So Curious is back! And to kick off this season on the science of music, we're looking at a question we've all asked before; why do we like the music we like?

To get to the bottom of this, Bey and Kirsten sit down with three experts across the fields of music cognition, psychology, and audio engineering to explore the ways our brains, personality, and experiences help shape musical preferences.

Links for today’s episode:

• Learn more about Dr. Psyche Loui and her research with the MIND Lab
• Learn more about Dr. David Greenberg’s work on music, personality, and the brain
• Learn more about Dr. Susan Rogers and her book, This Is What It Sounds Like

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to season

four of So Curious, a podcast presented by the Franklin Institute, a science museum

in Philadelphia focused on celebrating human sciences and technology.

And this season, we are gassed up.

We're geeked, we're excited!

We're very excited, because we're going to

be exploring all the science and technology behind music, how our brains

understand music, how people interact with music, and so much more.

But before we get into all that, we should probably introduce ourselves.

So like I said, I'm Kirsten Michelle Cills.

I am Philadelphia's token terminally ill stand up comic.

I'm born and raised in the City of Brotherly Love.

I have cystic fibrosis, and because of

that, I work as an advocate for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and I've also been

doing stand up comedy professionally for eight years.

And I split my time between telling jokes

and yelling, "Go Birds!" unprompted, any chance I get.

And I'm The Bul Bey!

I'm a Philadelphia based hip hop artist.

To prove it, here's a little clip.

"Yeah, I'm still out west.

Yeah, I'm about to get a check.

Yeah, I'm back at it again." I'm also a creative collaborator and a civic leader.

I do all things community.

I just love my city, and I love people,

and I love science, too, so I can't wait to get into this season.

All right, Bey, I already know you have a

musical background because you are a musician.

My musical background is not as strong as yours, but I did study

musical theater in college, so that's something.

Yeah, I was going to push back. You're the musician.

No, Bey. Come on.

No, you are!

You know what's so interesting, too, is I feel like I've had a very similar

experience where I was just kind of going through life and I didn't really take

stock fully of how much music was present, is present.

So no, I'm right there with you.

I didn't know music was ingrained in me.

So let's get into it.

This first episode of this season, season

four, we are going to be looking into the science behind music taste.

Like, why do we like the music that we like?

First, we'll be chatting with Dr.

Psyche Loui to learn why our brains like music.

Oooh! And then we're going to talk with psychology researcher Dr.

David Greenberg about how our personalities shape our music taste.

And to round out this inaugural episode of

season four, we'll be sitting down with audio engineer turned neuroscientist Dr.

Susan Rogers, about how elements of

recorded music impact how we personally respond to it.

All right. Well, then, Dr.

Psyche Loui, welcome to the So Curious podcast.

Can you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do?

My name is Psyche Louie.

I am an associate professor of music and

creative practice at Northeastern University, where I direct a lab called

the MIND Lab, where mind stands for music, imaging, and neural dynamics.

So I do research in music and the brain, thinking about why we have music, how does

music tickle the brain, and how we can use that for greater good.

Tickle the brain, I like that!

I like that imagery.

And are you yourself a musician?

And if so, can we hear a little snippet?

Oh, my goodness!

Well, you're finding me on a fun day.

I do play musical instruments.

My main instrument is the violin, but I've recently picked up some mandolin, and we

were actually just rehearsing before I came here.(Mandolin playing ensues!)

Maybe that's all I got, but a little bit of mandolin, a little bit of violin.

I shouldn't spend the whole time

No, this is wonderful!

Because I think that's how I relax.

Why do our brains like music?

Is there some sort of dopamine response? Tell us about that.

Why does our brain like music?

Well, there are so many questions that surround that question.

So at the core of it, I think music plays with our expectations and our predictions.

So there are these long term expectations that we've learned and built up just by

virtue of being in our environments and being in the culture.

We also have kind of one-time predictions that are much more specific.

We might call those vertical expectations.

