Tape, Prince, and the Studio: Interview with Susan Rogers 23 May 2016, Cambridge, MA

Extract

Susan Rogers has lived many musical lives. As a faculty member at Berklee College of Music, she directs the Berklee Music Cognition and Cognition Laboratory, expanding her research in auditory memory, which she began during her doctoral studies with Daniel Levitin at McGill University. She also teaches analogue studio production, drawing on two decades of experience in recording studios. She is especially well known for her years working as Prince's staff engineer (1983–87), a period in which she not only encountered Prince's own unique uses of tape, but also created his now-infamous tape vault. In many ways, the immediate impetus for this interview was Prince's untimely passing on 21 April 2016. In previous interviews, Rogers had already emerged as a lucid commentator on Prince's work first-hand, but that context adds a certain emotional heft to this interview, conducted one month after the pop music star's death.