Become a sustaining member of the
Commonwealth Club for just $10 a month. Join today. And hello, everyone. As George said, I'm John Boland,
president emeritus of KQED, and I serve on the Commonwealth Club
Board of Governors. It's my pleasure to introduce
Susan Rogers, the author of This Is What It Sounds Like
What Music You Love Says About You. Susan is a cognitive neuroscientist and professor
at Berklee School of Music in Boston. She's also a multi-platform
record producer and audio engineer who has worked with artists
including David Byrne, Bare Naked Ladies and Prince. Throughout the book,
readers are encouraged to listen to various songs to illustrate
and bring to life the concepts
that are described in the book. And so throughout today's program,
we're going to be listening to songs which will be fun. Welcome to the Commonwealth Club, Susan. Thank you. And let's start off by hearing a snippet
of our first song to set up the story you tell in the overture,
which is the introduction to the book. So let's go ahead
and play that first track. I never meant to call you. I never meant to call you. What about? See you later in the. Purple. Rain purple. I'm not one to look beyond it. We can. So obviously that's Purple Rain by Prince. And the reason I played it
is that there's an introduction for Susan to tell us briefly the back story
about how someone who was not a musician but who loved music ended up
being the sound engineer for Prince and then and many other great recordings,
including Purple Rain and then pursued a career
as a neuro acoustician. So so tell us how how
and how did this happen? Yeah, I grew up in Southern California and like a lot of little kids,
just was crazy about music. And I, I really believe
that little children, most of them anyway, down deep inside,
they kind of know who they are. And and I did. And I felt
an instinctual attraction to music, but no aptitude for it whatsoever
and no desire to even have any aptitude. I didn't want to play or right or sing. I wanted to in some way serve music,
help it come into the world. So in order to get into that kind of career, when I was 21 years old, it was 1978. And you didn't see women
recording engineers or record producers. You see very few now, much less then. But there was one avenue that I could door
I could walk through that would work for me, and that was to become an audio technician
and repair the audio equipment. And I did
that self-taught in electronics and worked my way in and up the chain. And then my lucky break came in 1983. My favorite artist in the world
who happened to be Prince, put out the word that he was looking for
an audio technician. He liked working with women. I had all his records. I had seen him live many times. I was an audio technician
and I was willing to leave Hollywood and move to Minneapolis
and be a full time tech. He transitioned me from the tech chair
into the engineering chair, and after that I was off to the races. Amazing. So over the course of nine chapters, you approach music, listening, experience
from every angle. And we're not going to have time to cover
nine chapters today, but we'll have time to touch on four chapters
authenticity, melody, lyrics and rhythm. Or at least we're going to try
to get those for the first song we're going to hear. At the very beginning
of the first chapter. Authenticity is a recording
by a group called The Shrugs, the Shacks, the Shags Shack. The most charitable word I could use to describe
this recording would be amateurish. Okay, so let's go ahead and play. I'm so happy when you're near. They're happy when you. So that when you're away. I was having. Then I. Every day you have to go and. But I never know what to. I'm gonna have. You are always in hiding. We need. Grief is so hard in every way for you. So when you get there, that's probably enough. So tell us how you selected that song and what does it tell us
about authenticity? So in this book I'm talking about
the listener profile, and I'm describing things that I learned in grad school
about how the brain processes music. So I'm describing the listener profile
along seven dimensions. Four of them are musical. Three of them are esthetic
and saying how we all have a sweet spot on all seven of these dimensions. The one dimension, though,
that isn't well described by science is authenticity, and that's just something
we knew in the recording studio. It has to do with where you as a listener perceive the performance gestures
to be coming from. Is that singer singing her little heart
out, that bass player getting down into the belly button
to play that grungy bass part? Or is that player John Coltrane,
let's say, technically so proficient
that he can blow you away? Playing from genius from the neck up. So when we listen to performers in
the studio, we're assessing is this real? Is this authentic? Now, the shags are what we call
an industry band in the sense that people
in the music business know about them. There were three sisters
who grew up in rural New Hampshire in the 1960s Betty, Helen and Dot and their father believed they were going
to be great, successful musicians. So what Dad did was
pull them out of school, forbid them from dating or seeing boys,
made them stay in their room and gave them instruments and said,
You're going to play and you're going to be great
on your instruments. And these poor girls
are just teenage girls and they're cut off from the whole world
and they didn't know how to play. But they wrote these songs like I'm So Happy
When You're Near that has a genius to it. I'm so happy when you're near. I'm so sad when you're away. Now that you're here to stay, I'm happy
every day. There's a purity about it, a kind
of a Emily Dickinson sort of purity. So when we listen to them, we don't hear technique. But what we hear is pure,
unadulterated intentionality. It's teenagers
on drums and guitar and bass sing. I want to tell you something. It's the musical equivalent of a child's
finger painting. The child's finger painting
is not going to hang in the museum, but the child saying,
this is mom, this dad. There's my dog. There's the house.
