Music and Memory

We all know music can influence our moods, but can it actually boost our memory? How do musical memories emerge at the borders of identity, experience and culture? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore these questions and discuss the curious ways we remember music and sounds.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick. As we've
discussed on the show before, memory is a complex topic.
There are things we remember, there are things we forget,

(00:24):
There are the things we only think we've forgotten, and
then there are the numerous ways in which altered memories
are stored and then retrieved as if they're fact. Memory
is powerful, it's beautiful, it's dangerous at times, and it's
essential to human culture and the human experience. In this episode,
we're gonna be looking at some of the issues related
to memory and music because the way we think about,

(00:46):
store and recall music. I feel like this helps illuminate
what's going on in the complexity of memory. And it's
also something that's that's that's highly relatable. We can we
can all dip in on the this particular topic, and
I look forward to hearing from listeners about it. But
also we're dealing with something that's you know, slightly intangible.

(01:06):
You know, you try and when you try and think
and talk about how you remember music, how songs stick
with you over the ages, and what songs mean to you. Uh,
you know, you know, you get into a lot of
interesting territory. Sure. I mean, I think one of the
most common things that we can all relate to is
the way that music has, uh such a powerful ability

(01:29):
to evoke by gone places and times that you know,
to to just sort of like put you right back
in the mindset of you know, that summer, the year
that you were nineteen years old or whatever. Um. And
it's kind of strange why sequences of sounds do that
seemingly so much more than almost any other, uh stimulus

(01:52):
of any kind. Yeah, yeah, they you know, there's a
lot of nostalgia tied up in music, and uh, you know,
I I thought I might share a personal example of
of how I sometimes feel like I'm haunted by music.
Sharing this because I think it's a good example for
our discussion, but also, deep down, I have this secret
hope that somebody will will help me identify this or

(02:14):
send me a maybe just you know, send me a
VHS tape that will answer my question. Uh. And I
imagine people out there have had similar, many similar experiences.
So as a child home one summer and watching lots
of daytime television. I saw a commercial for a community
college or state college. I'm not sure which, but it
I seem to recall it was probably a regional advertisement.

(02:38):
This might have been for it might have been a
college in Tennessee, or it might have been a college
in Kentucky. I'm not sure which, but it contained various
splashes of technology and humanities classes. It showed footage of people,
you know, tinkering with some electronic equipment, uh, you know,
doing some other stuff that looked vocational. And it also
contained uh, footage of the stage performance featuring what I

(03:02):
think was a Cyclops, like a large scale Cyclops costume
that towered over people. It might have been a minotaur,
but I think it was a Cyclops. You can respect
their advertising department saying, okay, we got a bunch of
footage of the stage productions. What what what goes front
and center in the commercial? It's got to be the monster? Yeah, yeah,
I mean it made an impression on my mind. But
what also made an impression was the music in this commercial,

(03:26):
because at the at the time and as I look
back on it, it felt like the music of the future.
It was some sort of glistening retro sounding synth and
I've never been able to find out exactly what it was.
I've I've never found like footage uploaded on YouTube of
this particular advertisement, and as far as I know that,
the commercials just lost to history. And again it was

(03:48):
likely very regional. But listening to Boards of Canada, the
musical duo years later whose specializes and often very nostalgic,
founding sounding retro synthies tracks, um, I did listen to
a track titled M nine off of Old Tunes Volume one,
and it either it reminds me a lot of what

(04:12):
was the of the song that was in this advertisement.
It reminds me so much that I'm tempted to wonder
if this was the track somehow. This is funny because
to me, the Boards of Canada very much is the
sound of like an a trium in a in an
institutional building on a college campus that has like sort
of futuristic looking staircases exagging around and like an orange

(04:35):
carpet or something exactly. That's I mean, that's the complicating thing, right.
The kind of sounds that the Boards of Canada excels
at crafting are are sounds that are reaching back towards
the time period, like they're they're they're kind of reverse
engineering the sort of sounds I would have heard in
this advertisement. And I'm not sure exactly when I would

(04:56):
have listened to this advertisement. The tape in question, Old
tun Tunes Volume one, came out, and I think, but
I'm yeah, I'm not sure how the timelines add up here,
And if they do add up, I'm not sure exactly
how that track would have wound up on this commercial.
And like I say, in Tennessee or Kentucky or something,
um and and again, I'll likely never have the answer

(05:19):
to it. But every time I listen to that track
M nine, it takes me back to that experience of
watching this this advertisement and sort of glimpsing into this
possibility of what the future was like, what college might
be like, what adulthood might be like, what you know,
a life of technology or art, what that might consist of.

(05:40):
I think it's interesting. I don't know if you're even
aware you said this, but that your vision of the
future necessarily includes consciously retro elements, like retro sounding synth.
Is what you what you think of when you think
of the future. Yeah, it's it's weird. Yeah, And and
and I'm still kind of tied to this where I
see like there's certain building styles which are no longer modern,

(06:04):
that are very much retro, but they still look like
the future to me because they looked like in many cases,
they look like you know these strange, you know, collegiate
buildings that I saw when I was a child, you know,
some of these buildings that were probably built in the
nineteen seventies that we're you know, super reliant on air
conditioning and maybe didn't have as much natural life. Like

(06:25):
the atrium and overdrawn at the Memory Bank, and it's
both it is both of the past and of the future.
Yeah that that I forget which atrium was used in
that movie, but they made great use of an atrium there. Uh,
there are various other sci fi films. I love it
when it's clear that they're filming inside of a hotel
or a mall and making him look like some sort

(06:46):
of like a futuristic building. Absolutely love it. And to
that extent, I love just being in a large atrium.
There is that. I mean, these are like cathedrals, they're
just the god at the center of it is just
the hotel chain. They give you a brutal hanker in
for some cinemas. Sorry, the overdrawn of the memory bank
jokes can can stop right now. Well, you know everything

