FT Weekend: Why your brain craves Despacito

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Why your brain craves Despacito’

Lilah Raptopoulos
In the early 80s, Susan Rogers was a small time audio technician working in Los Angeles when she landed a job with a big time rock star.

[PRINCE’S ‘PURPLE RAIN’ MUSIC PLAYING]

Susan Rogers
I was an audio technician. I didn’t do anything artistically with records. But it turned out that when Prince was embarking on Purple Rain, he was looking for a technician, someone to keep his home studio running. And also, as it turned out fortunately for me, use the equipment and assist him in his recordings.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It was a stroke of luck. Susan loved Prince, and it turned out they also had a similar taste in music. They listened to the same funk and soul records growing up. And working with him, Susan learned not just to record music better, but to think about what it meant to have a signature sound.

Susan Rogers
So he was able to train me and teach me his ear, what he liked music to sound like.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Over the next 22 years, Susan worked with tons of stars. David Byrne from The Talking Heads, the trip hop artist Tricky. And then in the early 2000s, she switched careers entirely. She went for a PhD in neuroscience to understand how music affects the brain. And she recently wrote a book called This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Susan Rogers
Individual pieces of music are chosen to serve an immediate function.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm.

Susan Rogers
So our little brains are up there minding their own business, and throughout the day they’re gonna say, you know what would be good right now? I would like to hear some music. Then you’re gonna go to your playlist, you’re gonna choose something. That’s the brain saying there’s a particular kind of treat I’m in the mood for right now.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Susan’s built a theory around this. She says there are seven different criteria that our brains use to make sense of the music that we hear.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There’s melody and lyrics and rhythm, and then there’s some that I found really surprising. So today, Susan and I chat through them and we listen to some music together. Then I speak with our literary editors, Fred Studemann and Laura Battle, about their favourite books of the year. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Susan, it is such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for joining me.

Susan Rogers
Thank you very much, Lilah, for asking me to be here on your podcast.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you wrote a book called This Is What It Sounds Like. And I’ll tell you that I actually walked into a bookstore in Manhattan and I was killing some time and I thought, I have too many books. I can’t buy a book. And I walked out carrying your book because I started reading it and I just got hooked. You promised me that you would help me understand, like, why cognitively we like the music we like and why we may not like music that others think we should like. And it’s just something I never really realised I always wanted to know. Why did you write the book?

Susan Rogers
I loved the conversations that we would have in the recording studio. I was a record maker for 22 years and I’m also a non-musician, so it was especially gratifying to me to start talking about music from a place that I recognised, namely the position of being a music listener. So when musicians are talking about how to play or write or sing, I can’t hold up my end of the conversation. But when we’re talking about the music that we love, that’s when the musicians all revert back to where they started: music lovers, listeners. So I wanted readers of this book to experience that and to recognise you don’t have to be a trained musician or a professional musician to be able to say something about how music works.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. Susan, I’m in the business of questions, and there’s this one question that I really hate and I sort of live in fear of. And that’s the question: what kind of music do you like? Like, it feels like a test to me. And I feel like part of the pressure is that, like, culturally, there’s a wrong answer. Like, it feels more like it’s an ideology question than it is about our wiring. Like, if I like country music, and I do like some country music, will I be judged accordingly? (laughs) And I guess I do, I’m wondering from you what your thoughts are on that. Like, what are the things that come together to form our taste in music? It must be some mix of identity and cognitive wiring, right?

Susan Rogers
Lilah, my compliments to you as a journalist. This is the ideal question about this topic. All of us, I believe, have experienced that. When we talked a few moments ago, I was saying in the recording studio I didn’t feel quite on the same level with the trained musicians who were actually players and writers. What we need to be doing is considering that music is functional. So in the book I’m talking about at least seven different dimensions of recorded music that can independently, different regions of the brain, give us a neural treat. A reward. You can think of it like a constellation of seven stars. If a given record happens to plop down somewhere in the middle of your constellation of seven stars, it might be too far from any one of your stars to actually excite you or cause you to feel any gravitational pull. But if a record just so happens to land right next to that sweet spot on your dimension for rhythm or your dimension for timbre or your dimension for style, if it’s close enough to any one of these seven dimensions, you’re going to feel an attraction to it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Here’s the premise of Susan’s book. There are these seven ways that our brains process music. There’s melody.