I want to show you something. And in their lack of technique, you can perceive
what they're trying to do. In the recording studio, you sometimes get musicians
who are very well trained. And they play perfectly with no heart and no soul at all. They're just being technically perfect, unconnected to their hearts
and their belly buttons and their groins. Shags are all heart. So that's why I wanted to share it
in the book, to share their story, but also to point out that great music isn't always technical perfection. Sometimes great music is
great intentionality, pure intentionality. In a sense, it's interesting
that you point out some pretty famous artists appreciate shags. Yes. Because they recognize that's hard to do. It's hard to be that pure
and that raw and that exposed, as Miles Davis used to say to his musicians,
play like a non-musician meaning. Play like a three year old would play
if a three year old could make music, how a 97 year old would play off a 97 year
old had the dexterity that he once had. Play like a human. This the shags remind us of this. So authenticity,
realism and novelty are what you refer to as the esthetic dimensions
of a listener profile. And for the rest of the program,
we're going to focus on three of the actual musical dimensions
of listening, starting with Melody. Frank Sinatra,
as you point out in the book, is considered a master of melody,
but he was not always a master of melody. We're going to listen to two
Sinatra recordings that will illustrate how he learned
to leverage Melody to develop what is now his very familiar style. Let's first hear Frank singing
all or nothing at all in 1940 with the Harry James Band, and then we'll hear how
he sounded 25 years later. Singing It was a very good year
Live at the Sands in 1966. So let's play both Sinatra recordings. All or nothing at all. I feel. Never appealed to me. Yeah. Your heart never could. You to me. Then I'd rather have nothing at all. All or nothing at all. If it's love, there is no in-between. Why begin and cry for something that might have been? No, I'd rather. I have nothing at all. When I was 17. It was a very good year. It was a very good year for small town
girls and soft summer nights. We'd hide from the light. On the Village Green when I was 17. Tell us what we're hearing and what do we learn about melody
from Sinatra's development? When Sinatra was a young man,
24 years old, he went to a concert at Carnegie Hall. He saw Jascha Heifetz violinist perform,
and Sinatra was sitting near the front and he saw how Yoshihide fits would make
these long phrases with his bow. Just keep the energy into that bow
and not stop those phrases. And Sinatra had an epiphany. He said, If I could just
learn to do that with my voice. So he went to the vocal coach, John
Quinlan, and Quinlan said, Stop smoking. Take up running. Increase your lung power. Well, he kept up the smoking,
but he did swim and he did run. And he learned to time
his melodic phrases. Now, in the studio, you hear a singer take a deep inhale. I used to love that with Prince. When there's a deep inhale at the top
of a phrase, it means here it comes. Hang on to your hat,
because an expert singer is going to take all that lung power and time it out. Just perfectly. Frank was better than anyone at that,
so Frank could deliver this subtext of virility because his phrases
could last for so long. And then he'd get to the end of the phrase
and you'd hear air come out. He'd still have more gas in the tank, and that's a subtext
of even more virility. So Frank was showing his dominance over other male singers and also playing with melody in such a way
that the band had to follow him. That segment, you just heard was actually conducted by a very young Quincy Jones
conducting the Count Basie. Yet he's like 26 years old
conducting the Count Basie Orchestra. Frank loved
working with with Quincy Jones, but they all the musicians who worked with him
said Frank, could hold on to a phrase. To a link that was beyond belief, but Frank valued lyric so deeply he wanted to make sure you understood
and paid attention to every single word he sang. So he learned to control his breath
and consequently his melodic phrases. To make you feel what he wanted
you to feel. Hard to do. He was the master. Regardless of what you think
of his politics or other aspects about him, we're just discussing
the man's musicality here. And there was no one finer in his day. And another superstar
with melody was Nat King Cole. Let's hear Nat King Cole singing Nature Boy from 1947. There was a wall. A very strange and shattered bore. They say he wandered very far, very far over land and sea. Little shy. I'm sad about. But very few are. Hmm. So what makes Nat King Cole a master of melody? So when we are we learning about melody when we were
in the womb in the final trimester. It's a liquid environment. And we can hear mom's voice
and a little bit later on, we can hear dad's voice, too,