(07:09):
that I've talked about so far, We've been talking about
the boards of Canada. We've been talking about music that
had that is that is completely um instrumental, it has
no lyrics because once you start talking about lyrics, Uh, this,
this adds an entirely different dimension to everything. Yeah, So
this is something that I wanted to talk about because
I came across a paper that I thought was pretty interesting. Um,

(07:31):
So I guess here's the best way to introduce it.
I'm gonna start with a couple of questions for anybody
who ever did school theater as a kid, If you
were in plays when you're in you know, elementary school
or whatever. If you ever had a speaking part in
a play, can you still now remember any of your lines?
And if so, how much can you remember? And then

(07:54):
the second part is uh, same time of your life,
If you ever had a singing part the musical, can
you still remember the lyrics to any of the songs?
If you are anything like me, you probably find that
you don't really remember many spoken lines from childhood plays.
Most of the ones that stick in my head are

(08:16):
I think they're memorable because something like maybe something funny
or otherwise memorable happened during practice of the scene they're in,
so they sort of become a part of an episodic memory.
But but even examples like that are are pretty rare
in my memory. But I I can quite easily and
immediately remember all kinds of lyrics from songs that I

(08:39):
sang many years ago and haven't practiced since, songs from
the Pirates of Penzance or or like a musical adaptation
of god knows what kind of weird stuff I was
in as as a child, But like the lyrics have
stayed in my brain for twenty plus years. Yeah, my
my experience is much the same. Um. You know. I

(09:02):
think back on plays that I was in and and
and in some cases I had like pretty major roles,
had a lot of lines to remember, Like I believe
I was in a community production of other people's money,
and I remember nothing. I had nothing at all that
I said from that play, uh, which which on one
hand I understand because I didn't like love that play.
I mean, it was an enjoyable experience at the time.

(09:23):
But it's not like my favorite play or anything, So
it makes sense that I would maybe make room for
other things in my memory and sort of flush that information. Um.
But then, and but then. I also think back on
musical community theater musicals I was in, and in some
cases I had pretty major roles there. I was in
a production of seventeen seventy six, and I don't remember

(09:44):
any of the music from that. I don't remember. I
remember the costumes and sort of the experience, but I
remember no words that came out of my mouth. Well,
for me, I don't know how much it has to do.
I mean, I don't think I have any particular love
for like the Pirates of pens Ants, but I could
still rather. You know, I am the very model of
a modern major general. All the you know, the from

(10:05):
Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical And this is interesting
to me because in both cases the lines I spoke
in the lyrics I sang are collections of verbal text.
In both cases, I would have made a conscious effort
to memorize them, and I would have practiced them by
repeating them out loud over and over. But for the

(10:25):
most part, the spoken lines for me completely fade away,
and a lot of the song lyrics have remained. They
have way more staying power overall. Obviously I don't remember
all of them, So what's making the difference? Yeah? This, this,
This is interesting because I also think back on things
that I liked. For instance, um, I had to learn

(10:46):
the Dagger monologue from Macbeth Forum, just a Shakespearean acting
class I took once and I love I love that monologue,
a great monologue, And there have been times since then
where I kind of wish I could just belt that
monologue in its entirety, but I cannot. It's it's mostly
gone just with you know, a few lines remain, and
if I read it, you know, it comes sort of

(11:08):
comes back to me a little bit. But then there
are things like Don McClain's American Pie, a song that
I have never performed. It's not like community theater or
something where I had to get up and actually performed
this stuff in front of people and work through memorize
and work through stage fright. But with with American Pie,
I could probably recite all of that right now. I

(11:28):
haven't listened to it in a in a in a
long time. But like that, is a that is a
song where like the entire um uh, you know, the
entirety of the lyrics, you know, they're just stuck in
my head and they're not going anywhere. Uh. And it's
because of the power of the music. I guess, well,
maybe maybe not. I mean, I guess it's hard to
say why exactly it is that these lyrics seem to

(11:49):
stick with us for so long. Now. Another thing, just
from personal experience to sort of inform this question, is
that I have also, definitely in my life, back when
I was in school, uh, tried to use melody as
a mnemonic device when trying to memorize things for a test.
I don't know if you ever did this, but I remember,
like trying to create songs or set things. I was

(12:11):
trying to remember to the melodies of existing songs. And
I don't know if it worked for me, but I
at least I thought it might work enough that I
tried to do it. Well. Yeah, I don't have a
lot of personal experience with this, but I've I've you know,
I've heard that it works for some people, like some
people and and in general I'm talking about Western um

(12:34):
sinologists sometimes memorize the dynasties of China by using a
particular song. I forget which a song. Idea is that
it's like some Western song and then American. It's not,
but you can you can look it up. I remember
finding a video of like a couple of old sinologists,
Western sinologists setting around singing this little childhood tune because

(12:56):
it's how they both learned the order of the dynasty's.
So it definitely works for people. But I don't think
I ever really leaned on it myself. Okay, well I
would like to hear that. Maybe have to look that
up later. But so I was wondering a couple of things.
So first of all, is this preference for at least
the perceived ability to memorize song lyrics over other verbal content.