[GUITAR STRUMMING]

Lyrics.

[‘AMAZING GRACE’ PLAYING]

And rhythm.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There’s timbre, which is the quality of the sound.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Susan Rogers
Timbre is sound itself. So you can take a song, a jazz standard like ‘Autumn Leaves’, and whether you play it on saxophone or guitar, it’s got the exact same melody . . .

[SAXOPHONE MUSIC PLAYING]

. . . might have the exact same tempo and the same rhythm. But what is different is one version’s on a piano and other versions on saxophone.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And then there are three aesthetic dimensions: novelty, authenticity and realism. Susan says these actually apply to all kinds of art. Movies, books, painting. Novelty is, do you like stuff that feels new or familiar? Authenticity is, do you believe the songwriter when they say they have a broken heart? And does that even matter to you? And realism is, can you envision the song being performed?

Susan Rogers
If we listen to electronic music, it’s often made by musical instruments that exist entirely in the box, meaning in the laptop, virtual musical instruments. If I’m trying to picture what happened in the studio when this record was made, I’m not picturing individual musicians. These are all electronic sources. Some of us have a preference for realistic records. Some of us have a preference for the more abstract kind.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So our brain naturally has different preferences in these seven categories. Mine is wired to enjoy a different type of melody or timbre or rhythm than yours. And actually, it goes even deeper than that, beyond just the brain.

Susan Rogers
There’s a certain way our bodies like to move. If you go to a rock concert, you see people doing that up and down, pogo stick kind of motion. For me personally, that doesn’t work. But if you go to a soul or R&B kind of concert, you’re gonna to see more front to back movement. Latin music is going to generate a more side to side. Our bodies have ways in which movement feels just right to us. Same thing with sounds and styles.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so that’s the theory. Seven criteria, brain wiring, inputs. But to really understand what Susan is talking about, I asked if she wouldn’t mind listening to some music with me to explain what might be going through our brains when we hear a song.

So the first song that I’ve chosen is ‘Despacito’ by Luis Fonsi, featuring Daddy Yankee. And I’ve chosen it because it has been played on YouTube nearly 8bn times.

[‘DESPACITO’ PLAYING]

It’s not my favourite reggaeton song, but it is addictive and it’s the one that’s, like, captured the hearts and minds of, I don’t know, a generation.

[‘DESPACITO’ PLAYING]

Susan Rogers
So it’s got a lot of things going for it. So first off, there’s that reggaeton rhythm, which is well-established. Humans love this. Then that vocal comes in. That vocal is a strong one.

[‘DESPACITO’ PLAYING]

Susan Rogers
Then in the arrangement of this record, it’s transitioning between sections and giving you a different kind of sonic picture in different sections of the record. And that helps prevent it from being boring.

[‘DESPACITO’ PLAYING]

Susan Rogers
It’s got a strong hook and it did really set the gold standard for reggaeton.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Susan, so there are like millions of people who listen to this and don’t know any of the lyrics. So what is that?

Susan Rogers
That happens because as I was saying earlier, our brains independently process these elements of a record. So, yeah, so if you don’t speak Spanish, the lyrics aren’t gonna work out for you. That’s OK. Your brain can just ignore that part and attend to just the rhythm of the vocal performance or attend to just the melody in the song or in the vocal and in other aspects of it. If you’ve got a friend who says to you, oh, I never listen to the words, believe them, because there (laughter) are many listeners who just, they just turn off that side of the processing when they’re playing their favourite records.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm. OK. The second song is Etta James’ ‘A Sunday Kind of Love’, foundational R&B. So I’ll pull it up. I love this song

[‘A SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE’ PLAYING]

Susan Rogers
So in the recording studio you might point out how much music a performer is delivering, their voice or on an instrument. In this case of Etta James, this could be an a cappella record. Her voice is delivering so much music, the melody, the sound, the timbre. There’s so much of what music is in her vocal performance alone.

[‘A SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE’ PLAYING]

Notice that Etta sings the verse, and then when the strings come in, those strings are almost swooning. It’s like they’re saying, oh, Etta, tell it slow. Those strings are syrupy and romantic and dripping with feeling.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And the lyrics are, like, so simple. But you know exactly what she’s talking about. It’s good that they’re simple, too, in a way.