if dad's voice gets close enough. So we're learning how humans use the pitch changes of their voices
to express emotion. And then after you're born, caregivers
use their voices to express. All right, baby,
you got to calm down, though. Aw, come on, baby. It is time to put on your pajamas
or whatever they do. I don't know. I don't have children. Amy, this is. This is the tone
of voice we use to warn you. Or reprimand you. So from a very early stage, we're learning what these pitch changes mean emotionally when we grow up. If we become composers, we compose in our in a way
that reflects our native language. So a great singer who's also a great pianist like Nat King Cole. Knows how to use his voice
to imbue those lyrics with feeling like a great stage actor. Countless actors have done Shakespeare. They all have the exact same script. But not everyone is Sir Laurence Olivier. Not everyone knows how to time
those phrases and deliver the weight of those words like a like a true maestro. We don't always know
technically what we're responding to, but we know it intuitively down
deep inside when we hear a great performance
by a great artist. We're moved in part because they know the signals
that cause us to respond. And there's a there is there a particular part of the brain
that's responding to melody? Exactly. So our auditory
system, our whole brain is very efficient. It divides up tasks. So in case you get an injury, there's a homologous section
on the other side thinking maybe help you out if you get an injury
on one side of your brain. So our auditory system is no different. We've got the two ears and the auditory
nerve bundle comes up through the auditory brainstem and it terminates right here,
now above our left ear. For most of us, nearly
all of us, this left side of the brain is specialized
to be a really fast processor of words. Languages,
for the most part, processed over here. This side is the slow side that doesn't focus
so much on the short little differences between a constant
and a vowel, for instance, but focuses on how sound is changing over the long term,
which makes it perfect for music. It's listening for those pitch changes,
for the intonation in your voice. We're not the only mammal
to have developed that studies with dogs, domestic family dogs in full MRI scanners, which is wonderful because the dog lies
still in the scanner for three six minute runs to do with the line scanner
with the little headphones. And it's the same thing. Dogs are responding to dog voices
over here on the left and dog valence, meaning dog emotions
over here on the right. This is how our brain is. How our brain can independently attend
to the lyrics in a song with a melody and a song and get a treat
a dopamine hit from either one. If you have friends who say, Oh,
I never listen to the words on a record,
I used to think, Oh, that's not true. Now I know it's true
that you can totally be absorbed in the in the rhythm
or in the melody, in the harmony, in the style of the record, in the timbre,
the sounds of the record, and really not be engaging
that side of the brain at all. You've got all the treat
you need from the other aspects of it. Now we're going
to hear another version of Nature Boy by jazz legend legend John Coltrane,
who was a master of harmony. I'm. It. You know, I could listen to God, John Coltrane for the rest of the night,
but I'll do that when I get home. Tell us about the role of harmony, working with melody
to add nuance or emotional power. So yeah, most. Back in the fifties, most fifties
and sixties, most listeners were familiar with Nature Boy, because it had been a hit
for a lot of a lot of artists. So most music listeners knew the melody. So what Coltrane is trying to do here
is play some variations on that melody to wordlessly tell you a little bit more
to imply something else about this boy who wandered very far,
this strange, enchanted boy. Now, Nat King Cole presents
the song as a sweet, tender, poignant, beautiful story. Coltrane is using his horn to say, yea,
but there's some darkness going on there, too, right? And it's the harmony notes that do that. So the harmony notes are shadows almost. It's almost how they function. They shade the main message
in a certain way, just how I'm trying
to think of a good analog with speech. But we can
we can choose our words very carefully to imply certain subtexts in our speech. That is very subtle. And harmony works a little bit like that. The great jazz musicians have to be. Geniuses because Jazz Improvization has been called composition
in real time. They're writing as they go along. But they have to. They have to understand the head, the lead line,
the main melody. They have to know how far they can drift
away from that with their note choices to still remain
and key still be communicating something and then working their way back to that
main melody. You got to be pretty,
pretty talented to do that at that level. Let's begin our discussion of lyrics
with another song. Let's hear a little bit of Stand By. Sly and the Family Stone pick in these songs