(13:18):
Is this just me? And second, is there any evidence
that this actually works, that this is actually true? So
the first thing is it seems based on what we've
been talking about, it may not be universal, but it's
definitely not just me. I found plenty of articles in
the mainstream press about using music as a mnemonic device
or a learning tool, and some researchers thinking that that

(13:41):
music or setting verbal information to music might help people
remember it better. But the second question would be is
there evidence that it actually works? And there I think
the evidence might not be a firm yes or no.
It's actually quite complicated, but complicated in in ways that
seem pretty interesting and might reveal some things about our

(14:03):
experience of music and about the way memory works. So
there are actually a ton of studies on the role
of music and the effects of music on memorization and
verbal learning. Um, so I I can't do do that
whole slate of literature. Instead, I wanted to start by
focusing on one study that I found interesting and then

(14:23):
maybe comment a little more broadly. So this study was
published in two thousand seven in the journal Memory and Cognition.
It is by Omilie Rossett and Isabelle Perettes, and it's
called learning Lyrics to Sing or Not to Sing. And
they begin by talking about this existing popular belief that
we've already been discussing, as well as some empirical evidence

(14:45):
that music can possibly aid in memory, especially learning of
verbal information, learning of words. And so they cite a
few examples, such as previous studies one by Dixon and
Grant in two thousand three that investigated trying to learned
the laws of physics through karaoke that sounds both sweet
and really cringe inducing. And then secondly, they mentioned to

(15:08):
study my Medina from nineteen three that looked into learning
English as a second language via songs, with the idea
that songs might provide an advantage over just normal verbal content.
But the authors point out that if it's true that
singing and music help with learning verbal information, it's not
obvious why that should be the case, because, after all,

(15:31):
when you learn a song, there's literally more information that
you have to encode and retrieve than when just learning,
say that the text of a song, just the lyrics,
because you're you're adding music on top of it. It
seems like that would be more to remember, might be distracting,
and thus would uh, you know, would make things harder. Yeah,

(15:52):
I mean, if if memory serves uh. Some actors use
the technique of learning their lines flat without any kind
of motion added to them, and then that come then
they build on that later, you know, So they start
without any additional information aside from the words, and you know,
of course you know the meaning behind the words, right,
And though uh, though I guess we we should always

(16:13):
remember that acting techniques are not necessarily informed by the
latest memory and cognition. Yeah, like then all these things,
there's also a certain amount of tradition and different views
on performance that you know that that may not be
scientifically verified, right, But that's another thing like we've like
we were talking about that, you know, at least it
grows out of personal experience. So you have to wonder

(16:34):
if there's something there that could be plumbed by empirical research.
So the authors here are Stt and Parretts. They note
that in previous studies, the results looking into this question
on whether music aids in in verbal learning and memory

(16:55):
formation and retrieval, the results have been kind of mixed.
But while they're this is not the universal finding, there
have been a number of studies that show people have
an easier time recalling sung words over spoken words. Now,
in their introductory section they talk about a few reasons
they're hypothesized for why this might be. Why might if

(17:15):
people do remember words from songs better than the same
words spoken, what what would be going on there? And
so they say, well, maybe, uh, speed actually plays a role,
because when you take a text and you sing it,
generally you will spend a longer time pronouncing the words
in the text, then if you just read it or

(17:37):
recite it out loud, and thus it the text is
sort of less compressed. They also say that the characteristics
of the melody seem to be important because a simple
melody that has a very sort of repeated line seems
to be easier to memorize than complex melodies like you
might find and say, an opera or something. But then

(17:57):
also that they offer another reason that saw lyrics might
be easier to memorize, which are structural characteristics of the
text that make it easier to recall. So to read
from their introduction quote, for instance, the metrical structure of
music and the number of musical notes in a line
can queue word recall. Similarly, song lyrics are usually constrained

(18:20):
by both semantics, meaning meaning that there is like a
meaning constraint on what can be said in a song.
So they say a story underlies the words, generally through
a schema or script. Uh. And then so you you've
got the semantic constraints. You know, the song sort of
has to tell a story that makes sense. That certainly
not true of all songs, especially these days. Um. But

(18:41):
then the other thing would be sound patterns, and this
would be things like rhymes or alliteration, which they also say,
megan limit possibilities of what types of words could come next.
You know, these offer you some schema of of you know,
predicting what the rest of the line would be. That
that's interesting because makes me think of American Pie. It

(19:01):
also makes me think of Warren's Van's Roland the Headless
Thompson Gunner, both long songs that I easily remember, but
both of them are are very narrative songs. The lyrics
tell a story, especially with Roland. You know, there's a beginning,
a middle, and an end to it. There's a climax,
and they've both got very regular rhythm in the delivery

(19:23):
and uh and a rhyme scheme. And so those things
can help you remember because they limit the possibilities of
what could be coming up next in the song. If
you know the say the rhyme sound at the end
of the last line, that helps give you a clue
as to what the next line is. Whereas you know,
you might have trouble recalling otherwise. Yeah, And the authors
here note and interesting thing they say when errors occur

(19:46):
in song recall, they say quote, the changes usually preserve
the rhyme and the number of syllables in the line.
So if you were say, singing American Pie, and you
couldn't remember drove my chevy to the levy, but the
levy was dry, you might at least be able to say,
took my chevy from the levy and I looked at

(20:07):
the sky. You know, it would be something that preserved
the rhyme and preserved the meter the number of syllables. Yeah, yeah,
a misheard and misconstrued lyrics are still going to They're
still going to meet the basic framework that was presented
in the song. So anyway, in this study, the authors
did a couple of experiments to see if learning verbal

(20:29):
materials through song actually did provide a memory advantage over
learning the same verbal materials just recited or spoken. And
so there were three different conditions as people were trying
to learn the lyrics of an unfamiliar song, and there're
three different conditions here. So first is the sung sung condition,

(20:50):
and in this condition, the subject would have the song
sung to them and then they would try to sing
it back. Second is the sung spoken condition, and year
they would have the song sung to them, but then
they would try to speak the lyrics back and then
the next condition. I thought this was interesting. They tried
something called the divided spoken condition, and this is where

(21:14):
they would be presented with the lyrics but not sung,
though they would be hearing the accompanying background music. And
I guess this was to try this was sort of
a control to try to rule out Wait a minute,
could it just be that having the music going on
while you're learning the words is what contributes to learning
and not the fact that the lyrics themselves are being sung.