So, for example, if I told you I have a guitar pick in my pockets right now, you

might not have thought about that before, but now you know what I have in my pocket.

So that's a one time prediction, right?

So much of why we love music, I think, is

because music taps into these different kinds of predictions.

So, (more mandolin playing) that gives you

certain memories of maybe the last time you've heard that piece.

And now if I change that. (same mandolin example as before, but ending on a different note)

So that suddenly gives you a different set of expectations.

So much of why we love music is because

music taps into these different kinds of predictions.

I want to keep the conversation going and

ask you, why do we sometimes get chills when we hear music we particularly like?

What is that response?

I would imagine it's a pleasurable

response when people get the chills from a song.

Yeah, it's definitely a pleasurable

response, but it's also a little bit unexpected.

Chills are a grab bag of physiological descriptions that we have for those

musical moments that change our perception and our cognition.

We can record heart rate, for example, and

we can record breathing and skin conductance like how sweaty you are.

And we can see that if there are certain

pieces of music that gives you a chill, those specific moments that give you a

chill, you're actually sweatier and your heart is actually beating faster.

And that's been also tied to the dopaminergic response.

So earlier we're asking, oh, is it about dopamine?

And dopamine, of course, is a neurotransmitter.

That's a brain chemical that is really the currency of the reward system.

So we know that the central nervous

system - of not just humans, but many other animals - has evolved to want to

seek out food, and has evolved to seek out ways to procreate.

Right?

So that's a very kind of evolutionarily hardwired biological thing.

But then what humans can do over and above that is we're learning these associations

between these biological hardwired things and something that's a bit more abstract.

Right?

So if you'll go back to the old findings of Pavlov's dogs, where you have a dog

that's hearing a bell, and then given some meat powder.

And so meat powder, of course, makes the dog salivate.

And so over time, even if there's no meat

powder, if it hears just the bell, it will learn to salivate.

So there's this automatic conditioning that's going on.

And so, music seems to be somewhere between the bell and the meat powder.

So it's a series of learned associations

that might at some point be tied to these evolutionary advantages.

And so maybe part of that is about the way

music taps into movement, makes us want to move.

So by having moved together to music and to rhythm in music, over time, people

might have learned to associate music with social predictions.

And so then music is a way to bring us together.

And so at a core level, part of what, for

example, gives me chills is like when I'm hearing some piece of music really go

towards a goal and then it exceeds that goal.

So for example, in house music, we can

have a piece of music that's going faster and faster and faster and then suddenly it

just stops - and then there's a music happening again!

Right?

So that beat drop moment is very much tied to a surge of dopamine.

That's the dopamine rush that is in music.

And then in classical music, you also get these chord progressions.

You talk about like I, IV, V chord progressions, that's kind of very standard

chord progressions, but sometimes you might throw a different chord in there,

maybe there's like a flat sixth and suddenly it's like, ooohh, it's a little

bit unexpected, it's a little bit cooler than what you would expect.

So the unexpectedness, in music theory, it's called appoggiaturas.

And it turns out that a lot of folks, when

they hear those unexpected appoggiaturas, they report feeling like they want to cry.

So again, it's about playing into expectations.

Wow.

So I'm thinking about the fact that music is universal, of course, but are there

people who just do not get any enjoyment from listening to music?

Yeah, so specific musical anhedonia, that's the term that's been coined for

people who, you know, they're not generally depressed, right?

They love good food, they love a nice back

rub, they love long walks on the beach, but yet music just doesn't do it for them.

And we found a few cases like that and

that's been linked to differences in the way the auditory areas in the brain are

connected to the reward areas in the brain.

So given that the reward areas that are

rich in dopamine are how we're learning from the acoustic signal of music to form

these expectations and to motivate all sorts of behavior.

It makes sense that the auditory areas being less connected to the reward centers

are what give rise to the lack of music rewards.

So let me ask about genres, like pop.

Some people say that pop is easier for people to get into than, let's say,

freeform jazz or traditional music in other cultures.