that are killing me. Oh. She'll be you one that's done
all the things you set out to do. Instead, there's a cross, so you use the best things to go in
if you want. Anyway. Stand. No. All right. It's the truth. That's the truth. All the things. You won't all read. And so what gave the lyrics of Stan
so much power? And I know you particularly felt that. And how do the lyrics generally impact
our listening experience? I sort of where do lyrics fit in
and particularly on this song, but just in general, yeah, there's
a fellow named Peter Murphy who's written this scholar. He's written quite a lot about lyrics and he says, if you're out on the street
and you hear somebody say, Hey, you, you look around and you can determine
right away, Oh, you doesn't mean me. But when we're listening to lyrics
and I hope we'll talk about this later about the default network
when we're listening to music, music is really effective
at getting us to go into our own heads, shut out the outside world and imagine
and daydream, go into our psyches. You hear that word you in a lyric. For all you know, it could be you. And it feels often like they're talking to you. They're talking about you. Sometimes you feel like you're the singer. Sometimes you feel you're
the one being sung to. When I was 13 years old,
when that song came out, the song is about the tension in America. You know, the Vietnam War and race
relations were in such terrible turmoil. I was 13, so I was in turmoil
just from being a teenager. And and that when that came on the radio, those lines. All the things you want a real you have you to complete
and there is no deal. This killed me. It just got me. Yes. The things I want are real now. Other people can listen to that
and it's not special to them. But when the right lyric hits
you at the right time, it becomes your words. That record becomes your record. The phrase
I like to use is, well, the music of me. When you hear a song
that sounds exactly like something you would make if you made music,
that's you. That's your musicality. And this record is
is a reflection of my own musicality. And and sort of related to that,
many of the world's most popular songs have lyrics that capture
the social anxiety and isolation of youth. And so when you hear it,
it means very different things. But let's hear a snippet of In My Room
by the Beach Boys. Set my Kleenex up here. Go. So I can go back to my cigarets. In my. In my. It is good. I love. The. But tell us about the way the impact
and meaning of lyrics change as the listener changes or as the listener grows older. So when we are teenagers,
the most important problem we need to
solve is fitting in in our social world. Brain studies have shown a quick sidebar
for a fun neuroscience fact You get adults and teenagers into the lab and get them in the FMRI scanner
and you ask them two questions. What do you think of yourself? And the second question is What
do you think other people think about you? And in the adult brain,
those are two separate areas. Here's what I think of myself and here's
what I think other people think about me and teenagers. It's almost perfect overlap
to a teenage brain, what the other kids
think about you, who you are. So when we're teenagers,
we've got these social problems to solve. We don't know
how. We're not old enough yet, but you can come home from school
after a bad day. You can put that record on. If you were in the sixties, someone like
Brian Wilson would sing to you. There's a world I can go and it's my world
and I'm private there. And all my worries
and my fears come out in that room. I can do my crying and my sighing. And for men. How often does that get talked about? Women are known to be a little bit more in touch with their emotions
and more comfortable with expressing these kinds of sorrows
with a pure and beautiful expression. He wrote in that song to say, I feel vulnerable and I'm hurting. And you hear that singer's voice
and you go, Yeah. Just like me. Just like me. You bond to that singer. Now, when you get older,
you'll appreciate it on a different level. In the book, I mentioned a song
like Tammy Wynette Drive or R.C. singing about divorce. If you're a teenager, that means
nothing to you for the most part. But if you get older
and that's a real possibility, that song is going to hit
you like a ton of bricks. Willie Nelson's
version of You Were Always On My Mind. When you're older in life. You know what that means. You might not appreciate that at 35. In short, lyrics are the part of records that solve problems for us,
and our problems are different as we age. And it's interesting
the people who write music and lyrics since she just passed away. Loretta Lynn lyrics were very important. Yeah. Talk a little bit about her work. And so the height of elegance
is simplicity and it is damned hard
to write a simple song like In My Room or the Pill, like Loretta Lynn did