(21:36):
M Now, that's interesting. That makes me think of of
of songs like the Moody Blues Knights and White Satin,
which has of course traditional lyrics, but then also has
that spoken words segment, and thinking back on it, like
I can, I can remember a lot of that spoken
words segment from Knights and White Satin, despite the fact

(21:57):
that it's not like, you know, a piece that I'm
particularly attached to, but that the words will come. Well.
I guess so in one of the conditions, that's what
they're going to test here, that does that does the
spoken words section actually have a memory advantage over just
something being spoken without any music? Um? So in keeping
with sort of the conventional wisdom and with what a

(22:17):
number of studies had found before, they predicted that the
sung sung condition would create the best word recall. So
when people heard heard a song sung to them and
they tried to sing it back, they would do the best.
But here's where I thought this got interesting. They found
no in this test. The hypothesis was not confirmed. They
predicted that the sung sung condition would be best, but

(22:39):
they write quote. However, fewer words were recalled when singing
than when speaking. Furthermore, the mode of presentation, whether sung
or spoken, had no influence on lyric recall, either short
or long term recall. But anyway, at the end of
their abstract they right quote altogether. The results into kate

(23:00):
that the text and the melody of a song have
separate representations in memory, making singing a dual task to perform,
at least in the first steps of learning. Interestingly, musical
training had little impact on performance, suggesting that vocal learning
is a basic and widespread skill. So, first of all,
I just like to say, you know, I like this

(23:21):
study because it's a great example of a negative finding
that can still be really interesting. The hypothesis is not confirmed.
Yet we can still learn a lot from from what's
going on here, and the authors had some interesting thoughts
in their conclusion section about about what might be happening
with music and verbal memory. So I want to read
a section from their discussion in their conclusion that that

(23:43):
I thought was interesting here. So they say, Nevertheless, one
important cue for auditory vocal remembering that is common to
both music and poems is rhythm. The regular organization of stresses,
mostly alternating between strong and weak beats or still doables,
is supposed to limit the words that are compatible with it,

(24:03):
and thereby constrains words selection, at least in English. The
rhythmic similarity between the prosodic accent structure of spoken words
and the metric structure of the melody is striking and
has long been noted by linguists and music theorists. Moreover,
Palmer and Kelly in nineteen two have shown that linguistic
accent structure and musical meter are generally aligned in Western songs. Hence,

(24:28):
rhythmic structure, as determined by the number of syllables or
notes and the location of primary stress, may serve as
a compatible format for setting words to tones. By this account,
Recalling a particular stress pattern in a melody or spoken
text activates a metrical grid that constrains the type of
text or melody that is compatible with it. A common

(24:51):
metrical grid is typically used throughout a song. Therefore, metric
structure provides a means by which lines of an entire
song are organized in a common hierarchical structure, thereby relating
non adjacent song components and helping memory. So I think
what they're arguing here is that maybe in these cases
where we have found that music aids in verbal memory,

(25:14):
it's because the words in the music are set to
a sort of poetic rhythmic structure, and it's that structure
that makes things easier to memorize, not so much the
setting it to the melody part. Uh. They also note
some interesting things like one thing that uh they mentioned
is that advantages of lyrical recall might actually depend upon language.

(25:39):
Uh So, just for example, it might be easier to
recall words with the help of lyrical structures in English
versus French. That's not clear, that's just a possibility they mentioned. Um.
But then they also say something that I think might
tie into something you're going to discuss in a bit. Uh,
so they argue in the end quote. This conclusion raises
the question of why music is believed to be so

(26:01):
important for verbal memory, not only in oral tradition, but
also in everyday life. We believe this is due to
a misunderstanding of the utility of music. Music is not
at the service of language in songs. Music contributes to
the creation of a general mood that is shared with others.
And then they quote an author named Booth from that

(26:22):
teen eighty one who writes that a singer tells people
quote nothing they need to decode or learn. He evokes
in them ways of seeing life that they already have.
And then they go on to say that quote. In fact,
oral transmission of text is rarely word for word or
verbatim in singing. Althose singers believe that they sing the

(26:44):
text exactly as heard, They never do so. Uh. And
then side studies by Reuben Reuben famous research into recounting
of like long oral poems, things like the Iliad and
the Odyssey, that people supposedly do from memory. But a
lot of these studies find that that actually, while people
think they are performing the same poem or song over

(27:07):
and over, in fact, they're making major changes to it
as they do. And in fact, maybe the role of
music is to sort of create the illusion that what
you are recreating is the same thing, rather than making
it the same thing. So the structure is still the same,
the words are still rhyming. Uh, therefore, surely nothing has changed.

(27:30):
But there is of course room for stuff to have changed, right,
So details may change, but something about the fact that
it is the same song creates the feeling that you
are recreating the same work, even though the details are
actually different. So anyway, I thought the study was really interesting,
though it is older. This is from two thousand seven,
So I was trying to look through a more recent

(27:52):
studies on this subject the effects of music on verbal
memory and recall, and trying to see if I could
find anything, you know, if any newer conclusions had emerged.
And it looks to me like the the landscape of
findings on this is still somewhat mixed, like it is
not consistent, and that this may just indicate that there
are different features of different kinds of music and verbal

(28:15):
encoding tasks that that that provide different results in the end. So,
for example, I was looking at one study from Frontiers
in Psychology published in by Lehman and Seifert called can
music foster learning? Effects of different text modalities on learning
and information retrieval. So they have different ways of having

(28:37):
people try to learn text through written exposure, through spoken exposure,
and through sung exposure, and they found that the actually
was through exposure to written text that people signal recalled
the most detail in the verbal text. However, they say,
and and this one really surprised me. But at least
within this study, they say, quote comprehension after learning with

(29:00):
the sung modality was significantly superior compared to in learning
with the written learning modality. Comprehension so like comprehension of
the of the text being presented. So they say that
reading helps people focus more on details, which may help
them answer sort of specific recall questions that would come
down to a single word or detail later on. But