Do things like exposure and family affect

how we respond to different types of music?

Yeah, for sure.

I would say that your past experiences

play a huge role in how you respond to music.

So if you grew up in a classical

background, chances are you've had more exposure to that in the past.

And then, of course, this interacts nonlinearly with age.

So we also know that the whole reward system is developing as we grow up.

There are certain time windows where there

are sensitive periods of development of our reward system.

So if you look at someone who's lived for, let's say, 70 years and you ask them, hey,

what are the pieces of music that you love the most?

Chances are they'll mention music from their adolescence.

So there's this golden age where this

reminiscence bump, when you are especially receptive.

Music that you find in that age range, you

find to be especially rewarding and memorable to listen to.

What topics are you researching now that you're most excited about?

Well, I like to find out what creativity is and how we can measure that.

So we have a new musical scale that's based on mathematical ratios that are

different from all existing scales in the world, and we're trying to come up with a

way to let people jam and let people compose tunes in that way.

And then we also want to record brain

potentials while people are listening to creative tunes in this new musical system

and use that as a way to find out how the brain enables creativity.

And we're also, on the other hand, looking

at nursing home - going to different nursing homes and designing music based

interventions that are a little bit novel ways to get at brain rhythms that might be

disrupted in people with Alzheimer's disease.

So, yeah, so two kind of arms of the work, some that's more kind of exploratory and

some that's more novel interventions for people who need it the most.

Yeah, that's incredible! Woah

I know right! I know.

Well, this is all so much to look forward to.

You're doing such great work in what you do with MIND Lab and with Northeastern.

And thank you so much for taking the time to chat with Bey and I.

Thank you for having me.

Great to talk to you!

All right. Thank you so much.

Dr. Louis.

We asked to hear a sample, but we

definitely were not expecting a live performance.

Of course. That's what this is all about.

No, we were not!

But now that we understand why our brains

like music in general, I say let's learn about how our

personalities shape what specific music we listen to.

And Dr. Greenberg is the man for that.

So, Dr.

Greenberg, thank you so much for joining us on the So Curious podcast.

How are you? I'm well.

Thanks for having me on.

Please introduce yourself and what you do.

I'm a psychologist and a neuroscientist

and I study the impact of music on the brain and society.

And are you yourself a musician? Could we hear a clip?

I consider myself first and foremost a musician.

That's how I got to wanting to understand

how music impacts the brain and impacts the mind and impacts people.

I grew up mainly studying and learning jazz improvisation.

John Coltrane was my main inspiration and hero.

There's some clips of a concert I did a couple of years ago specifically for

Coltrane, who spent some years in Philadelphia.

Yes, he did.

Nice. (David's performance plays)

We want to talk about your research.

A lot of your work deals with what are called the Big Five personality traits.

Can you explain what those Big Five are?

The Big Five personality traits is the

most contemporary and up to date model of how we understand who we are.

So whenever we're dealing with the topic

of personality we're really asking the question of who are we?

What motivates us?

The Big Five, it understands personality in terms of five dimensions.

So the five traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness,

extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

And how does someone's Big Five score affect their musical taste?

So I was a senior scientific consultant for Spotify and an advisor there for about

four years and I was helping lead a team to look at how people's, Spotify playlists

and histories were able to predict their Big Five personality traits.

And we found that overall we could

actually make interesting predictions about people's traits.

For example, people who are open to

experience have very wide ranging preferences for a variety of genres.

Beyond that, the most recent publication

that we've had, we've looked at hundreds of thousands of people across 50 different

countries and we find that actually the links between personality traits and

musical preferences are consistent across countries.

So an extrovert in Thailand or in India is

preferring music that is energetic and rhythmic as well as people in Brazil who

will also prefer music that is also energetic and rhythmic even though they

don't speak the same language and so forth.

So we're seeing that across countries

people are using music as a way to express their own internal traits.