Susan Rogers
That’s true.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Amazing. OK. The last song is LCD Soundsystem. ‘Dance yrself clean’.

[‘DANCE YRSELF CLEAN’ PLAYING]

I would say, I don’t know, electric dance, punk, kind of electro dance and punk. It’s kind of hard to define off kilter electro pop, someone said. Anyway, I chose this one because it’s much more abstract.

[‘DANCE YRSELF CLEAN’ PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, I’m gonna fast forward it a little bit.

[‘DANCE YRSELF CLEAN’ PLAYING]

So I’m curious what you, what this one, I mean, I know this is, but this one I sort of chose because it sort of, it builds in an interesting way, like it brings you on this ride where you start one place and it’s very simple. And then by the end you’re like, there’s this sweet release. Like, you kind of descend into . . . somewhere, you know, dancing . . . 

Susan Rogers
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Or chaos or whatever.

Susan Rogers
Isn’t that interesting? People who love abstract records like this one, and by abstract, I mean they’re made pretty much in the box. You’re not picturing a drummer in the studio. That can, that kind of abstraction can free the brain from the quote, unquote, “dominance of reality”. This is what neuroscientists say about abstract visual art. So when we see a painting of realistic art, a mountain and trees or river or something like that, you can say, oh yeah, I recognise what those objects are. I get it. But if you see like a Jackson Pollock action painting with splashes of colour, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not depicting anything. And what that does is it allows your brain to make up your own interpretation as to what this music is representing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Susan, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the songs that we like, but what about what’s happening in our brains when it comes to songs that we hate?

Susan Rogers
So we know that when we like music, circuits in the brain activate something called the default network. The default network is an interconnected network of brain nuclei that are concerned with our sense of self or self-identity. So when we’re listening to music that we love, we start daydreaming, we start fantasising. That’s the function of music, is to get us into our own heads. And this is why the music that we love reflects our identity. But when we hear music that we hate, there’s a wee little nucleus called the precuneus. It’s kind of like a little gatekeeper. And when you hear music that you hate, it turns out that that precuneus cuts itself off from the default network as if it’s saying, “no, do not want, not for me”. So what we’re kind of doing when we hear music we dislike is we’re saying, “this is not part of me. This does not represent my self-identity”.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s so interesting that your brain just cuts it off. (laughter)

Susan Rogers
I’m thinking of a record I can’t stand, and I hope your listeners won’t judge me harshly. But Enya’s sail away, sail away, sail . . .

[ENYA’S ‘ORINOCO FLOW’ PLAYING]

I feel like I just want to curl up into myself when I hear that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right. Right. My very last question, Susan, and thank you so much, is just why do you think we should care about this? You know, does it help us understand ourselves better? Does it help us understand each other better? Does it make us less judgmental? For you, what’s the why?

Susan Rogers
Oh, I think all of that is true. There’s so much pressure on people — to fit in and to demonstrate their belongingness and to identify with others in some way. I think we need more emphasis on understanding ourselves as a unique work of art and appreciating. That what’s interesting about us is that there’s no one else like us and I hope, I hope that the book helps listeners have a language and a vocabulary and a way of talking about the music they love that helps them give voice to their inner musicality. And I think all of us who love music are musical as listeners.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Susan, I will be thinking about this conversation for a very long time. Thanks so much for joining.

Susan Rogers
Well, thank you very much. You guys do a great job. Really appreciate it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’ve put a link to Susan’s book and the accompanying Spotify playlist in the show notes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It’s that time of the year again, the time when you have to figure out what gifts to get your relatives. And the FT is about to put out its annual Books of the Year special. So different lists will be dropping across the site this week. And there’s something for everyone. There’s business books, poetry, economics, pop music, food and drink, audio books. But it’s a lot of lists. And here in the podcasts, we lucked out. We got literary editors Frederick Studemann and Laura Battle, who are the brains behind the special, to join me today. And they’re gonna tighten it down to their personal favourites. There’s a literary riddle, a story of friendship between two French schoolgirls and a book about animal perception, to name a few.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK. So Fred and Laura, welcome to the show. I think we should just get into it. I would love to hear some of your favourite books, but I’ll start by asking the question on everybody’s mind, which is when my dad (laughter) texts me from the bookstore and says, “What is the FT recommending these days?” What should I tell him?