or other songs she wrote. It's hard to take a deep topic and write about it as a simple truth that's capturing what Joseph Campbell, the scholar Joseph
Campbell, called the universal truth. Simple words. But it's true of all of us. Loretta's genius was to be relatable, to get you to feel like I know her. She could be my neighbor. I could have a cup of coffee with her. She'd like me. Bruce Springsteen, for a later generation had a simple or a similar relatability. That's hard to an artist
like Prince or Michael Jackson. Is is is lyrically
not offering that to their listeners. They're offering other things,
but not that relatability. Loretta set the standard for
how to do that, and there were many, many songwriters who owe her a debt
of gratitude for showing us how it's done. So particularly lyrics to that,
I guess much more than Melody would. Yeah. Lyrics. Allow us to. As it is, one scholar wrote, Music
allows us to don the clothing of the person
who is singing to us. So certain lyrics can let you temporarily
become someone else. I don't have anything in common with the members of Public Enemy except that I love Public Enemy. There there are rap artists that I love because when I listen
to them, I listen to Chuck D. I feel just a trickle. Power when I listen to my hardcore music for a little bit. I will never be that. But I want to feel like that
when I listen to the great Lana Del Rey, who I just adore. She's sexy
and she's attractive and she's bold and she's just all the woman that I'm not
and will never be. I love feeling for a three minute song
like I imagine she feels. This is why many artists are incredibly
popular artists like Prince who don't. They're not the kinds of cars
that past you every day you pass a prince on the street. But when you listen to Prince music, you get to be
someone who's a fairly rare bird. And that feels good. Yeah. And actually a composer who wrote lyrics
more than 100 years ago. Irving Berlin. Still,
his songs still seem relatable. Yes. And are still performed by many artists. Interesting. So we're going to move on to rhythm,
one of your favorite topics before we run out of time here. So let's hear the opening of Stoned
and Starving by Parquet Courts. Magazines. I was. So what does this song tell us about? The different ways or the individualistic
ways that we all hear rhythm, right? We don't hear it the same way. So rhythm perception is actually something
that's extracted from the beat of music. So you ask people, sing you
the melody of a certain song and they'll sing you the melody
and you ask them, Tell me what the lyrics are to this song,
and they'll tell you what the words are. But if you are someone to demonstrate the rhythm for you, well,
that could be different. And I chose that particular
song as an example, because some people are going
to feel the beat on the one and the three. One, two, three, four, one, two,
three, four. My coauthor feels that on the
one in three, one, two, three or one, two, three, four. I hear it
naturally on the two and the four. One, two, three, four, one,
two, three, four. And then younger people with a faster
resting arousal rate are likely to hear it on the eight notes. One and two and three and four. And one and two and three and four. And so each one of our our brains is extracting
where we think the pulse is on records. Record makers can let you know
where the pulse is by choosing to accent certain beats
and have others be unaccented. But in a record like that, it's up to you. It is wherever you think it is. The records that we love
rhythmically tend to match how our bodies like to move. Now you go to a rock concert,
you watch the kids at a rock concert and in rock music. The dance they do is like that. Pogo, stick
that up and down, up and down, up or down. In my day
when we dance to R&B in our soul music. Kind of a front to back thing. Just get on the floor. You not even move
that much. Was going to front of x. How you like to move. Latin American music will often foster
that side. The side there's more syncopation. So it's a hip, swaying movement
that's side to side. We all have a way that we prefer to move,
and consequently the rhythms that we love the most
tend to match the dances we like to do. And how does that evolve? Sort of how do we develop? At what stage of life do we develop? I do not know. I don't know that there's research on when exactly we
we find our sweet spot for rhythm. I imagine that it evolves along with your other preferences,
in your general taste in music. This may be common to you, but my my brother was telling me
after he read this book, he said, Yeah, I used to like rock music
when I was after school. Job was as a grocery store, as a clerk,
and he loved the rock music. That's what they played in the late night
at the end of the shift at the grocery store
when they were stocking the shelves, he and all his buddies,
they listen to the rock music and then he got a little older and started
going out to clubs and at clubs you dance. And he found
he had a real affection for dance music because think about it,
