave myself credit for. Maybe I've got something to say. I'm currently writing a book. I've got a co-author, and we're in the early stages of writing this book, but it's going to be about listening. It's going to be about listening to music as a record producer, as a brain scientist, and as a fan and

Speaker 2 (01:28:38):

All at the same time.

Speaker 3 (01:28:39):

Yeah. I'm going to take different perspectives on listening, but one of the themes in the book is going to be that listening is musicianship of a different kind. It completes the act. Listening to music is performing the function that music is intended to do. It's allowing someone else to feel what the musicians and the composers intended them to feel, or maybe perhaps what you felt yourself when you were writing and playing this piece of music. That consumption is an under appreciated part of music. We don't give it enough credit for what is actually going on in listeners when they dance to or sing or learn the chords to, or just simply listen to our music just for the fun of it. That's what music is. You need both.

Speaker 2 (01:29:38):

That goes back to what you said earlier about how it's not art until it's consumed.

Speaker 3 (01:29:42):

Yeah, exactly. Music that's never been heard by anybody isn't music in the listeners, in the receipt of it is where we have its function of what it does. There was a student, one of our graduates, who went on to become very, very successful. And he told me early in his mixing career, he wanted to play his mix for mom and dad. And mom and dad are not musicians. So he plays it for dad. And dad says, great job, son. Great doing good. Keep up the good work. And then he goes and plays it for mom and mom's listening, and she says, what's that funny sound? He says, what funny sound. She says, that one that went in the middle that just keeps going and going and going. And he says, show me Mom. What? So the song is playing, and she's taking her finger and she's going, ding, ding, ding dink. And she's moving her finger on the snare and he says, the snare that ding ding. Yeah. What's wrong with it? Mom totally got it. Mom totally got that. The snare was sticking out like a sore thumb.

Speaker 2 (01:30:40):

Okay, good. So the snare was messed up.

Speaker 3 (01:30:43):

The snare was messed up. Yeah. Amazing. It was at tuned to too high of a tone for the track, and he just thought it was a great snare sound, and it didn't even occur to him that it doesn't really fit. It's not really fitting around the other tones, but mom being a non-musician, she just heard that right away. What's wrong with that?

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):

I mean, I feel like that's really, really similar to visual art. I used to draw when I was a kid, and I remember the horrible feeling of drawing something you think is something, and then someone looking at it and not knowing what the hell you drew. That's such a great indicator that you need to get better.

Speaker 3 (01:31:23):

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:31:25):

It's like it's just an instantaneous instinctual reaction they have.

Speaker 3 (01:31:30):

Yeah. That this is a two-way street. I love going to the art museums. I really love visual arts, so, so much. And last year, the Met or no MoMA in New York had a Picasso sculpture exhibit. And I went in and first thing I came to was this incredible modern iron sculpture, I think it was of a cow, or I don't know, a goat. I think it was a goat. And I stood there in front of it, and I thought, all right, I'm just going to run my eyes over all of these pieces, and I'm going to try to imagine what he was thinking when he put these pieces together. So I stood there and just scanned it, scanned the whole thing slowly and imagined each piece being larger or smaller or shaped differently. And it brought me to tears. It brought me to tears. I recognized the mind, the thought of that operates in a way that mine never has and never will. My mind doesn't do that.

Speaker 2 (01:32:36):

It just doesn't go there.

Speaker 3 (01:32:37):

And that's why he was great. And when you do that with music and with art, and you let yourself really sink into the gestures, the formal gestures, and really follow along, really listen actively to all the parts, the musicians are playing to the lyrics, to the vocal performance. Maybe you imagine yourself doing it. You really get into the head of the players. In many cases, what's going to happen is you're going to feel like what it felt like to do it, and you get to try on an alternate reality. You get to be another self. Music. Psychologists talk about this, and one writer said that when we listen to music, we dawn the clothing of the person who's singing to us. So when I listened to Converge to American Hardcore and Jake Bannon is there just

Speaker 2 (01:33:30):

Scream, love Kurt Lu, by the

Speaker 3 (01:33:31):

Way. Yeah, Kurt love kalou. I'm imagining what it feels like to be them, and they are nothing like me. I'm nothing like them, but man, does it feel good to be them for just a three minute song or when I listen to Rihanna, Lana del Rey, I'm imagining what it's like to be someone that I'm not. But yet, somewhere down, deep inside, some part of me is saying that's true of me. That Rihanna there, that Lana Del Rey, that sexy woman who's really smart and seductive, it exists somewhere in me way, way, way down inside, certainly not on the surface, but down deep inside, I'm resonating with that. It feels true and it feels right. And that's what music listening is.