And can I ask, like, when you saw the results, were you surprised?

There's been about 20 years of research in this area before we conducted this study -

which it's definitely one of, it might be the largest on the topic to date.

And so we had a lot of different

hypotheses that we had to go on and certain things made sense.

For example, people who are higher in openness to experience are going to prefer

more jazz and classical music and music that has more complexity to it.

People who are agreeable are going to tend

to like more mellow, sensual, romantic music.

But one of the things that was surprising was that people who score high on the

trait neuroticism, which is people who have a tendency towards stress and

anxiety, preferred music that was more intense.

So music from heavy metal genres and punk and so forth.

And now that's on average.

Why that was surprising was because we

thought that it could also go the other way, meaning that people who

have a certain degree of stress would then be seeking and preferring music that might

be more calming, like mellow music, in order to decrease their stress.

Whereas on average, what we are finding is that people are seeking music that

reflects the stress and also potentially even reinforces it.

So that's an interesting area that was a

surprise and an area that we want to be researching more, because neuroticism is a

predictor of many different types of mental health conditions.

And the more we understand it, the better

we can then use music to treat those conditions.

And there are likely subsets of people who score higher neuroticism that may use

music, for example, as catharsis in different ways.

And so we have to really understand a larger picture of it because, again, at

the end of the day, the Big Five is more of the starting point of personality.

It's the basic tendencies that we have, but it's not the end of the story.

So it's really, for us in that respect, a starting point.

Yeah.

And I wanted to ask you, David, what kind of music do you like?

I mean, I know that's probably a reductive

question because you work in this field, but...

It's a great question.

I sing to my daughter, so that's a lot of

the music that goes on in my life these days.

But I grew up with jazz.

When I learned how to improvise as a

musician, that was what I would say, like an opening or a new access point in terms

of just consciousness to play spontaneously with other people.

And that really then grew into discovering music in a variety of other areas.

And I study a lot of, now, what I would

consider music that has a spiritual undertone to it.

When we look at the music of John Coltrane, for example, his music not only

was about political and social issues, but also about spirituality.

So he had a deep religious experience.

And so when I first began to study

Coltrane's music, that was the beginning of understanding and trying to explore

different aspects of spirituality and music.

And so that's from a variety of different

religions and faiths and so forth, and how music evokes awe, how music evokes wonder.

And that then crosses over with the

science part of me, as well as the musician.

Awesome.

And circling back to improvisational jazz, how does that correlate to the Big Five?

What direct lines can you draw there?

And I want to know the same about religious music, like you said.

Right. So I'll start with the last one.

Preferences for religious music in the US.

Are very interesting, particularly because of the Bible Belt and so forth.

So in the South, you have people scoring high on religiosity.

But then also there's such a connection with country music in those areas.

So you actually see this correlation.

But then it's a prime example of correlation doesn't imply causation, so we

don't necessarily know that that's the true relationship.

We still need to unpack that more.

But in general, then, when we look at

spirituality, which is different from religiosity or religious affiliation, that

has strong links to openness to experience.

And so people who score high on openness

tend to also seek different spiritual aspects within music.

People who are also high on trait spirituality then will tend to listen to

music that is outside the box, can be more avantgarde.

And interestingly, just in some of our own research not yet published, we will

publish it soon, that music seems to provide a greater window into people's

trait of spirituality than the Big Five personality traits does.

In fact, if someone is reacting to music,

if you both provided your playlist, then that would give me a better sense of your

spirituality and it would give machine learning algorithms a better sense of your

spirituality than filling out a personality trait inventory.

Wow, that's interesting.

We have to circle back and send you some playlists!

Yeah right!

The jazz part of it is also openess to experience.

Yeah, I was going to say I imagine it

would be right openness with improvisational...

Right, but it goes beyond genre.

Our research, basically we stopped ten years ago looking at people as genres that

they like and more, looked at the underlying qualities of the attributes.

Because within jazz alone you have avantgarde, you have Sun Ra and so forth.

