REVIEW: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You, by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

5 Stars

I am not a musician, but music is in my blood — in my soul.

My parents named me after James Marshall Hendrix and Robert Allen Zimmerman, also known as Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. Obviously, music was important to them. Growing up, I lived off my Dad’s record collection and, soon, I would begin my own.

As a teenager, I saved every dollar I could to buy music and to make trips to small punk rock clubs two hours away in Atlanta. Then, I started throwing my own punk rock shows in our little Middle Georgia town.

Back in the pre-internet days, bands from Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia somehow found my address and wrote to me, asking to play my shows. Concerts in Atlanta might draw 50 people, maybe 100, but I could get 500.

A few years later, I met a girl who sang and played guitar, and I asked her to marry me. Turns out, she comes from a musical family.

We have two kids, each musical in their own way. Our oldest plays multiple instruments — piano, trumpet, bugle, baritone, and trombone — and has dabbled at composing, while our youngest is like me, an avid listener of music.

In short, music is central to me and my family.

All of this explains why, when my new Next Big Idea Club box arrived on New Year’s Eve, I immediately grabbed This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You.

I was even more intrigued by I saw the author was Susan Rogers, the legendary music producer and sound engineer. In a male-dominated industry, Prince brought Rogers to Minneapolis in 1983 as a sound tech — and then he asked her to be the lead engineer for his new album, Purple Rain. After recording a string of albums with Prince, Rogers went on to record David Byrne, Rusted Root, Tricky, and the Barenaked Ladies, whose #1 hit “One Week” allowed her to retire from the music industry.

In her 40s, Rogers finally graduated from high school, enrolled in college, and earned a PhD in psychology, studying music cognition and psychoacoustics. Now a professor at the Berklee College of Music, she is also the director of the Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory.

Together with fellow neuroscientist Ogi Ogas, Rogers explores the brain science behind why we love music. The goal is to increase the self-awareness of listeners of music: “By gaining a better understanding of your musical identity as a listener, you will deepen your connection to music, feel empowered to live a more musical life, hear the music you’ve always loved with fresh ears, and — I hope — learn something new and surprising about yourself.”

Rogers identifies seven dimensions, four musical (melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre) and three aesthetic (authenticity, realism, and novelty), that form a unique “listener profile” for each of us.

I learned that I authenticity, which emphasizes the subjective feeling over the learned technique, is important to me. That’s why my first loves were punk (NOFX) and hip hop (Wu-Tang Clan), but also why I then developed loves for indie rock (Damien Jurado) and post-rock (Mogwai) in college, hill country blues (R.L. Burnside) as a young adult, minimalism (Max Richter) and classical music (Dvořák) in middle age, and HBCU-style marching band music as a father. To me, music is first and foremost about the instinctive emotional connection.

Realism asks, “What do I visualize when I listen to music?” And while most people see either the musicians or themselves playing the song, or they visualize a story from the lyrics, I learned that my mind goes to a more abstract place. This, explains Rogers, is a very modern way of experiencing music. I appreciate that Rogers pushes against my instinct towards snobbery: “One’s preference for realistic or abstract art does not say anything about one’s intelligence, maturity, or level of cultural sophistication — it merely shines a light on the highly individualized mental activities that each brain finds pleasing.”

Rogers really helped me understand my relationship with musical novelty. On the one hand, I love risk-taking in music. But as Rogers explains, that requires a lot of work from the listener. That work often pays off, but these days I just don’t have as much time or energy to put in the work. Or maybe I do, but I devote my time and energy elsewhere. Either way, Rogers observes that this is a common experience.

I’ve focused on the aesthetic dimensions because they are the least obvious. But the second half of the book is about the musical dimensions: melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre. Rogers describes these, respectively, as the heart, head, hips, and face of a record. She explains each of these musical dimensions, but what I enjoyed about these chapters was the brain science behind them.

The last chapter entitled, “Falling In Love,” puts all the pieces of our listener profile together into a whole. “The sweet spots on your listener profile,” Rogers explains, again pushing against musical snobbery, “were formed out of genetic predisposition, cultural influence, and all the random and purposeful listening episodes you experienced over a lifetime of exposure to music.” In other words, as with romantic love, you can’t entirely control your musical loves. But the dimensions of our profile, as well as the brain science behind them, can help us understand our loves — and ourselves — at a deeper level.

Music is just personal, though. And so Rogers ends with this: “it is fortunate for human beings that, on occasion, a record provides two people with the same jolt of delight, creating the opportunity for a connection that can run deeper than words.”

I give the book 5 Stars.

I learned a lot — about music, about myself, and about Rogers. She sprinkles bits of her own stories throughout the book, and those personal touches go a long way to balancing out the science. Overall, it’s a well-written book, engaging in a way that is rare for nonfiction. And as a lifelong listener of music, rather than a musician, I felt like Rogers was writing to and for me. After reading, I long for the days of record pulls (discovering new music and sharing it together with my roommates was central to my college experience) and mixtapes (creating the perfect playlist was central to my dating experience with my wife).

If you are a music lover and listener, you should definitely go get a copy of This Is What It Sounds Like. It would also make a great gift for the music lover(s) in your life.