As soon as we finished creating a musical CD for Koko (the only lowland gorilla who understands English perfectly and communicates using a version of American Sign Language) we decided that we loved interspecies communication through music and wanted to try some more projects.
However, since Koko was the only animal we knew who understood English perfectly and could communicate her thoughts through sign language, the only option left to us was finding our very own Dr. Doolittle. So that’s what we did.
It took almost a year to find the right person but we finally saw her on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Her name was Dr. Kim Ogden and she lived in a suburb of Chicago – my hometown.
I called Dr. Kim and told her that our record label was the only label in the world that created music about and for animals and that now we were very interested in trying to create music with animals.
I asked her if she thought she could act as a “translator” to see if we could involve animals directly in the creative musical process. She said yes. She felt that our first attempt should involve dogs. Dr. Ogden is a doctor of public health so she wanted to research it quantitatively and quantitatively. She wanted to test a minimum of two hundred dogs for preferences in lyric content and musical genre. I believe she ended up testing about 225 animals for us. Thgis is excluding the more than a year of testing after the CD was released.
Dr. Kim went back through the past seven years of consultations with dogs and chose the top twenty things that her canine clients seemed to care about. These were used to define the lyric content of each song.
We then gave Dr. Kim a CD with twenty three different genres and styles of music. Dr. Ogden took a boom Box to the shelters she visited regularly and played the different kinds of music for groups of up to 13 animals. She transcribed each session. We then created the rough song demos based on the dog’s responses as translated by Dr. Kim and the data she provided.
I won’t go through all the things we learned about dogs in creating this CD but here are a few examples:
• We couldn’t use side sticks or rim shots on our percussion tracks because they reminded dogs who came from bad neighborhoods of gunshots.
• Dogs LOVE Being happy. In fact they become physically ill in the presence of depressed or angry humans so don’t get angry or depressed around your dog if you can help it. Dogs also equated faster tempos with happy so we kept the tempos upbeat..
• We didn’t use the word “NO” in any of the songs. Dogs shut down when they hear the word “NO!”
• Sambas tested out the highest with our focus groups.
• Johnny Cash tested out the lowest. One of the dog’s comments (as translated through Dr. Kim) was, “That’s just a sad man talking.” John was too sad for the dogs.
It was then time for our final pre-mix focus group. Dr. Kim came to Los Angeles and we held the session at a no kill facility we work with in L.A. called New Leash On Life.
We were going to hold the session at my house until I realized there was no parking, I didn’t have insurance and I was about to have fifteen dogs who didn’t know each other sitting in my living room with their attendant 15-20 humans beings. Almost the same logistics as a rock concert. That’s why I called New Leash On Life and asked for help.
We had thirteen dogs involved in the New Leash group. Eleven shelter dogs and two pets. Each dog had a volunteer handler with a leash and a clipboard and pen for taking notes when Dr. Kim translated for each animal. It was kind of amazing that 13 dogs who didn’t know each other were sitting two feet away from the next dog and there was not one fight in the entire two hours the they were sitting in the room. I attribute this to Dr. Kim’s presence in the room.
The first thing Dr. Kim did was to introduce us, tell the dogs what we were doing and ask if any dogs didn’t want to participate. One dog didn’t and was taken back to it’s run. Another didn’t know what music was and Dr. Kim had to explain it to him.
Then Dr. Kim went from dog to dog as I played each song from the CD. She asked each dog what they thought, then dictated the dog’s response to it’s handler who wrote it down on the clipboard to document it. She did this for each of the songs.
There was one comment that stuck with me. Remember. I wrote a lot of the songs. I’m singing the leads. And, I’m standing in a roomful of dogs playing songs for them and this dog says to Dr. Kim, “I’ve heard better”.
We did have to change one song called I’ll Be Back – which is what you should always say to your dog when you leave, even if it’s just for a moment.
As soon as that song began to play all of the shelter dogs lay down and got visibly depressed. Some of the handlers even began to cry. The shelter dogs knew there was no one waiting for them, You could see it. The two pets loved it.
We redid the song and had Dr. Kim test it for us in Chicago and it passed – kind of.
We then did our final changes and mixes based on the responses of the focus group and released the CD. That’s another story. The one about how happily amazed we were when we tested Songs To Make Dogs Happy for over a year and found out that dogs loved it!