And then on the other end you have Kenny G or Chris Botti and smooth jazz.

So people who like different types of jazz music have different personality traits.

Those who like the really avant garde are

really open, also can tend to be extroverted.

Those who like more the smooth jazz on the

other extreme, for example, are typically more agreeable and more conscientious.

What other factors around personality have

been found to affect music taste, kind of beyond the framework of the Big Five?

There's other models of personality that we've looked at, for example, what's

called the empathizing or systemizing framework of understanding.

So if someone's very high on systemizing, they tend to prefer music that has more

intense, complex and cerebral aspects and features to the music.

And then that actually leads us to understanding autism, because people who

are autistic tend to score high on systemizing.

And so, in some of our initial research we

see the connections between musical preferences and systemizing and autism.

And then there's other aspects which are

interesting in terms of what I mentioned before, mental health.

So, when we look at personality, like I

mentioned before, big Five is just a starting point.

But what defines us as who we are is also

our narratives, our stories, how we adapt to certain situations.

And so when we look at the themes that people are drawn to in music, for example,

we see things like lyrics that communicate being tentative or not, that those have

certain associations with different types of mental health conditions and same thing

about body image and violence and so forth.

So the themes in music also can point us to different qualities in the person that

are beyond just about the Big Five basic tendencies.

Are the listeners aware of their own taste, of the patterns that they have in

terms of choosing songs or what they might be leaning towards?

I think people have a certain understanding intuitively.

I think that they know what works for them and what doesn't.

Sometimes it could take people a long time to find that song.

If someone just had a breakup and they

really need something that's cathartic, it could take days, if not months, to really

find that one song at the right time, at the right moment that then opens up that

surge of emotion that they need in terms of healing or a cathartic experience.

And so I think that with technology there's ways now to speed that up.

Underneath it, there are certain things

that any individual, any listener just can't have or understand.

For example, you take one song and you

might describe it in five or ten characteristics, but really there's

hundreds and thousands of different configurations of song patterns.

So once you grasp that, that's where then, like AI and machine learning is really

going to be advancing us in the next decade to then be able to show us a new

way that we can understand and use music to help us and to help each other.

Amazing.

So when you meet someone you've never

spoken to before, right then, and they tell you their favorite song, are you able

to infer what you think their personality might be like?

Yeah.

So there's of course outliers, but there's an incredible amount that if someone tells

you about the music that they like, if it's just one song or a group of songs,

you can infer certain aspects about their personality traits.

I'll end on an example, which is that I went for a music lesson.

I've been trying to work on voice.

My initial instrument is saxophone.

And the first thing we did in the lesson

is we just freely improvised for the first maybe 20 minutes.

And I never really spoken with him before,

so we didn't know each other personally, but I knew of him.

And then the first words he said to me were, "Wow, you've lived an interesting

but long life", which was a very interesting comment.

But what he was communicating to me was

like, "Hey, I kind of like, see where you're at, where you've been, and I can

see what you've been expressing through the music" because of the emotional

aspects of it and the psychological aspects that I was signaling either

consciously or unconsciously through the music.

What did you say back? Wow.

Yeah. What did you say back?

Aww shucks!

Yeah, I don't remember what I said back, but I

think it was just kind of like an understanding.

Yeah, wow! Beautiful.

Thank you, Dr.

Greenberg, for coming on to hang out with us.

And now to close out, we are joined by Dr.

Susan Rogers to share with us more about how music taste is formed.

Could you introduce yourself and what it is you do?

Well, I'm a semi-retired professor.

In my former life, years ago, I was a

record maker, an engineer, and a record producer.

And then I left to go to academia, earn a PhD in music perception and cognition.

And for the last 15 years, I've been teaching both record production and

psychoacoustics at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Oooh, Psychoacoustics?

I can't wait to get into that!

But you have done some amazing things.

Can you talk about some of those amazing things a little bit?

