Musical memory and why music is a “super-skill”

This week I had a nice email from a student in our media department who was working on her final dissertation project. She was interested in exploring the nature of musical memory as part of a mock radio program and wanted to chat to me for her planned broadcast. So we set a date for a meeting last Friday morning to have a coffee and for me to be ‘interviewed’.

In preparation for the meeting I had a glance over the literature in the field of musical memory. It is rather an exciting time in this area as there are some fascinating new insights from both behavioural and neuroscience studies that have implications for better understanding why our memories for music seem so deep, so rich and also why they seem to survive when memory declines either through normal ageing or in cases of dementia: More of this as I describe the interview below.

I took all these ideas to my interview and looked forward to hearing the questions that the student wanted to ask me. I was not disappointed as it was a very interesting hour. Her first question went straight to the heart of the matter. Is musical memory special?

My simple answer to this is usually, yes! But the interesting response is in the detail when you think more about why musical memory might be special. Here are a few points to consider:

1)Music as a ‘super-skill’ – Music stimulates a number of the sensory and motor systems all at once, especially if you have any history of musical training. But even if you don’t, then music contains stimulation for the brain in the form of complex sound changes, intricate hierarchical patterns, a ‘beat’, and rhythms that trigger our motor systems (when you can’t help but tap your foot!). And we know that memories are more likely to be deep and easy to recall if they have been through a process of elaborate encoding as opposed to simple encoding.

2)Music is everywhere – The ubiquity of modern music, played as it is in our shops, offices, gyms, restaurants and homes, means that our memory system gets plenty of practice in encoding music as part of other experiences. The role of music in many of our important ceremonies and life events (e.g. weddings, funerals, birthdays and New Year) means that some of the most emotional times of our lives, and our subsequent memories of them, will have music involved.

3)Music is personal – Music has no overt referential meaning; unlike language it does not directly refer to the things around us. To put this into an example, try to imagine a piece of music that everyone would agree was about a tree – fairly impossible right?!
This is what the academic Ian Cross (Cambridge) once termed as music’s ‘floating intentionality’. In practice, this means that any one piece of music can be interpreted in different ways by different people. It can be a ‘blank slate’ which we can imbue with whatever meaning we would like. This means that music is inherently flexible, and can be built into our memories in a way that is completely unique to you.

So that is my case for why music is special, and has a special role within memory. The student then moved onto to questions relating to why music is able to trigger memories from so long ago. Here I talked about a memory effect known as context dependent memory. One of the most famous studies in this area was done by Godden and Baddeley. They designed a great real-life experiment to determine how much influence the context of a situation has on our memory. They tested memories of deep sea divers in two situations; learning a list of words either on the beach or deep under the water (with waterproof lists of course!). They then tried to recall the words in the two situations. And they found a context dependent facilitation effect; if you learned underwater then your recall is better underwater than on land, and the opposite if you learned on the land.

So what does all that mean for music? If you learned something in the context of a certain piece of music then your recall of the things you learned is likely to be improved by the presence of that music. And if you were particularly happy at a time in your life, and music was present, then music can help to facilitate that memory of happiness and bring it to your current time. So in a commercial environment you can help to facilitate memories by providing context appropriate music, especially music that is linked to the types of emotions and moods that the commercial environment is keen to represent.

And then for the final questions the student was interested in why musical memories seem to survive so well into our old age. At least part of the answer for that question comes from all that I have been describing so far.

1)Musical memories are strong because they are made up of lots of different parts – sound, sights, movements and so on. This means they can resist the breakdown of neural pathways as we age.

2)Music is so often tied up with very important events in our life that it is only natural that it carries a degree of emotional attachment. Emotion not only helps to code a memory in a more elaborate way (making it stronger) but means that music can be triggered when we are in that emotional state again or indeed trigger that state when we hear it again. This is why music holds so much promise as a form of therapy for people in depressive or anxious states, especially as we age.

3)We have absolutely unique tastes in music. This means that any musical environment is inherently personal to us. This means that it is very important to personalise music therapy but also that it is possible to make our experience of any environment (including commercial ones) a personal one. And everyone likes to be treated like an individual!

So musical memory is a uniquely powerful system that is at the heart of our understanding of who we are as people and what we have been through in our lives, and can provide transport back to our happiest times whenever we need.

– Dr Victoria Williamsson, Ohlogy’s scientist in residence.