(29:24):
listening to the verbal content as a song leads to
higher levels of comprehension of the entire text. So one
last thing I came across the I found an article
in the Wall Street Journal from two thousand thirteen by
Heidie Mitchell called does music aid in Memorization? And this
was interesting because it just uh, it consulted the opinion

(29:45):
of a of a leading American psychologist who does research
on memory, and this psychologist is Henry L. Rodiger the third,
who is a professor of psychology at the Memory Lab
at Washington University in St. Louis. And what he's as is,
there's wide agreement that information set to music is easier
to remember. Now why would this be, well, Roddiger actually

(30:07):
uh cites something that the authors of that earlier paper mentioned,
So he says that music aids in memory because it
helps in the retrieval process. So of course we know
memory involves not only storage but the act of retrieval.
And this can be clearly evidenced by the tip of
the tongue effect. You think about how you can know

(30:28):
the word you want to use, but for some reason
you can't locate that word in your memory at the moment,
and then suddenly something clicks and then you have the words.
It was in there. It was retrievable in your brain,
but you couldn't put it together. And likewise, you can
fail to recall a memorized string of words, a memorized sentence,
until maybe you get the first word in the string

(30:50):
and then it all comes rushing up out of the
DP your memory. Uh and so. So Roddeger claims that
music is helpful at retrieval of verbal information be cause
it provides structure through things like rhythm and rhyme, like
we were talking about earlier that the the other authors
discussed in their conclusion, And it's this structure, the rhythm
and the rhyme, that acts as a queue that makes

(31:13):
it easier to retrieve the stored information of the next line.
So Roddiger claims that it is the structure, not the melody,
that aids in the retrieval process. When it is the
case that it's easier to remember lyrics, he thinks at
least that it's probably due to the fact that lyrics
are encoded in these rhythmic structures, things that have meter

(31:34):
and they have rhyme that make them easier to recall
than just unstructured strings of text. And you know, I
can kind of say that it is similarly easier to
recall lines of poems, even though they're not sung out loud,
just poems that have uh say, meter and rhyme, than
it is to recall just lines of unstructured prose from

(31:58):
stories that I like or or famous speeches I feel like. Um,
like perhaps at some point I had I was asked
to memorize the Gettysburg Address or something like that, and
like that really doesn't stick with me. Some of Macbeth
sticks with me because there is very much a cadence
in a in a rhythm to to all of that. Uh,

(32:18):
and also things like a rhyme of the ancient mariner.
You know. Um, I certainly don't have it all memorized,
but there's some some bits of it that are stuck
in my memory. So yeah, I could. I can see
what they're getting at in this this paper. And then
that might also explain cases where like, so if you
take song lyrics and you're just trying to say, do
people learn song lyrics better if they hear them spoken

(32:40):
out loud or if they hear them sung? And this
is on initial exposure. Things might change if you know
you're you're exposed to these words either spoken or sung,
day after day for a long time. But on initial exposure, Uh,
the authors of that study from two thousand seven didn't
really find a difference, Like you you did not do
better if you heard them sung. I wonder if that
could just be as well their song lyrics anyway, So

(33:01):
even if they're spoken out loud, they would still have
the same structure. They'd still have the rhythm and the rhyme. Yeah. Yeah,
Like even if you're if you're not hearing the song
rolland the headless Thompson gunner, there's still Roland was a
gunner from the Land of the Midnight Sun. You know,
it has it has that cadence, and it has that rhyme.
Oh and in case in point, I actually got the
lyrics wrong there, it's Roland was a warrior from the

(33:24):
Land of the Midnight Sun. But I got the important
parts right. Well. It sounds like that that's what happens
with songs, right Like we keep the structure and you
get things about the gist. But but yeah, the details
seemed us shift all over the place anyway, though. I Mean,
it seems to me like this is the kind of
thing that we could probably return to in the future,
because I bet that there is still a lot more
to learn about the relationship between uh, verbal memory and music.

(33:49):
It seems that the studies we've looked at here established
some things, but it's still it still seems to be
a messy picture where sometimes music does aid in memory
and sometimes it doesn't, and figuring out exactly what what
all the variables are there would probably continue to be interesting. Yeah,

(34:13):
So I'd like to come back to um to some
of the ideas we're talking about earlier, and then some
of the ideas that came up in uh in your
discussion of of the work with lyrics and and that
concerns sort of this broader picture of of memory and music.
Because memories involving music, they of course, can be highly individual.
We've already shared a few different examples of that. We

(34:36):
we also have any number of examples where a particular
track or particular work of music becomes linked to a
particular idea of a particular book, a particular movie, a memory,
a hope, or a dream, sometimes in a good way,
sometimes in a in a bad way, or perhaps a
slightly annoying way. Perhaps you've had a had a co
worker with a with a particular ring tone that that

(34:58):
that kind of jabbed at you, and and now that
song is forever linked with just random outbursts from this
person's phone. There there is a David Bowie song where
I can no longer hear the opening guitar riff without
thinking that the next thing is is going to be
like hearing a voice saying, hey, what's up? Uh. But anyway,

(35:19):
the direction I wanted to go in though at this
point of the episode is to is to get into
the the idea of the connection between music and and
not only individual memory, but collective memory. Okay, Now you're
probably wondering, if some of you may be wanting, okay,
what is collective memory to tell us or or remind us? Well? Uh.