Frederick Studemann
Well, if you’re very nice to her, Laura will give you first insight on her (laughter) much cherished list of best books.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Amazing.

Laura Battle
Well Fred was actually looking for a book to take to a dinner party the other day and looking around other people’s desks to see if he can pinch one. (laughter) And I think the book he pinched was Trust by Hernan Diaz. Which we, I think we both, both of us read and really enjoyed and seems to be one of those slightly buzzy ones around the FT, perhaps because the subject matter is kind of about finance and markets to some extent. And it’s set in 1920s New York, and it tells the story of a fantastically rich Wall Street tycoon, but through four kind of competing manuscripts. So the same story, but through four different points of view. And it’s a really fun literary riddle, basically, about, about wealth and power and the idea of legacy as well.

Frederick Studemann
Well, I’ll just jump in and say one of my favourites was a book called Iron Curtain that came out earlier this year, by writer, Vesna Goldsworthy. And she came originally from Serbia. And this evidently draws a lot on her own, what I assume her own, personal history. And it’s a romance between two individuals, one behind the Iron Curtain, one from the UK. And it challenges a lot of sort of preconceived wisdoms about freedom and trust and honesty in respect of societies. And I just think, you know, there’s been a bit of a thing around that. It’s like 30 years ago, everyone was reading Kundera, you know, just that it was all in the run-up to when the Berlin Wall came down. And now in the wake of Ukraine, you just feel this sort of, that type of little irreparable Balkan spread. It’s sort of coming back a bit. So I really enjoyed that.

Laura Battle
Yeah. Another, another kind of quieter choice would be Yiyun Li’s latest novel called The Book of Goose, which has gone slightly under the radar, although she’s a wonderful writer, a wonderful novelist. And it’s inspired by the real life story that’s not all that well known. I tried to look it up on the internet, and there’s a tiny amount of information about a 1950s French schoolgirl who comes from a very poor rural background, and she found sudden fame in about ‘57 as a debut novelist who was then later revealed to be a fake and illiterate, completely illiterate. And Li’s novel takes this idea to to explore the friendship between two fictional French schoolgirls.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Fred, what about you? What’s another book that you really loved?

Frederick Studemann
There was a bunch of short stories that Laura’s already busted me for looting books from the office (laughter) anyway, so there’s another thing I sort of swept probably off her desk, actually, is a series of short stories by a guy called Ferdinand von Schirach, who’s got an interesting personal back story, but in that he’s sort of the descendant of one of the leading figures of the Third Reich, but he’s nothing like that. He’s been a successful lawyer and is now a successful writer. And it’s a collection of short stories called Punishment, a lot of which draw on, that set in and around the legal world, but also develop, you know, look at a lot of the quirks that you find there, but also the unresolved . . . justice never quite being seen to be done and so on.

Lilah Raptopolous
And what did you learn about the minds of lawyers?

Frederick Studemann
Well, I think that, it is that bit that it’s never quite, you know, I mean, a lot of the tales are about something terrible has happened and someone is then trying to sort of write it. And when you get in the end, it’s often quite a sort of necessarily messy compromise of sorts or that . . . Yeah. I mean it is raising lots of questions. Very German in that sense about whether, you know, has justice ever really been done in this case.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Laura, do you have, like, a hidden gem kind of a book. Is there a book that maybe didn’t get a ton of press but should have?

Laura Battle
Yeah, well, there’s a book that’s not even published in Europe or North America, as far as I can tell. It’s a debut memoir called Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy, who’s a journalist and broadcaster based in New Zealand. But it’s about her family life in 1970s and 80s Ireland and about her mother’s struggle with alcoholism. And a friend who just got back from New Zealand, pressed it into my hands this summer and I thought, oh, I’m not sure I can cope with another tale of misery and another alcoholic mother. But I’m so glad I read it. It’s a very angry book, but it’s also a really vivacious account of frayed family relationships across decades and around the world. And also about the author’s, you know, attempt to escape, as it were, to turn-of-the-millennium, millennial Auckland. And her life, you know, early life and journalism. So that was a real hidden gem and I’d never have come across it unless this friend had told me about it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s awesome. You know, Laura, it makes me wonder, like, how do you both choose books? You know, I know you have to do it for your job, but outside of that, do you choose them based on, like, places you want to go or worlds you kind of want to enter or places you already know something about? Or do you ever choose them based on not knowing anything about something? Like, I guess my big question is really: how do we stay open to exploring new types of fiction?