you're at the club, the dance music is playing, there's girls and you want to dance with them
and you ask girl to dance, and the girl says , Yeah, and you're
dancing in music and I love this music. So the whole
brain is always processing everything. And when we're experiencing feel good
neurotransmitters and a song happens to be in the vicinity,
that song is going to hitch its wagon to the star of those neurotransmitters,
and that song is going to get a boost. In your opinion, you like that record
now you're not really sure why somebody were to ask you. You just
I don't know. I just I just really like it. It reminds you of the girl who said, yes,
she'd dance with you. Right? And so,
although there is a rare condition called which I never heard of before,
beat deafness. Yes. Most of us have a highly developed
sense of rhythm. By the time we're adults,
we can react to layers of rhythm. So to demonstrate that and continue
the conversation, let's hear a bit of Missy Elliott. Get your freak on. Correct. I mean that mid-October. So I go so I roll it. Hit me hit me. Lose. It's Mississippi. Putting the down on the hottest, Graham. I told the mother, y'all can stop me now. Listen to me now. Unless you turned around. And if you want it, come and get me now. Women, they're the big you. Pick your love. Yes, Mr. Harlow. So I could tell by our feet
we found different rhythm. Oh, but how do most humans find a groove among multiple rhythms like this one song? So there's a higher order brain circuit
that. Listen to the basic tempo. And then extracts regularity from that. And it is a higher order brain circuit
because it turns out that there are folks who have just like some folks
have tone deafness . Some folks have beat deafness. And a person with beat deafness can listen to a steady click
of a metronome or a car's turn signal. Tick, tick, tick, tick. And you ask them to tap along with it. No problem. Tick, tick, tick, tick. They can tap along with it, synchronize
their muscles to what they hear, but play a rhythm like that. And those higher order circuits,
if they happen to be defective, will not allow them to extract
a steady pulse from that rhythm. There was a case that was studied up in Montreal at my alma
mater, kid named Matthew. And Matthew could keep time to a metronome,
but they put on a marriage record. And this marrying record has a strong
binary 1 to 1 to 1 to 1 to beat. Matthew,
for the life of him, could not dance or move or tap
in time with that mooring record. Others have been have been shown to also have a defect
in those higher order circuits. Now, for most people, it's automatic. Our ability to find regular pulses,
the regular pulses that we like in a very percussive
rhythm like that and lock onto them. But it is
does involve some higher order processing. And so is someone who is who has this condition,
the person who goes out on the dance floor and seems to be. Not connected to anything to do
with the music. Matthew Poor Matthew. He took music lessons
and he took dance lessons. It just didn't work for him. I encountered Beat Deafness
with Prince in the recording studio. We were doing handclaps one day
and Prince music is pretty straight
for for time signature for the most part. And you clap on the two and the four. But in those analog days,
you didn't use a machine for clapping. You got people around a microphone
and you just listen to the music and just clap on the two in the four. We didn't have enough people,
so we brought in a receptionist from the front desk and she stood
with the headphones with the rest of her folks around the mic
and I'm in the control room and press record and going along, Clive
went on the tune, The Four. Everything's fine.
And all of a sudden she stood. Clapping in between the beats. We just stopped. Roll back the tape.
But nobody said anything. What was that? Start over again. Two in the four. And she started off okay
and then just got completely off. And I remember
I stopped the tape and Prince just pointed at the door. You just. Yeah, it's a word. Yeah, I had never seen it before. But her brain circuitry wasn't capable of extracting a rhythm
from a steady pulse like that. And since we're on sort of a
related subject, what is tone deaf? Tone deaf, folks? Well, let's let's talk about folks
who aren't tone deaf. This is an amazing thing our brains do. If we hear an A in this room
and let's assume that everyone in this room
does not have perfect pitch, we hear an A, it occupies a psychological category. That is the No. A categories, it is
said, are not created in nature. Human people create categories. An orange in an apple,
we have decided, are two different things. So when a is not a sharp,
if you take that A and you start making it more and more sharp, at some point it's
going to cross a psychological boundary and it will no longer be a
it will be a sharp. For many of us, we won't recognize that
boundary until it gets to be. But there's a boundary, A