(35:39):
French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Hubbox born eighteen seventy seven
died developed the concept of collective memory and has been
explored by various other thinkers since then. The basic idea
is that while individuals remember things, groups of people also
remember things together. Now, I was also reading a paper

(36:01):
titled Collective Memory What is It? By Getty and Elam
from volume of History and Memory, And here the authors
make a connection between the modern concept of collective memory
and you know, much older traditions of myth and legend,
because this is this is arguably how we used to
understand some of these concepts in terms of national myths

(36:22):
local legends and so forth, but as well discuss modernity
affects some of the apparent mechanisms and flows involved here
with individual and collective memories of events and uh in histories. Now,
there are two distinct areas of collective memory. They're small
scale collective memory and this is in small scale groups

(36:43):
among the members of small scale groups. And then there
are large scale collective memories in large scale groups. And
this later category is also known as memory boom. Uh.
There's there's also literature about the connections between the two
because anytime we're talking about these memories like individual memory,
small all scale collective memory, large scale collective memory. Uh,
they're not you know, distinct things separated by walls. They

(37:07):
are they influence each other, and so there's there's very
much the individual experience of all of this. But even
if you have a group of just two people, you
see this interesting thing emerging. We've talked about this before
on the show, and there are some actually some studies
about this about how couples, uh, you know, any kind
of to any two people who have kind of like
a long term close relationship, they'll often do this thing

(37:28):
where they share the task of remembering certain things, and
this can be a point of you know, slight irritation
at times, like why am I the one that remembers uh,
you know, Uncle Karen's birthday or or whatever the thing
might be. And we end up doing this thing where we, uh,
we allow the other person to be the the the

(37:48):
remember of that particular fact, and then perhaps we end
up remembering other things, and then you engage in this
kind of collective remembering of things. Uh. And this is
this is of course one of the great great pleasures
in life. Right. You get together with either you're you're
talking with a significant other, perhaps as a close friend
or a relative, and what do you do together? You
share stories? But you remember things together. Yeah remember when. Yeah. Though,

(38:14):
it's great to point out the idea of sharing stories
as as being crucial to this this collective memorization, because
that's sort of like it. It puts emphasis on the
fact that the the retrieval of these memories often in
itself is a type of performance. It's like a creative
act in a way. And uh, and I think that's

(38:34):
one reason you ever get in the situation where, uh,
you are together with a group of people and say,
your spouse says I, Oh, here's you know. They bring
up the concept of a story, but then they want
you to tell it, you know, and so that you
can kind of something sometimes doesn't quite feel right there
because it's a story that you could tell, but somehow

(38:56):
I don't know, like you don't feel like up to
performing it at that moment. It's not like you can't
remember the details as they're supposed to be told, but
something about being put on the spot is like I
was not ready to perform. So it's almost like you
can't remember. But I think a lot of times we
we kind of stow away the idea that well, this
person either they have the better telling of the story,

(39:16):
they have the beats down, they can tell it in
a funny way. Or sometimes it's more that person's story
to tell, right, like it's it's their experience. So it's
even maybe you don't feel is right being the bearer
of that story, like like you need to tell it,
Please tell that story. It's such a good one. So
so basically in all of this, a kind of emergent
memory can emerge from a small group of people or

(39:39):
a large group of people. Um oh, and of course
we have to remember we're talking about. When we're talking
about memory retrieval, we have to recall that the mere
act of retrieving a memory can alter the memory. UH.
And in fact, the memories that we retrieve the most,
or perhaps the ones we can trust the least, right, um.
But in either case it's important to drive home. We're

(39:59):
talking about ecological and historical concepts here, and UH it's
it's a different beast from objective history, but rather a
view of the past that involves specific views and values
of a given group, Right, I mean, I think that's
something that should come through. It's not that humans never
recall details accurately. Sometimes they do, but broadly, I think

(40:20):
it is better to think about your memory as a
sort of UH, a mythology based on facts about history,
rather than an objective recording of events. Yes, yes, that
the link between mythology and UH and even individual memory,
but also collective memory. I think it's strong, and you
can also tie in I think various connections to the

(40:41):
idea of collective unconscious and the power of various symbols
and tropes. Um. But the basic concept here of collective
memory sometimes described as social memory, and UH it is
also sometimes criticized for being very monolithic and its approach
because everyone in a particular group is not actually going
to have the exact same memory of something, and while
their various memories might contribute to a collective memory, they

(41:04):
are still not going to have the same specific memories
of the event. Also very true of mythology. I mean,
there's rarely just one version of a myth, right, you know, right, right,
and get all these different variations on where did Medusa
come from or whatever? But then often you will have
somebody come along and attempt to codify it and say,
this is the version that we are adhering to. And

(41:25):
sometimes this is merely and sometimes it's accidental, like a
great storyteller comes along and retells the story and now
this is the one. Other times, you know, there there
are potentially nefarious attitudes involved, you know, particularly if you
have someone who is looking to to lead people or
manipulate people, and in doing so they might say, well,
this this is our collective memory. Surely you remember it

(41:47):
this way. This is the way that that I would
like for you to think of it. But you know,
we might think of this. We might take this concept
and apply it to something like let's say the nineties
sixties in America. Uh, there are and we're individual memories
of this time period. But there also are and we're
collective memories of that decade. And depending on who you
were and where you were, there was likely a fair

(42:10):
amount of drift concerning the exact flavor of that time period.
Was it a time of liberation, a time of struggle,
a time of great danger, a time of laughable fashions? Uh?
You know, I'm simplifying here, but hopefully you get the idea.
And on top of that, media plays a role in
all of this as well, again, as do certain manipulations
of recollections of tough times by people who have a

(42:33):
particular agenda in all of it. And of course music
plays a part as well. And in this I come
to the paper that I was reading about all of this,
um titled record and Hold Popular Music between personal and
collective memory. I wonder if that might have been an
illusion or a play on sample and hold from Neil Young.