Speaker 2 (01:34:19):

If it's something that's that universal to where it spans that, that many experiences to where you can relate to something that seems completely different than you, is it correct to think that it's something that we evolved to be able to, I guess, perceive or do or feel or communicate a long time ago? And if so, does that make us different than animals, for instance? Did our brains evolve, I guess, to be able to take in music specifically?

Speaker 3 (01:34:54):

Yeah. Researchers think that music as we know it, and as we talk about it, is unique to humans. And that is extremely puzzling because Mother Nature doesn't make big jumps. The platypus, not withstanding Mother nature. Yeah, those are weird animals. Mother Nature operates on a continuum. So anything we have, our closest relatives should have. Chimpanzees have quite a lot of what we've got, but something chimpanzees can't do. They can't keep time to a metronome. A macca monkey cannot keep time to a metronome. Human beings, little children, one year olds can do that. They can march and clap to a beat. So humans have some unique wiring between our motor cortex where it innervates our muscles and our auditory cortex. Humans, that's not unique to humans. Certain birds have that and seals have it, sea lions have it. But not all species do what we call song in birds and in whales is functionally a lot more like speech. It's broadcast and it's transmitted. It's telling the others, here's what's going on with me right now, and it's putting out a call for a mate. And it's describing who you are. It's functioning a lot like language, the way music functions just for pure beauty and pleasure. We haven't seen evidence of that in other species, which is kind of weird. It's kind of weird.

Speaker 2 (01:36:26):

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (01:36:27):

Now we know that other animals are capable of using pitch changes to convey information. For example, these vervet monkeys, little vervet monkeys, they live in the trees and they have an alarm system that involves when the sentinel monkey, the watch monkey, when he's there and he goes E and modulate his pitch up, it means the threat is probably a hawk or some animal coming from above. When he goes ee, it means the threat is a leopard. It's coming from the ground. And when he just goes ee, the two monotone, it means it's coming from a cross. It means it's a snake. So what that implies is that the other monkeys that aren't the ones who are doing the watching out, they can hear pitch changes and know that another monkey knows something that they don't know. And the smart ones, the ones that are socially very aware and are ready to acknowledge that another monkey has knowledge that you don't have, they'll scamper in the right direction either down or up or across, or whatever it is they're doing. That takes a very sophisticated social kind of mind to be able to contemplate. So if we're going to see music in other species, it's going to be a highly intelligent species with some of the wiring that we have, and we haven't found it yet, which is why Ani Patel, the researcher, Ani Patel says, music is not a universal language. If it were universal, other species would have it. They would do music.

Speaker 2 (01:38:01):

All right, there you go. That's what I was wondering because people keep saying that, but based on, and it seems like it would be in humans, but feel like, yeah, we would see it in animals if it were to some degree.

Speaker 3 (01:38:15):

Yeah. Now, humans evolved. It is thought. We've got these two information streams going on for audio. We've got the one information stream where audio conveys information about, oh, the snake is coming, or whatever, and that's language. And then we've got a second stream that is just the emotion, the feeling of the sounds that we make, and that is the one that evolved into music. So we developed two communication systems for conveying, here's what I'm feeling versus here's what I'm saying. Now, it turns out, and this is awesome, we're not the only ones who can pick up on that. Domestic dogs can recognize the difference between the words we're saying and the intonation, and that processing goes on in the two different streams, a dorsal stream and a ventral stream the same way that ours does. So that tells us that other species that have a fairly sophisticated brain are capable of doing the same thing.

Speaker 2 (01:39:21):

Do they just not?