Yeah, I started my career in Southern

California, where I was born and raised, and I started in 1978.

There weren't that many women - and there aren't now - as engineers.

You wouldn't see many women record producers.

I didn't know of any.

But I had more modest ambitions.

I just wanted to be in the game.

So I started my career as an audio tech.

What an audio tech would do, and still

does, is repair the equipment, the tape machines and the console.

And I was working as a technician in Hollywood when my favorite artist in the

world, who happened to be Prince, put out the word in the grapevine that he was

looking for a technician to come and join him full time in Minnesota.

So I joined him and did Purple Rain,

Around the World In A Day, the Parade album, Sign of the Times, and then all the

other stuff we did during that period, which was Sheila E.

and the Time and Vanity Six and all that stuff.

When I finished with him, we had a good run,

Yeah you did! But it was very very intense.

Yeah, seriously!

It was very very intense.

So we parted ways, amicably, and then I

began my career as an independent engineer and mixer and record producer.

Had big success in the late nine ties with Bare Naked Ladies.

By big success, I mean a hit record as a record producer.

And that's back in the days, and it's still the days today, but

you'd get a big royalty check if you had points on a record as producers did.

So you'd get that big royalty check, and

then six months later, you'd get another one.

Those were the glory days.

But with that money, I was able to leave the music business and enter academia and

pursue the sciences, which I love tremendously, and get my PhD.

This is all so amazing, but we brought you

on specifically because we want to talk about your work around music taste.

So, you wrote a book called This Is What

What the Music You Love Says About You.

I would just love to hear more about this from you.

Yeah, these are all based on things that I

learned in grad school, studying music, perception and cognition.

And I threw in there, for good measure,

something that we knew about in the recording studio.

When we listen to a given record, there are at least seven different dimensions on

that record that can, independently of the others, give us a little treat.

And by treat, I mean a little release of dopamine.

So let's imagine that you're listening to a record for the very first time.

You've never heard it before, someone's playing it for you.

And what your brain is going to do is perform a scan of these seven dimensions.

And what you're seeking is your

personalized treats, a match between that dimension and your listener profile.

Now, all you need to do when you're scanning that record is find one treat.

I mean, it's great if you can find two or three, but if you find one, that can be

enough to make you go, yeah, I'm into it, I like it. It's good.

I love it.

I think we want to just go a little bit more into these dimensions that you talk

about, these seven ones, like how they are practically applied, like how

different people respond to them, and how do we build our own listener profiles.

Yes! So, I love the saying from the biologist D'Arcy Thompson.

He said, "Everything is the way it is because it got that way." So starting from

even before you're born, your listener profile is starting to form.

Because when you're floating around in

there in the womb, you can hear Mom's voice.

In the third trimester, you can hear Dad's voice too.

So you're hearing the melodies of speech in your environment.

After you get born, you begin learning - here's how they use their voices when

they're trying to warn me, don't touch that.

When they're trying to reprimand me, I told you not to touch that!

When they're trying to calm me down, when they're trying to amp me up and get me to

wake up, they use their voices differently.

Different dynamics, different melodies.

So we begin learning the emotions that underlie melody and

loudness changes and tempo changes and things like that.

So your listener profile is forming throughout your life.

It's getting stronger every time you have a positive musical experience.

So of these seven dimensions that I'm describing in the book, four of them are

musical, and three of them are aesthetic , and they are dimensions that apply to

film and books and television and dance and all art forms.

So of the musical dimensions, it's the familiar ones.

It's rhythm, lyrics, melody and timbre.

Timbre refers to sound itself.

You can take a given song and you can notate it on a score.

Here's what its rhythm is, here's what its tempo is, its time signature.

Here's its melody, here's its lyrics.

But you could play that record on a great variety of different instruments.

We tend to have preferences for guitar sounds and drum sounds and

keyboard sounds and we have our preferences for the timbres that we like.

Rhythm is associated with how your body likes to move.

So I'd like you guys to think about being at a party.