(42:54):
I don't know, but it's by the the researcher yo
Say Van Dunk, published in Critical Studies and Media Communication
from two thousand six. Van Donk writes that quote people
nourish emotional and tangible connections to songs before entrusting them
to their personal, mental, and material reservoirs. But they also

(43:15):
need to share musical preferences with others before songs become
part of a collective repertoire that in turn provides new
resources for personal engagement with recorded music. So her main
contention here is that that musical memories emerge and become
codified at the intersection of personal memory, collective memory, and identity. Uh,

(43:38):
you know, which leads to the question how do personal
and collective memories intermingle here? And I think this is
really quite interesting to think about. For for for instance, think
back to a song that came out when let's say
you were in high school or perhaps college, or perhaps
some other justformative time in your life, you know, think
about a time when a lot of new music was
entering your life and your life was changing and so forth. So,

(44:01):
first of all, how did you think about the song then,
and how do you think about it now? How did
your group, small or large think about the song, How
have you come to reflect on it as a product
of that time period? And how is the song packaged
and sold to you at the time figuratively and perhaps literally,
and then how has the media been packaged or repackaged

(44:22):
since then? You know, I recall a kind of youthful
arrogance about my taste in music when I was in
high school, and a lot of the stuff I liked,
I'm sure I would now regard as quite horrible. Um,
but I but I remember thinking at the time like, oh,
finally music is good, you know about about like the
kind of music that I liked then. I mean, I
guess I grew out of that fairly quickly, but like

(44:44):
there was a kind of a feeling of like, Okay,
you know this new this new type of metal that
I'm into now, which in my case was probably like
early two thousands metals, so you know, like real good stuff. Uh.
I was like, finally, you know, we've we reached sort
of the apex of music. This is what it's all
been building up to. This is the new frontier here.

(45:05):
There's a kind of pity for like previous generations who
didn't have that, you know, they didn't really know what
music was about because there wasn't disturbed yet. Yeah, it
reminds me. I think it was a no fielding line
about how um. Uh, that's saying something about like adam
ant having been having invented music and someone was like
what about classical music? And he was like, well, it

(45:27):
was just that was just warming up, you know, like
like well, whatever came before the music that was pivotal
for you, Like that was just the precursor, the necessary
precursor to the real music that was that was actually speaking,
which is is ridiculous, but also I think makes a
lot of sense as we as we move on through
all of this. Uh so, um, you know, there's a

(45:48):
lot to consider when thinking about it. But uh and
in those questions here that I asked, the only scratched
the surface. But as um As van Deynk points out,
Number one, remembering as an active process of a mind
in the world. So we are stirred to remember things
by a multitude of stimuli. So it's you know, it's
you're not just a black box of memory. There's all

(46:10):
this additional stuff coming in stirring memories, um, you know,
and sometimes like stirring them up to into a into
a storm, into a uh, you know, a new obsession
or a re obsession. The second point is that that
music is enabled through instruments and technology and quote enabling
apparatus becomes part of the recollecting experience. So this is

(46:32):
I think this is perhaps worth remembering as we occasionally
throw out old physical albums and playing devices like all
of that stuff. And I'm not saying, hey, keep all
of your your garbage, but but it's worth remembering that, Yeah,
that that physical album is still a part of the
experience of that album. And uh and uh, I guess
some of us may be cling onto that idea more

(46:52):
than others. Uh, pieces of my soul will always live
on unlabeled, burned c d s A right that. The
next point that Vandang makes is that music emerges from
a socio technological context and then also quote, remembrance is
always embedded, so the social context within which we live

(47:13):
stimulate memories of the past. For an example of this,
she points to internet forums and and radio programs is
things that don't merely stimulate such musical memories but also
helped construct collective memory. Oh yeah, I mean, so music
is powerfully evocative, but to a great extent, we determine
what it evokes by talking about it with each other. Yeah, yeah,

(47:36):
there's I mean, there's because there's what the music means
to me. It's what the music means to us, you know, again,
the collective memory of of what this song is or
what it was, what it meant, you know, especially when
songs become anthems, right when they become things that are
attached to movements, to generations, or just a particular scenes
and times. Now, I mentioned high school and college for

(47:58):
a reason here. These are period of time, but not
not the only periods of time during which we often
build out our musical taste and in doing so, construct
our own identity. And it's kind of crazy to think
about that, you know. These are these are largely sonic
and linguistic chunks of technologically constructed media that are used
to build out the cultural self. So I'm I'm taking

(48:19):
this building block, you know, dripping in the cultural honey
of the hive from which I have, I have yanked it,
and now I'm I'm putting it inside myself. I'm implanting
it in my body, altering the shape in the form
of my own being. And so the music becomes me
and I become that music totally. Now she she points
out that exactly how music gets stuck in our memories

(48:42):
is kind of hard to nail down because different networks
and functions of the brain are involved in music remembrance.
There's cognitive, there's a there is a motive, there's a
a somato sensory. She cites some cognitive scholar Patrick Comb
Hogan who says, quote, the tendency of working memory to
cyclic repetition, combined with the exaggerated accessibility of a simple

(49:06):
and frequently repeated tune, gives rise to a situation in
which the song is likely to cycle repeatedly through working memory.
And this touches on some of what we're talking about already, sure,
on the basis that every time you recite a memory,
you make that memory easier to access in the future.
Though not necessarily accurately, but you at least make it

(49:27):
easier to access in the future. And songs, by their
very nature, especially sort of catchy songs with easily repeatable
melodies and and and lines, um, really are easy to
recite in the heads, so you sort of like you
implant them for very powerful ease of retrieval in the future. Yeah,
and and when you start talking about repetition in these songs, um,

(49:50):
one of the things that the Van Bank points out
is that technology aids in it immensely. Um, because the
the advent of recorded music technology allowed us to engage
in true repetition and to expose ourselves um cyclically to
particular songs, both privately and collectively. UM. And I think
we can all probably think of examples of this where

(50:12):
we you know, we hit on that one song and
nothing but that song is going to do it do
it for us right now? So what do we do?
We put that baby on repeat. You'll listen to it, like,
you know, five, six, ten times in a row even uh,
just continuing to get that hit. And UM, I want
I wonder like, Yeah, in the old days, I guess