and B are two different notes. And we have, for the most part, 12 of these pitch categories
that we recognize. But for folks who are tone deaf,
their categories are really wide. So they have fewer categories. They might not recognize the pitch
difference between A and B. It all sounds like the same thing to them. Almost like colors looking the same
to folks, some colorblindness. So folks who are tone deaf
have a really hard time memorizing melodies because things don't
fall into their categorical bins. And if you can't memorize melodies,
you can't enjoy music the whole. Enjoyment from music comes from predicting what is going to happen. You hear that lead line, main theme. And then the saxophonist goes off
or the orchestra goes off into variations on the theme. But you just know that theme is going
to come back and you can hardly wait. And sure enough,
your happy called positive prediction, you release a little dopamine
when that theme comes back. If you can't memorize music,
it's all free form jazz to you. That's what tone deafness is. It's relatively rare,
but folks who have it have a hard time perceiving
and producing notes in scale. Hmm. I'm going to move back to the clapping to demonstrate musical accents
that are almost like language accents. We'll hear rhythms in two tracks. First up is levitating by Dua LIPA and followed by Hand Clap by Fritz
and the Tantrums. Why don't we just play both of those? Oh. Oh. Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! If they want to run away with me,
I know what I see in the catechism. All right. I had a premonition
that we fell into a rhythm with the music. Those flies in the sky glitter my sentence. It's a feeling that can me a little bit beneath me at the same time. You're me, aren't you, baby? Sugar. I'm tasted. We were relegated. I got to. I got my start. I need to. And then hand clap. Somebody save you Smokey
Robinson in your city? No. To any trouble. So you let me go. I the club every night. I want to hold. You don't even know I keep your hands. I can't dance. It's in the city. So tell us about the difference
in where we feel the weight of the. So the record makers in those cases wanted to make sure that you felt the beat
on certain parts of the bar. So in Dua LIPA,
they're emphasizing the two in the four one, two, three, four, they're making those stronger and fatter
and more obvious. Whereas in Hancock
there's that very strong one, one, two, three, four, one, two,
three, four, one, two, three, four. Just to nudge your body
into moving in a certain way. When you hear that record, some people
have preferences for one or the other. So we're going to we have a little time
for audience questions. If anybody has a question, raise your hand
and somebody'll bring a mic. All right. Just. Just. Sorry. No, no, no. I just wanted to remind the audience
that's listening that we're listening to Susan Rogers, the author of the book,
on what the Sounds of Music Say about you. And John Bolen is doing the interviewing. And I also want to remind everybody
that this was a good live event that was underwritten
by the Bernard Shaw Foundation and now brings the down to the. Wiseman success in reggae. The down beat is always on the one and it threw us rock and rollers. TERRACE We're like, What's this? And we fell in love with it. Of course,
Rolling Stones, for sure. And. And Marley and all those cats. Yeah. What's that about? Why did that change us so much
in the seventies? Reggae music. Because. Full of love. Thank you, sir. Yeah, reggae. Reggae beat. Classic reggae beat is features a one drop
rhythm where they don't play the one. It's implied as a whole there
where we normally expect it. If you listen to No Woman,
No Cry by Bob Marley, you'll hear the classic reggae one drop. There's a researcher named Tecumseh Fitch. He's a evolutionary biologist,
and he writes about why we love syncopation so much. So on the records
we just finished playing, there are musical beats on one. The two, the three, the four,
the one, the two, the three, the four in syncopation. Well, let me back up a little bit
to come to Fitch writes about how four, four time
signature matches our bodies when we walk. Foot down one. Next foot up is two. This foot down is three. Next foot up is four. So it's easy
to synchronize our bodies to that. But in many African and Latin rhythms,
they put the accent not on the one and two and three and four,
but on the ends at the places where we're just
transitioning from one beat to another. And what that does
one and two and three and four and is it forces us off rhythm
a little bit and it pushes our bodies
more side to side, and it feels good. You write that
rock music began incorporating more and more and more syncopation
as the decades went by. And it's really hard to hear a syncopated
rock, a syncopated record without syncopation in it. A groundbreaking record that introduced syncopation into punk was Iggy
Pop's lust for life. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
doo in punk. No, you don't do that in punk.