A variety of music is playing, let's say

let's say it's some intergenerational thing like a wedding.

So there's people of different ages and

generations there, so they're going to play a variety of music.

What song or record would they play that

would get your body out on that dance floor?

And when they did, how would you move?

Would you do that rock thing where you go up and down like on a pogo stick?

Or if it's maybe you like a Latin groove

and you like something with more syncopation and you'll go side to side

where your shoulders go one direction, your hips go the other.

So I'd be out on that floor if I heard a

groove that facilitated the dance I like to do.

Rhythm is associated with our bodies.

Melody is associated with the emotions

that we pick up on from singing and from melodic instruments.

Some listeners are deeply into it.

So much so that they can get full

enjoyment from records that are sung in a language that they don't speak.

So a lot of people say, "Oh, I never

listen to the words." Believe them when they say that!

The lyrics are processed over here, left temporal lobe.

For most of us, where we process speech.

Melody's on the right hand side.

So many of us will have deep passion for records sung in a language we don't speak.

No, that's so true.

That's so awesome.

Yes, definitely true of me.

And what I'm responding to is the passion in the vocals and in the melody, the

intonation of the vocal performance, not the information or the words.

Those are the four musical dimensions, then our aesthetic dimensions.

Authenticity refers to where you perceive those performances to be coming from.

Our preferences on that dimension might be for technical perfection.

You might want to be listening to - if

we're going to focus in on vocalists - you might want to listen to an Ella Fitzgerald

or a Frank Sinatra, someone who was technically perfect.

Or you may like your performance gestures

to come from the heart or from the belly button or from the hips.

For me, I love my Ella Fitzgerald, but boy, do I love Howlin' Wolf.

Boy, do I love that blues music that just

comes from the gut and from the belly button.

I listen for that.

I'll take a bad performance from the gut

over a technically perfect but timid performance from the neck up.

So that's authenticity.

Realism versus abstraction has something

to do with the kind of visualization that you most enjoy when you're listening to

your favorite music. When you're listening to your favorite music, the kind of music

that you love the most, what do you see in your mind's eye?

Now, some people don't see anything.

Some people see abstract shapes and colors.

Some people see nature scenes, the beach or the mountains or a meadow or something.

The most common visualization is you see scenes from your life, the people and

places and events that were important to your life, when you hear this music.

For other people, they visualize a story from the lyrics.

Many of us picture ourselves playing or singing, and many of us picture the

artist, either maybe in concert or in my case, in the recording studio.

The reason it affects our sweet spot on the dimension of realism versus

abstraction is some records lend themselves to the kind of visualization

that you like best and other records don't.

Then the very last dimension is one that's

the easiest one of all to explain - novelty versus familiarity.

Some of us, and I'm one of them, prefer a higher degree of innovation and

experimentation than what you hear on the pop charts.

Other folks like music in classic styles,

your classic reggae or disco or bebop jazz or Bruce Springsteen - classic rock.

Because when they select a new record, they want that technical perfection.

They're not listening for innovation.

We've all got sweet spots on these seven dimensions, and that's collectively our

listener profile, which is unique to all of us.

Well, thank you so much.

We really appreciate it. Dr.

Susan Rogers this was such a pleasure. Awesome.

Thank you so much. Loved talking with you.

Thank you, bye!

Thank you. Dr.

Susan Rogers. That was, in a word, dope.

Alright, Well, please be sure to join us next week when we are going to get to the

bottom of the grand question, the question everybody wants to know.

Why do humans even have music?

So it's a fundamental human property.

How and why it evolved is hard to discern from the fossil record, right?

Because music doesn't leave fossils.

Just the easiest question to ever try to answer.

Should be pretty cut and dry. Probably going to be like, what?

A two minute episode?

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The Franklin Institute's Director of Digital Editorial is Joy Montefusco.

Dr.

Jayatri Das is the Franklin Institute's Chief Bioscientist.

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Thank you! See ya!