(50:32):
if you had a song in your head and you're
in your heart, you could just continually sing it to
yourself as you just went about your day. Um. But
but without recorded media, you have the chance to change
it in the process of doing that. That's right, That's right.
You could change it a little bit each time, even uh,
you know, come up with your own lyrics. I guess
and U and I guess you probably saw that of merge,

(50:54):
especially with like work songs right where it's like people
working collectively collectively sharing in a song and then perhaps
contributing to it and building upon it as they went.
But but it makes me think of these various like
especially like medieval style and fantasy setting, um shows where
you'll have like a pub scene and there's a performer,
there's a bard singing a song, and usually the bard

(51:16):
will sing the song once. But in reality, would you
have a situation where they're like, yeah, we love that,
let's let's just keep doing it. No, that song over
and over again? Uh, I don't know. I don't know
what the answer is. If you ever been to a
concert where the musician played the same song twice? Oh
I don't. I have know that that occurs occasionally if yeah,

(51:37):
if the audience demands it all right, Um, so we
don't remember all the songs we hear, but we we
do remember a lot of songs, especially if we can
pair it up with a specific emotional, physical response, even
stuff as simple as well, this song pumps me up,
you know, And I think we can all think of
examples of that. Right. Maybe it's it's not even the

(51:58):
song that you like really connect with in a lot
of meaningful ways, but it gets your blood pumping and
therefore it's easy to remember. But this alone can't account
for the stickiness of music and memory. Uh S Van
Dank also points to two complimentary theories. There's the neurocognitive theory,
and this is the feeling associated with the song. Uh

(52:19):
is inscribed in our in our biographical meaning, and recalling
them causes a flood of emotion and time, event relationship specifics.
And then there's the cultural semiotic theory. The musical sign
is not the key thing, but rather the emotions, feeling,
and experiences attached to hearing a particular song. So the

(52:40):
comparison that has been made here is that a tree
is falling in a forest. The forest is the song,
and the waves emanating from the falling tree are the emotions. Okay,
I don't know if that clarifies anything for anybody, but
um but but but hopefully what these two theories both
kind of work at is that yeah, there's the song,

(53:02):
there's the lyrics, but then they are all of these um,
you know, biographical elements, and it's the and and some
of this is perhaps make them off as an overstatement
of the obvious. You know, like that time when you
heard this song that time when you listen to this
song six six times in a row, like, all of
that becomes encoded in the memory of the thing and
the nostalgia of the thing. Right. Well, another way to

(53:23):
think about it is that there is no way to
appreciate a song on its own terms. There actually is
no you know, there is no way to just think
about a song. You're always thinking about it with some
kind of biographical and cultural framing. So you will have,
you know, independent personal emotions, feelings and biographical details that

(53:43):
will become associated with that song, and you will probably
keep reproducing in memory every time you hear the song
or sing the song. But then there will also possibly
be these broader sort of cultural associations. But it it
fits into a time, a social context, to political context,
and it means something to you within that context. Yeah. Absolutely. Now,

(54:06):
as as an example of of some of this um
in her paper, Vannk goes into it looks at an
example from a Dutch pop music survey. It's called the
Dutch Top two thousand, and this is a radio event,
and she argues that the Dutch Top two thousand is
a great example of how quote unquote mediated memories are

(54:28):
shaped at the intersections of personal and collective memories. So
this was a national radio event with generated user responses
in narrative form like people uh, people sharing their connection
with a particular song, what it means to them uh,
a narrative form for those memories, and since it's a
major media event, it also helps to shape cultural memories

(54:50):
through the sharing of the the individual connection to the
song uh. So. So I found that that interest is
trying to think, do we are there examples of out
from you know, from my my own experience with music
or I don't know if you have experiences with this,
because oftentimes it's you know, music is presented to you
and it's presented to you by a by a DJ

(55:12):
or or a d J if you were watching uh
MTV back in the day, and maybe they might add
some sort of personal experience or some sort of priming
as to why this song is important, but maybe not. UM.
I guess sometimes back in the old days, maybe they
do this still. People would have requests on the radio
and would like, you know, say this song goes out
to so and so. I could see that being a

(55:34):
form of this. So I hope this service as just
kind of a you know, introduction to some of these ideas. Um,
the topic of music and collective memory plays into a
number of interesting looking papers and books even that perhaps
beyond the scope of this episode, but I thought I
might mention a couple of them in passing in case
people wanted to explore further. Uh. There's there's music Memory
and Nostalgia, Collective Memories of Cultural Revolution songs and contemporary China.

(55:58):
This one was by Bryant came out into that and
five and China Review. And there is also a book
edited by edited by Um, bos Quasca and bomb Gardner
titled Music, Collective Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia and European Cinema
after the Second World War. And I was looking at
that one a little bit, and it Uh, this, this
is something that that is worth noting, like the way

(56:22):
that we strongly forge these connections between music and cinema. Uh.
And and it's and something and and and just sort
of visual media in general. And sometimes it can kind
of co opt the original meaning of a song, uh,
and that song becomes forever associated with with, say a
particular period of time or or a conflict, et cetera.

(56:44):
All Right, well, we're gonna we're gonna go and close
things out here, but obviously we'd love to hear from
everybody out there, because again, everybody has some sort of
connection to to what we've been talking about here, and
you're gonna have specific examples that might be worth sharing
from your own life and your own your your own
musical history. I also want to throw in I did
look it up real quick, the Dynasty's song that I'm

(57:04):
thinking about, um the Way to Remember the Dynasties of China.
It's sung to the tune of Freda Shaka. So you
can find examples of that online if you want. I
am I'm not going to sing it now. In the meantime,
if you like to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, you can find us in the
Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed, available wherever you
get your podcasts. We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

(57:28):
We have listener Mail on Monday's Artifact on Wednesdays as
a short form episode, and on Friday's We Do Weird
How Cinema. That's our time to set most serious matters
aside and just focus in on a weird film. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, just to say hello, you

(57:48):
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My heart Radio,
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