But Iggy Pop did. If you watch the official video
for Lust for Life, you'll see the dancers are not just doing that pogo
stick motion. They're actually moving their hips
from side to side. It looks more like a
like a West African dance than it does a traditional North American dance. You know, there are other questions. Two questions. You're not related to Mr. Rogers, are you? I wish I wish I was. I'm wondering,
as I have two real questions. Could you comment on the compliment that Frank Sinatra
gave to Tony Bennett and how saying he was able to extend the song or lead into it,
or whether Tony Bennett would play it before every one of his concerts here
in San Francisco, this scratchy recording of Frank Sinatra
saying the best rhythm. Or you were talking about blending or,
you know, holding the note, etc.. Was he Frank Sinatra's opinion? It was Tony Bennett. Wow. I wish I knew the quote. And I'm afraid that I don't
I don't know exactly what he said. I wish you could contact Tony Bennett. No, really, he is. He lives close. But I mean, he does have dementia. But his young wife, Susan, would certainly
be happy to share it with you, I'm sure. And I can probably find it online as well. Yeah. I talk in the book a little bit about three audiences
for our musical works, and this has bring something to bear to that. So when we're in the studio
and we're making a record or performing, there are three audiences and they're all
about evaluating our music differently. The one audience is just
the general public they're listening for Give me a three minute treat
and I'll be on my way. And then another audience
is the music critics and scholars who are evaluating music in terms of,
do we want to hear more of this or is this an art form
that we just want to have quietly go away? But that third audience is the toughest one of all,
and that's the audience of our peers. So other musicians are going to be
listening to musicians and listening for Could I Have Done That? And if they could have done that
or if their friends could have done that, they're not going to be
all that impressed. But when you hear musicians
talk about how great another musician is, those musicians
know what it takes to perform like that. Tony Bennett was undeniably great
and Frank being great himself was great enough to recognize
how hard it is to do what you do and was able to give the kind of informed
perspective to Tony. And by making that compliment public to others as well, to let others know. This guy is great. Often the greats don't get recognition
from the public. Jimi Hendrix is a perfect case in point. Other musicians regarded him as the finest
guitar player who ever lived. But the public,
they were just more into Eric Clapton. They weren't as into Jimi Hendrix. And when you call someone
a musician's musician, often it means that's shorthand for
they don't sell a lot of records, which is sad. Jeff Beck Yes. Yes. So, you know, since syncopation came up
and that requires the brain to work a little harder. Let's hear one more musical selection,
Poinciana by O Jamal live in 1958. Hmm. So how did you select this one? Those strong, upbeat,
you know, the the strong kick of that side stick, that strong up
beats. It's a perfect example of syncopation. And I just happened
to love the record, so. We were kind of reached the point in the program where I think we have time
for one last question. And this is something in the book
when humans gather. How is it that rhythm is what always gets
the party started? And I guess rhythm goes way back in the human race before probably melody
or certainly before lyrics, so to come. So Fetch writes about that there's
percussive rhythm and concussive rhythm. And so concussive would be you
take two rocks and you knock them together a little bit later. Later on, humans started getting involved
with percussive rhythm. You'd find a hollow log
or something that made noise. You take an animal skin and stretch it
across a hollow log and you beat on it. You could beat on an instrument
and you can cause a certain rhythm and that can communicate. We know that there are languages
that use drums. Talking drum languages. When I mentioned the strong affinity we have for rhythm
and how basic it is to most of us. Most of us have really strong
bidirectional neural tracts connecting our auditory cortex
up here to our motor cortex. We're really good at moving in time. With rhythm
as long as we don't have beat deafness. We love the feeling of social belonging. And when there's music on the dance floor
and people are moving their bodies in sync. We feel like we belong to a tribe. Even watching people move
their bodies in sync gives us a feeling of community
and of belonging. Which is why boy bands will never die. There will always be boy bands
because they get on stage and five boys, however many there are. They all move in
unison and we feel like, Yes, that's a
thing and I want to be part of that thing. Watching people move in unison
or participating ourselves allows us to participate, participate
without any special training. The allows allows us to join in. Same thing
with singing in a choir releases a lot of feel good neurotransmitters as well as some chemicals
that are good for our immune system. People have actually been protected
from disease in their elder years
by joining choirs and singing. DHEA is the compound that we are protected by, with the with the singing in a choir. It feels good. It's joining your voice
to the voice of others. And that's a sense of belonging,
which makes us feel safe and protected. So we all need to keep singing. We need to keep singing and dancing.
Yes, exactly. We do. So our thanks to Susan Rogers, author of
This is What it sounds Like joining us today. Thanks, John. We encourage you to we encourage everyone to pick up a copy of Susan's book here
or at your local bookstore. And if you'd like to watch more programs
or support the Commonwealth Club's efforts in making virtual and in-person
programing, please visit
Commonwealth Club dot org slash events. I'm John Boland. Thank you.
And we'll see you next time. Thanks, John.