Laura Battle
Yes. So I, it’s a, it’s a mixture. I try to be as open-minded, particularly thinking about work and what is coming out in the autumn, as open minded as possible. But then, like last week, I was off sick and just picked up a book by this obscure publisher based in the UK called Slightly Foxed, which somebody had given me for Christmas. And it’s a quarterly magazine, but also a publisher that finds kind of semi-forgotten works of biography. And I ended up reading Graham Greene’s memoirs about his teenage years in 1920s England. For those who don’t know Graham Greene, he was one of the most prominent novelists of his generation. He wrote The End of the Affair and Brighton Rock, and he struggled with mental illness throughout his life. And this book kind of talks about his early mental illness and how he became addicted to playing Russian roulette. It’s amazing. So that was just a complete kind of diversion and not really useful for work, although I’m mentioning it now. But perfect for kind of lying in bed, not feeling very well.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm. Thank you both so much. My last question is just, what did I miss? Like, is there anything else that you want to recommend to listeners uhm things we should know about? Things we should buy for Christmas or the holidays?

Frederick Studemann
Can I throw in one romp for the, just for the pop?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Please.

Frederick Studemann
And it’s a book called Magnificent Rebels, and it is a book by Andrea Wulf, who’s a writer who wrote a very much celebrated biography of the explorer, polymath, whatever, Alexander von Humboldt. And this is a curious milieu tale. So it’s a sort of group biography, if you like, of a bunch of philosophers, writers, painters, poets, scientists who gathered in a tiny town in central Germany called Jena, which for a brief period they were known as the Jena set around 1800. That was probably the sort of, you know, the place to be. And in a very short period of time produced some incredible works of philosophy and writing. But they also really established the sort of primacy of the ego. And that’s why this book is so relevant for today, and that I think we’re still living in that sort of very self-centred, self-aware state and sort of post-religious state where it’s all about, who am I? What do I want? Where am I going?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Cool. OK, great. And then Laura, what about you? I mean, one book that we didn’t touch on or one book you’d recommend as a gift for the holidays.

Laura Battle
Yeah, well, a non-fiction book called An Immense World by Ed Yong, and he’s a science reporter for The Atlantic. And this is all about animal perception and I think it would be a great present for people because we’re used to a lot of books about the natural world being fairly depressing at the moment, and this touches on a lot of serious aspects of it. But it’s so joyful and engaging and really shows how unbelievably restrictive humans’ five senses are when there are crickets that exist with ears on their knees and catfish with taste buds all over their body. It’s really an eye opening, mind bending book.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, fun. OK, cool.

Frederick Studemann
Wow.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m in. Laura and Fred, this was so fun. I now have a long list as usual. And yeah, thanks for coming. Please come again soon.

Laura Battle
Thanks so much, Lilah.

Frederick Studemann
Thank you. Thanks so much, Lilah. It was such fun.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times.

We are still collecting your predictions and wishes for 2023. We’ve decided to give you a little more time. And basically what’s gonna happen is this: we’ll be doing an end of the year call in show featuring your messages. So Matt Vella, the magazine editor, and I will play your ideas. We’ll chat through them. We’ll throw in some of our own. So what we want to know from you is what do you want to happen or think will happen culturally in 2023? Will something replace Twitter? Is 2023 Rihanna’s year? One listener predicted the return of speed dating. Someone thinks we’ll all start mending our own clothes. Someone wants old-school reality TV back, like Real World season one style. You can leave us a voice note using the link in the show notes and have fun with it.

If you want to keep in touch in other ways or prefer to email us, you can reach us at FTWeekendPodcast@ft.com. I see all those emails. The show is on Twitter @FTWeekend Pod and I am on Instagram and Twitter, but mostly Instagram @LilahRap. If you like the show, please share it on your social feeds or recommend it to your friends. That goes a really long way to support us.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and special thanks go, as always, to Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.

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