Speaker 3 (01:39:22):

Yeah. Well, they don't have the vocal apparatus to make the same sounds that we do, and they don't always have, as I said before, the connections between the auditory system and the motor system. So when we listen to music and it's got a nice steady pulse, and it's in that VPM that we enjoy, it's the range. Our sweet spot is between a hundred and 120 beats per minute. When we're listening to music, that's got a steady tempo in that range. It takes our neural system that might be oscillating at different frequencies. As you know, we oscillate at different frequencies throughout the day. When we're asleep, we'll be in the delta or the theta band, which is between one and eight hertz. When we are in an alpha state, that's an oscillation between eight hertz and about 15 hertz. And that's where we're chill. We're not moving a lot.

(01:40:10):

We're not thinking a lot. We're just relaxed. Maybe we're meditating or it's right before bed or whatever. But the next phase above that is the beta state, and that's where our nervous system is oscillating between about 15 hertz and about 30 hertz, roughly higher than that is the gamma state, which is above 30 hertz up to about a hundred. Anyway, when we listen to music, it increases the amplitude of beta wave oscillations. And what that means is if you are all relaxed first thing in the morning, listening to music can pump you up and get you going to start your day, get you up to that beta state. Or if you're freaking out because you've been physically working hard or mentally working hard and you need to calm down, music will get you from that gamma state down to that beta state. So music is really effective.

Speaker 2 (01:40:59):

So it's not just a trick. It's not snake oil. It's actually doing something,

Speaker 3 (01:41:03):

Right. Yeah. It's actually physically doing something, but that's because we've got those connections between our auditory system and our motor system. And our motor system is gone. This is sweet. I like predicting the future. I like knowing what's going to happen. So I'm listening to that beat. And guess what auditory system, this is your motor system talking now, auditory system, be prepared because I can predict this is going to be a weak beat that follows this strong beat. And I can predict, because this is how music goes after eight bars, there's probably going to be some kind of change, some important event is probably going to happen at the end of eight bars because that's kind of how we do things around here. And brains love predicting what's going to happen when those events actually do happen. The chord change or whatever that happens at the end of eight bars, it feels really good. It matches our expectations. And when it matches our expectations, that releases dopamine. That gives us a little hit of dopamine, and it feels good. We like it.

Speaker 2 (01:42:04):

Those people who, I don't want to say that are tone deaf if that's even a real thing, but those people who just, they don't resonate with music at all. It doesn't change their emotional state. They can't really hear it. It's almost like they're colorblind to it. What is that all about? Is that just like an abnormality or,

Speaker 3 (01:42:28):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:42:29):

Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:42:29):

Yeah, it is an abnormality. And tone deafness is also called congenital amia, meaning you're born with it. It is a defect in certain genes that give rise to or that are necessary for music perception. Roughly three or 4% of the population is born with congenital amia. And it just sounds like it would be really, really, really, really difficult to have, because people with congenital AMIA don't get pleasure from music. They have a very hard time encoding pitch changes. So memorizing melodies, they have a hard time recognizing when two different melodies are indeed different, especially if those melodies have the same pitch contour, but just with different intervals. They will be perceived as being identical. It's really hard for them to memorize music, which means it's really hard for them to enjoy it. And the folks who have congenital AIA typically, well, they don't derive the social benefits that we get from concerts and from talking about music.

(01:43:36):

Think how important that is for teenagers, because that's what teenagers do, is you bond over huge. Yeah. Who else has the same musical taste as you? So imagine if you didn't have the same musical taste as anyone. What these kids often do is just pretend to music. And I was actually at a party years ago with a woman who claimed that no one anywhere ever liked music. And as she's talking, I recognize, oh, this poor thing, she's tone deaf. Because she had never enjoyed music. She assumed that everyone else was just faking it. And that's what she said. She said, you're all just faking it. You're just trying to be cool. You're saying you like these bands, but you don't really like it. And nobody really listens to music when they're all by themselves. They only just pretending to like it. And of course, we were all laughing at her like Her name was Marsha. Marsha, you're crazy. But I realized afterward, she's got tone deafness. She believes that we're all baking it.

Speaker 2 (01:44:36):

She's telling the truth.

Speaker 3 (01:44:36):

Yeah, because she's never experienced it. It would be like having no taste buds. Food would be really bland,

Speaker 2 (01:44:43):

Which I guess is possible too.

