Welcome to the Sound In Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Jeanna Isham, owner and founder of Dreamr Productions and Sound in Marketing Learning. I create, consult and educate brands and individuals on the power of sound in marketing. Looking to create branded sound or need a sound strategist? Head on over to www.DreamrProductions.com and let's chat. www.DreamrProductions.com Now onto the show.
Today we'll be discussing The Sound of a nation with my guest, Sergeant Major Denver Dill from West Point Academy. The opinions of Sergeant Major Denver Dill are his own and don't represent the United States Military Academy, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense. Sergeant Major Denver Dill is a founding member of the West Point Music Research Center and the U.S. Army Music Analytics team leader.
In addition to being a professional musician in the West Point Band, Sergeant Major Dill is an instructor in the United States Military Academies Social Sciences Department, where he teaches future Army officers through a course he designed called SS 493. Music and influence. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I can't wait to talk with you today. I'm very excited to talk to you, too, because this was an angle that I hadn't really thought about.
But music has influence. It just it just seems like every single day I realize that it has influence. It's so many different ways and it's just fantastic to me. So, why don't we just go ahead and start with you introducing yourself and what you do at West Point? I am sergeant major in the United States Army.
I'm active duty permanently stationed at West Point with the West Point Band, and I've taught in several different departments over my 19 years here, but I'm currently teaching in the Department of Social Sciences. They focus in in three areas. They focus on American politics, international affairs and economics. And so it's really an interesting group of talented, talented officers shaping our cadets who are about to become future officers
and talking about the issues of that matter. And, they were kind enough to host my class SS 493 Music and Influence, where we do take music and influence head on, and we talk about both of those ideas and oftentimes, like you just mentioned, once you started listening for it, you hear it in everything. But if you're not paying attention, it's just this idea that, you know, you're not really, interacting with in a smart way or in an optimal way.
And so we want to be able to teach these future leaders to think about that. And the way that I approach it is it's not the 90% solution, but you can't get into the United States Army if you don't have hearing. Right. So it's at least 20% of the idea. Paying attention to detail, understanding, context, understanding, framing, possible references that are being made.
And that's really going to make them better leaders when they're in front of, you know, young men and women and they hear what they're listening to or what they were brought up with, or how they're trying to deal with their drive or their own emotions and coping and resiliency. And so being a leader who thinks to pause a little bit and to listen to that, and maybe this is a ground where I can engender trust in my team and a host of other things that I'm sure we'll get to is today.
It's amazing to me because and I know we're not going to really delve into this part, but like, you know, we're we're exploring how important it is for music and understanding culture through music and rhythms and stuff. But, you know, to be a better leader, as you said, it could also be about just your voice and how you speak.
And I feel like we we learn so much from what we listen to that I think that it would attribute to the way that we speak formally or informally, understanding, to read a room, that sort of thing. How do you feel about that? Do you think that music and voice coincide together? I do, and I think it's actually vital leadership tool. So we teach to listen and lead with empathy. Well, how do you communicate empathy?
Do you communicate it by profanity and yelling and all these classical, Hollywood depictions of military, you know, leaders? Well, no, there's a probably a time and a place where that's appropriate, but it's probably not in the garrison environment when you're trying to develop, you know, a team and team building. And so if I can match your cadence, match your pitch, match your tone, and sort of also the speaking patterns and rhythms that you do, I am empathizing with you by my responses.
So and I think I when I listen to people and you actively listen, that's part of the active listening is I want to respond in a way that's complementary to the way that you just delivered your message. So in that respect, the military is a lot like just business as usual. We both have to communicate in a way that is authentic and empathetic. Absolutely. And, that's one of the things that I've learned here.
Being stationed here is just like how they teach emotional intelligence and how important that is. And I don't feel like when I was younger in an elementary school, I ever heard those two words put together. And I just love that. That's the type of, leaders West Point is putting out into the force. One thing that you had explored, how you shape a nation's sound, and that's that's really what I grabbed onto, is how can you find a national identity through sound great.
I'd be happy to talk about examples, how that's happened. And it's definitely happened. I mean, we'll start with American examples, right? Our our national anthem in the history of the adoption of the National anthem from a drinking song into this sacred piece of music that is then used as a form of protest at major sporting events.
The idea that it's at this moment when there are physical courtesies being rendered to the nation, people are standing, some people are saluting and somebody is making a statement by taking a knee that's at music. That's that's a one musical moment that everybody understands that music is able to communicate a sense of values, a sense of national pride, essential heritage, a sense of multi-generational connectedness. Right.
And this is also a time where at the Olympics or, you know, at the NFL with Kaepernick, where somebody’s saying something's not right if they're raising the warning flag. And that's why it communicates so well and it's so effective, because in that example, that's one song that does represent part of our national identity.
I think that that also is how it gets complicated, because you can have one song that is attributed to national pride and the same song from a different source, and they feel that that national pride is being stepped on or just, you know, re associating it in two different ways. How can we make that cohesive? How can we find a middle ground when we have such tension going on?
Well, I think that the middle ground is in analyzing it and elevating the experience to what it truly is, which is hang on. Now, we do have some things that are nearly sacred, and oftentimes those are expressed with song. You know, that is how the early Christian church propagated its message was through songs and through hymns. And, you know, our sacred, sacred trust with the American public.
If you go to the military district of Washington, you see those monuments or you see the tomb of the Unknown Guard, you hear the click of their shoes as they're taking the steps honoring everybody who they, you know, don't necessarily know who they are. And you know, these ideas of selfless service and courage, right? There's these transition moments from cold, hard Stem ideas of engineering and concreteness to the aspirational and the inspirational. And I think music is always there.
