Co-Creation of Meaning: How Artists and Listeners Shape Musical Experience Together

Introduction: The Listener as Co-Creator

In This Is What It Sounds Like, Susan Rogers upends the traditional belief that meaning flows one‑way from performer to audience. Her central claim, rooted in both studio decades and cognitive science, is that music does not truly exist until a listener actively completes it. As she writes in the Overture, by perceiving, feeling, and reacting to a song’s many dimensions, “a listener closes the creative circle.” Co‑creation of meaning is therefore not a fringe idea but the book’s operating principle: the listener’s personal profile—their unique sensitivity to authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre—determines what a song means and whether it falls in love.

This theme unfolds across Rogers’s own journey from a doubting recording engineer to a confident record producer, through the seven‑dimensions framework, and into the intimate record‑pull of the Coda. It connects characters such as Miles Davis and Prince to symbols like the vow and the third ear, and it reveals both the beauty and the paradox of shared musical love.

Part 1: Rogers’s Awakening—From Bystander to Co‑Creator

Rogers’s personal story is the clearest illustration of co‑creation in action. As a young woman trapped in an unhappy marriage, she left a Led Zeppelin concert early because of her husband’s curfew and swore she would return to the Forum as a sound mixer. That vow – a commitment to becoming a professional listener – set her on a path that culminated in engineering Purple Rain for Prince.

Yet even after producing gold albums, Rogers privately wondered whether listening truly mattered. She felt that her own musical opinions carried less weight than those of composers and performers; she remained, in her mind, “merely a listener.” This doubt was shattered by a brief encounter with Miles Davis. After a rapid‑fire verbal duet, Davis declared to Rogers, “Some of the best musicians I know aren’t musicians.” In that moment, Davis validated the listener as a creative partner. The act of listening, he implied, is itself a performance – one that co‑constructs the musical experience.

This experience reframed Rogers’s entire career. She no longer saw the record producer as a mere director but as a “third ear” – the ability to hear from the audience’s perspective. The third ear symbolises the producer’s role as an empathic co‑creator, shaping form and function to invite the listener’s completion.

Part 2: The Seven Dimensions – A Map of Personal Meaning

The seven dimensions of listening provide the mechanism for co‑creation. Rogers explains that a song’s objective features do not predict love; rather, it is the listener’s active processing of those features that creates meaning. Two people can hear the exact same recording and report dramatically different experiences. This is not due to training or background alone – it is because each listener’s profile “determines your thoughts, feelings, and physical responses.”

For example, the dimension of lyrics is explored in Chapter 5 with an epigraph from Bono: “Sometimes songs are not what they were meant to mean, but rather what they need to mean to someone.” This directly states that the authorial intention is not final – the listener re‑interprets lyrics through their own identity. Similarly, authenticity (Chapter 1) is framed not as moral truth but as audible emotional commitment, which the listener judges as genuine or contrived.

The record pull is the symbolic ritual of co‑creation. Rogers and her co‑author Ogi Ogas engage in a honest exchange of songs, each revealing their own listener profile. The pull is not about critiquing technical quality but about sharing how each song sounds “to me.” This practice embodies the theme: meaning emerges relationally, through the collision of one person’s offering and another’s reception.

Part 3: The Coda – Shared Intersections Despite Opposite Profiles

The Coda deepens the complexity of co‑creation. After a record pull that reveals almost entirely opposite musical tastes, Rogers and Ogas discover a surprising shared love: cowboy music. Yet even here, co‑creation does not produce identical meaning. For Rogers, cowboy songs evoke “the warmth rising from a horse’s neck” and a romance of solitary adventure. For Ogas, the same songs trigger visualisations of a lone traveler under a big sky, journeying into the unknown. The music’s form is identical, but the experienced meaning is personal to each listener.

This illustrates a crucial nuance: co‑creation can lead to deep human connection even when the inner experience differs. Rogers notes that music is ultimately “a form of sharing,” and that occasional alignment between different listener profiles creates a bond that “can run deeper than words.” The shared love is not a uniform meaning but a reciprocal delight in the same object – a meeting of two creative acts.

Complexity and Contradiction

The theme is not without tension. Rogers’s own history shows that co‑creation can be invisible. For years, even as an accomplished producer, she undervalued her listening contribution because the culture privileged performers. The book argues that listening is a vital creative act, yet this truth is often obscured by industry hierarchies.

Another contradiction: if meaning is entirely personal, can music ever communicate? The Coda answers with a both/and. The same cowboy song sparks different fantasies, yet the act of sharing it creates emotional resonance. Co‑creation does not guarantee consensus; it guarantees relationship. As Rogers writes, the fact that we each respond in our own way is “fortunate for the art of music” and for humanity.

Character and Symbol Connections

• Susan Rogers is the primary example of a listener who learns to own her co‑creative role. Her transformation from doubter to author of a listening framework mirrors the book’s thesis.
• Miles Davis acts as the catalyst. His cryptic praise of non‑musicians as the best musicians repositions listening as artistry.
• Prince exemplifies the artist who trusts a listener (Rogers) with his work. Their silent exchange of smiles on tour – “nothing else needed to be said” – is a moment of mutual co‑creation.
• Ogi Ogas stands in for every reader, offering his own taste for comparison and showing that co‑creation persists even across differences.
• The vow is the promise to become an active listener – a foundational commitment to co‑creation.
• The third ear is the producer’s skill of hearing as the audience does, which is the very definition of co‑creative empathy.
• Cowboy music is the symbol of shared intersection – a genre that enables two different listener profiles to feel a similar delight.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Susan Rogers’s early feeling of being “merely a listener” illustrate the central conflict of co‑creation?
   Answer: Rogers initially believed that because she was not a composer or performer, her musical opinions were less valid. This reflects a common assumption that meaning is authored entirely by the artist. Only after Miles Davis’s remark that some of the best musicians are not musicians did she realise listening is itself a creative act. Her journey shows that the conflict between cultural hierarchy and the reality of co‑creation must be consciously resolved.

2. What role do the seven dimensions of listening play in the co‑creation of meaning?
   Answer: The seven dimensions – authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre – form the pathways through which a listener’s brain and body engage with a song. Because each listener has a unique profile, the same recording can produce dramatically different experiences. The dimensions provide a vocabulary for understanding why co‑creation yields personal, rather than universal, meaning.

3. In what way does the record pull between Rogers and Ogas demonstrate both the possibility and the limitation of shared meaning?
   Answer: The record pull reveals that two people with opposite tastes can still find a shared love – cowboy music – but that even this common ground does not produce identical meaning. Rogers imagines the warmth of a horse and pastoral scenes, while Ogas sees a lone traveler under a vast sky. Their shared delight comes from the act of sharing itself, not from a uniform interpretation.

4. How does the symbol of the third ear connect the producer’s craft to co‑creation?
   Answer: The third ear is the producer’s ability to hear a recording from the audience’s perspective. It requires setting aside personal bias to imagine how a listener will react. This empathic stance is co‑creative because it treats the listener’s future response as an essential part of the final sound. By designing form and function with the third ear, the producer invites the listener to complete the creative circle.

5. What contradiction does the book pose regarding authorial intention and listener interpretation?
   Answer: The book upholds that listeners are free to make songs mean what they need, as Bono’s epigraph states. Yet it also celebrates moments of perfect alignment – when a record provides two people with the same jolt of delight. The contradiction is that music is simultaneously an intimate personal construction and a vehicle for deep connection. The resolution lies in Rogers’s conclusion that music is a form of sharing: meaning is co‑created both within each listener and between listeners.