Speaker 3 (01:44:45):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:44:46):

I've never heard of that, but

(01:44:48):

I wouldn't be surprised. So we're kind of starting to run out of time. I have a few questions from our listeners that this one is particularly relevant to what we were just talking about a second ago from my friend Bob or Shell. He says, from what I've been told, the human brain is extremely good at identifying sounds. This comes from our primal years of being a hunter and being hunted. We are the growl of a tiger and identified as danger. We identify things that are not dangerous and are able to tune them out. So I guess my question is, as our ears are so good at identifying, ignoring, et cetera, has there been, or have there been any studies of others or your own, that copy and paste section of the songs that can cause a listener to identify and lose interest in a section of a song or maybe have less brain stimulation based on an identifiable clone of a repeated section of a song? And if so, are there any books or learning material in this area that you could point me in the direction of?

Speaker 3 (01:45:53):

Well, that's a very, very, very good question, and we've just been talking about it recently in the production classes on campus. Here's an example. Well, first of all, the questionnaire is absolutely right. The auditory system is our fastest modality. So we process sound faster than we process vision or smell or touch or taste or our other sensory modalities. Sound is the fastest one. And we evolved that so that we could quickly get our asses out of the way if it was a rustle of a snake behind us or just whatever. That's why there are those strong connections between the auditory system and the motor system. What you hear is telling you how to move. So we're really good at it. You don't have to have musical training to be kind of an expert listener in some ways. So anyway, we were talking on campus, this is Priceless.

(01:46:44):

A student played his basic track, and it was a rock song, so it was drums and bass and guitar, and it sounded great. It was kind of vintage, nineties, green day sort of track. It really sounded great. I listened to it and I told him, sounds fantastic. Put the vocal on it, ready to go. Now, one of the students in class said, well, you are going to fix those out of time snares, aren't you? Right? I said, what out of time snares? And we played certain fills, and yeah, what was happening was when a drummer's playing a really fast rock song and it's near the end of the song and you've just done a really complicated fill or maybe a blast beat, and you're coming back in, that snare is going to come back in slightly reduced in amplitude, in velocity, and in timing, it's because the drummer's arm is worn out, because it's a human being. Those are performance gestures. And I did not hear them as mistakes. I heard them as intentionality, that drummer's killing it. This to how Hardy's working. The snare was a little bit out of time there, but the students in class who are much younger heard that as a mistake. So I told them what I heard, and I said, now, based on what you just heard me say, do you still think these things need to be corrected? And the kids basically looked around at each other and went, yeah, so

Speaker 2 (01:48:01):

Amazing

Speaker 3 (01:48:02):

What they said. There's a young man named Max, and he said, A sentence I'm going to remember for the rest of my life. He said, very sadly, at some point, the drummer's no longer playing to you. The machine is, and I said, max, that's one of the saddest sentences I've ever heard in my day when we worked in analog and when we bought records and when we listened to records, what we were hearing was the best the players could do. You are hearing performance gestures and occasionally pitch might be off, or timing might be off, but those off gestures accounted for the humanness in the performance. And let me know that this drummer is Al Jackson Jr. And that guitar player is Steve Cropper, and this is Duck Dunn, because that's his style. Because now we can see music in pro tools. The temptation is very, very great to go in and correct everything and time, lock everything and create music that's not made by human beings. It's actually made by the machine. I don't consume that machine-driven music with the same kind of joy that I consume human-driven music because I'm one of those listeners who likes picturing the people who are playing to me. I like listening to music and being able to picture myself in the studio with them. What would it do to our fantasies if the machine is playing to us?

(01:49:25):

I am digressing a little bit in the answer, but I still think it's germane to the question about what we hear when we're listening to music. In my generation, what I heard was human beings. And now in the modern generation, what we're hearing are choices. We're hearing the vision of a songwriter, of a music maker, of a producer of a performer we're hearing their vision. In the old days when we made records, we went from the materials to the vision because the materials, we were limited by the materials. We were limited by the access to studios. We were limited by what instruments we had. We were limited by how much time we had and the budget and all that. So we went from the materials to the vision. This is what we can make with these people and these things. But these days, because the tools are so cheap, we can go from the vision to the materials. We can start with a vision, and then we can open up native instruments or contact or whatever. And we've got a gospel choir and we've got an orchestra, we've got a horn section, and we've got symphonies, and we've got digger redos. So now what distinguishes among music makers is the vision, not their materials or their players or their writers. It's a different product that's being sold now. And because it's a different product, the consumption of it is different.