So it doesn't just have to be our national anthem. It's a look at the idea of the brass band in the 1800s, developing with the sound of a military band, with the sound of New Orleans getting incorporated into that. Right. And then all of a sudden you have like a ragtime feel and then they have a lilt, but it's still got that driving tuba sound. Well, now we get into the early 20th century, we're calling that the origins of jazz, right? It's all this fusion of ideas.
And so I think that the common ground is appreciating it and talking about literally how you craft inspiration and you have aspirational ideas. And while we might disagree on what we're aspiring to, to some degree, there's going to be mutual admiration that we both have aspirations. And I think that that's how we try to elevate that conversation. It's like, hey, I'm thinking differently than you, but I love that you're going for it.
So let's talk about how we're both going for it, even if we're not going to try to get to the exact same end spot. One thing that you work on at West Point is you have the West Point Music Research Center. Let's let's dig into that. What do you do in the Music Research Center at West Point? Probably ten years ago, maybe nine.
I was looking to take some of the work I had done in systems engineering, and I have an undergraduate in marketing, and I wanted to try to help quantify the effect that military bands were having, because I didn't think it was something that couldn't be quantified. I think it might be challenging. There might be other words that you would use to describe it, but I didn't think something you couldn't touch. And I formed the Army music analytics team with some otherr officers.
And what we did was we articulated to the Department of the Army and to Public Affairs and all these other organizations, measures of effect of the bands themselves. So we were looking at physical effects, emotional effects. Right. There's there's a ton of effects. And really, what we found in doing that was we were looking really narrow mindedly. And so we kept putting all these, well, if we got into neuroscience we could talk about that.
We put the neuroscience on the shelf and said, you know, the barrier to entry is a little high. And we thought, well, there's sociological effects. And we're like, yeah, but they're going to claim that's anecdotal. You know, we need a social scientist. Okay, great. And then so we just kept putting all these things on the shelf. Eventually our shelves were full. And he said, you know what? There's enough research here to do this into perpetuity. And nobody's doing the research.
And so we pitched that we needed a music research center, and it was accepted by the dean at the time. And then they reviewed all the research centers. So now we're in let's say we're in year seven, maybe 6 or 7. And we collaborate with industry. We collaborate with academia. We do our own independent research for the United States Army when they come knocking as well. We look at that intersection of sound and music and what impacts it's having, what influence it's having.
You know, some things that you've you look into your, podcast as well, like the idea of sonic branding, you know, and affiliation right, traditional marketing applications of it. We just keep finding more and more and more data and more and more relevancy the more we look.
And so it's it's been a really fun, fascinating journey that every day I come to work and I feel like I just learn just an incredible amount and it's a little bit like, an Enigma machine, you know, like you get a little bit of behavioral science over here and then, you know, a little bit of neuroscience over here. And then once you figure out the language people are speaking, you can translate it into marketing or performance or some other language.
And then it like kind of unlocks the door and you're like, a-ha! They were saying discrete interventions. And I would have said, you know, small changes in a population. Okay, same way of saying something. That's the same thing. Yeah. As this is a show about Sonic branding, I would be remiss if we didn't bring up West Point Sonic logo and Sonic branding. Can you tell us a little bit about it and how it came about?
Sure. Yeah. So again, like we just talked about recognizing the importance of that and the overall brand and identity of the institution. Right. And we communicated that it’s an over 200 year old institution that's, you know, uniquely American. We looked at how we could communicate those ideas sonically, and that led us toward the natural look at our sonic branding, where we consistent with it, did it mesh with the traditions and the prestige of the organization?
So over the series of months, we were able to distill some of these ideas of academic excellence. Military excellence put them together with its preeminent leadership and development institution. And to put it into sound, we have one that’s more epic and global. (music playing) One that's a little more introspective, academic lectures or some of the West Point Department podcasts and things like that. (music playing) One that's extremely short
as like an acknowledgment. (music playing) Similar to how, Mastercard recently rebranded with theres. So you have that gratification that you did just spend it, but your brain remembers you spent it on Mastercard. And how how has, West Point used this? Has this just been something that you and your team have, gotten into, or is this something that the whole West Point Academy has acknowledged and uses in their marketing and their, outreach inward and outward? They do.
So our public affairs office and we have like copyright and licensing attorneys and people like that. They all have oversight of all of those things. We blend some of these iconic West Point sounds and songs into these logos together. So it's so graduates and people familiar with the academy think that they're hearing our alma mater, or they think that they're hearing our fight song, and really, they're hearing both because we've intertwined them.
And, you know, it's just paying homage to like, oh, yeah, that does sound like West Point. Why does it sound like, you know, and the curiosity gets going. So yeah, that's that's been that was one of our real fun projects that we still get to enjoy seeing when, you know, you hear a new advertisement or a new new project, you're like, oh yeah, there it is. I love that that you audited your sound. So you didn't just, like, start from scratch.
You're like, what is it that makes West Point West Point? And I'm assuming elements of it were new, but you also used something from your grand history. So that it just sounds right. That's great. Yeah, it's it's it's fun and I know that you'd appreciate it. So yeah. I hope you're enjoying the show. Stay tuned for next week for the conclusion to our interview. Don't forget to subscribe on all the major podcast channels, share with friends, follow and rate.
Spread the word because, well, more people should know about this stuff. I know you know that now. For any other inquiries, you can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also email me at [email protected] [email protected] All links will be provided in the show notes. Let's make this world of sound more intriguing, more unique, and more and more on brand.