Speaker 2 (01:50:44):

Well, do you think that, I mean, granted, you interpret it or you take it in differently because of, I guess the music that was done a certain way is more, I guess more in your experience. And with younger people, like 20 year olds, it seems like this more computer-based music is what they know. So even though you and them might interpret different music differently, do you think that for them it's doing the same thing as what I guess older music does for you?

Speaker 3 (01:51:25):

I don't know. I assume so, because human beings just don't change that rapidly. Music changes, technology changes, but people are the same. So I assume that they're getting the same intrinsic rewards that I got from music, meaning the dopamine release and the anticipation and the thrill of that beautiful chord change. And I'm assuming that they're fantasizing about either being a performer or being an engineer maybe, or fantasizing that they're in the audience. I assume that a brain being a brain is doing the same thing, but the information that they have with which to do all these things is a different set of information. The information that I had contained human musical gestures, human, human fallibility, human mistakes. And today, often if the machine is doing it, then it doesn't have those mistakes. And vocals have been tuned. And all of the snare hits are identical velocity. And human beings don't play a pop song with identical velocity on the snare hits. Humans don't do that. Machines do. So there's some differences there.

Speaker 2 (01:52:36):

Very, very interesting. So two more questions real quick. This one is from Renar Magnuson. He says, number one, is there any way to train auditorium memory? And number two, if I solo a track to work on something in isolation, my perception of balance is skewed. When I uns solo, the track I soloed appears to be too quiet. Is there a good way to reset your perception in these cases? I usually just stop and wait like 30 seconds, or listen to some references.

Speaker 3 (01:53:06):

Yeah. First question about memory. Long-term memory and short-term memory have physiological substrates and short-term memory is passive, not active. It cannot be extended by concentration. If we want to take something and transfer it from short-term memory into long-term memory, there are several ways we can do it. One is by repetition or by writing it down or by recording it so we can find it later. A physiological process needs to happen in order to stash something in long-term memory. That physiological process involves the generation of proteins. We have to create some proteins, and the whole chain reaction to stuff takes about 24 hours for it to fully happen. So unfortunately, we don't have control necessarily over what gets memorized and what you can do to improve memory. And this is what teachers at Berkeley do when they're teaching improvisation. So you can just listen to a lot of music, a lot more music.

(01:54:03):

And what that's doing is it's enriching and fleshing out your long-term memory, your library for music. Yeah, listening to a lot of music will expand your library and give you more reference points to recall when you're making music as a composer or as a record maker. So yeah, you can add to the library. You just don't have complete control over what you memorize. It is known that expert musicians have a larger than normal capacity for auditory working memory. Working memory is a combination of short-term memory plus some operation you're performing. So when I listen to a song, I listen to a song on piano, let's say it's piano and voice. And as a producer, I'm trying to imagine what record could we make out of this? I can mentally manipulate that as all producers can to speed it up, to slow it down. I can imagine it in a different key.

(01:55:01):

I can imagine it with a different piano part or not on piano at all. I can imagine different lyrics. I can imagine it sung in a different register in the singer's voice. All of that is auditory working memory. I'm recalling different exemplars from long-term memory, and I'm super imposing that on the active neural trace in short-term memory right now. So that's a physical ability, just like reflexes and their ability to run or jump or whatever it is what it is. But just go ahead and keep practicing by listening to a lot of music, and that'll expand your library. And the second question involved auditory adaptation. So all sensory systems adapt to maintain what it is they're doing. So when you walk into a room with a bright light, your eyes adjust to the light. When you taste a very strong flavor and you go, oh, wow, that's incredibly good. Your tongue adapts to it, and the last bite isn't as exciting as the first bite. So the auditory system adapts as well to what it's hearing, and it does this pretty quickly, just like light or taste, whatever. In order to reset it, you have to do exactly what you said. You have to stop and let the poor hair cells let them get refreshed with some new metabolites so that they've got energy and they can go again.

(01:56:20):

We can count on it if we're mixing for hours. We have adapted to what it is we're hearing, and we're not as fresh as when we first started. But that adaptation is something that is going to happen anyway. You can't prevent it from happening. So think of yourself as having adapted to smells or to light. Get a break from it, walk away, and then pay close attention. When you hit that space bar play, pay close attention to what you hear when your ears are very, very fresh. You need to provide yourself with metabolites so your auditory system can encode the high frequency, so it can work at full capacity. So eat well, drink plenty of fluids, and be sure you haven't worn your poor body out with too much of an ear pounding or with drugs or alcohol. You're not going to be hearing very well if your body is worn out.

Speaker 2 (01:57:13):

Good advice. Last question. This is from Kurt Ballou, actually,

Speaker 3 (01:57:17):

No, it's not really.

Speaker 2 (01:57:20):

Yeah, it really is. And he says, I want to know what prince's settings were when he used an H Hm, two on the drum machine.

Speaker 3 (01:57:29):

An H Hm, two. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:57:30):

It's It's a pedal. Oh,

Speaker 3 (01:57:32):

The heavy metal pedal?

Speaker 2 (01:57:33):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:57:34):

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Gosh, I don't remember, but I can tell you this. So we used the LM one drum machine, and by the way, Kurt Ballu, you're a genius and a God, and I really admire your work. Great. Oh, so we used the LM one drum machine, and the reason Prince preferred that one is it had the individual tuners for every output on the back, you can tune every output. And the later Lind drum did not have that. So what we would do is we'd take the kick, the snare hat usually went, or claps, I should say. Usually went to a separate rek, but not always. But kick and snare always did. But everything else, the mix of the percussion went through the Roland Boss pedal board that contained just whatever we felt like putting in there. It might be the flanger or the heavy metal pedal, or the distortion, or the chorus or the delay and all that.

(01:58:28):

So the mix of either his claps or symbols. Toms would be run through those pedal boards to give us the distortion or the flanging. He loved Flanging in those days, the coring or just whatever to give a unique tone to those percussion instruments. He used that same pedalboard with his guitar sound. He had a Mesa Boogie amp and a bag end cabinet, and loved having those pedal boards. He could stomp on him with his feet in concert and turn them off and on, or even in the studio. He liked that. The heavy metal pedals, I guess the HM one or the hm two, because it gave him the amount of crunch that he was after. But how he exactly set it, I'm afraid. I don't remember. Mostly just us fooling around. Either I'd set it up or he'd set it up and fooling around until we got something that we liked.

Speaker 2 (01:59:21):

I honestly thought Kurt was kidding with that question, but he confirmed that he wasn't.

Speaker 3 (01:59:27):

Oh, yeah. I don't know. But if you listen to the song, the Ballad of Dorothy Parker, which was one of Prince's really best songs, I think you'll hear The main keyboard is kind of a funny wobble to it, and my colleague John Wynot identified the other day that that's probably the sound of a Yamaha DX seven going through the chorus pedal, the one that's blue with white lettering, the chorus pedal, and then you just come out. The one side of it, you take, not the dry signal, but you just take just the effect, come out and then blend it in the console with your dry signal, and you get the really, really nice phasing going on there. We use those pedals to death. We used it on everything. They

Speaker 2 (02:00:10):

Are pretty killer, aren't they?

Speaker 3 (02:00:12):

Yeah, they sure are. I loved the octave. The octave was great. Oh, on base. So much fun. We always had a Dunlop the Cry baby. We had that on Keys quite a bit. Sometimes you just put it in one position and leave it there because it gives you the tone that you like. We like the a MS, the Non Lin Reverb, and I personally loved, but who doesn't the even Tide Harmonizer had to have that even tied Harmonizer. Prince loved delays. He loved the primetime digital delay. We used that a lot, and he loved Flanging, loved F Flanging, but that little Purple Roland Boss Flange Pedal was used on so many of his records. Things just sounded great. A nice analog tone to them. Very accessible tone, not wimpy. Very robust.

Speaker 2 (02:01:02):

Yeah. There's something about them. I've always thought, you just can't recreate it. There's no plugins that sound quite like them, and they're very affordable, so they're the perfect tools. But Susan Rogers, I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. I'm glad we worked it out.

Speaker 3 (02:01:26):

Oh, thank you very, very much. It's really a pleasure to talk with you. Likewise. I appreciate your interest and I wish you good luck with it.

Speaker 2 (02:01:35):

Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (02:01:37):

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