Musical Memory

Before we can understand the link between music and memory, it’s important to explore what memory is. Memory comes in a variety of forms, including some that don’t immediately spring to mind. In its simplest form, memory refers to our ability to keep in our mind something that is no longer available to our senses. To remember something, we need to mentally encode it, store it, and then be able to retrieve it. This storage might happen over a long period of time, as in remembering the name of an old teacher, or it might happen over a very shorter duration, such as remembering a phone number just long enough to dial it. 

What’s more, the type of thing we remember can vary. We can remember specific things that happened in our lives, such as what we had for dinner last night, or our high school graduation day, but we can also remember more general facts about the world, like the capital of France, or what the word “protagonist” means. In addition, we can also remember how to do certain types of things. The classic example is riding a bike, but there are plenty of other actions we can do quite fluently without necessarily being able to explain what we’re doing in words, such as handwriting or needlepoint. 

Finally, many different factors can affect how well we remember. These include how often something is repeated, whether it is associated with other cues, how deeply we have thought about it, other things we’re trying to remember, and how long it’s been since it last came up.  

Making memories, making music 

When we’re listening to, practicing, or performing music, all of these types of memory come into play. In preparing for a performance, a concert pianist may need to memorize the music. But there are other factors to remember during the performance, such as whether the piece is in sonata form or “did I play the repeat already?” The audience, too, depending on their prior knowledge, tries to remember e details from the program notes, such as who the composer is and what pieces are being performed. Even considering different renditions of a song requires holding them both in mind, whether it’s the Boston vs. Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s versions of Beethoven’s 5th, or comparing Phil Collins’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” to The Supremes’ vastly superior original.  

Enhancing recall skills 

A child taking music lessons has many opportunities to use and flex their memory. If they are learning an instrument, they gradually remember more and more fingerings, scales, and other techniques. To learn to read music, a child must remember the pitch a tone, the types of notes, and more Italian words than are found in your typical pizzeria. Because of these links, memory is one of the core cognitive skills we focus on in our Smart Start^TM early childhood education classes. For example, kindergarteners may be asked to recall whether the ending of a song is the same or different from the beginning, as a way to learn about form and develop musical memory. 

For younger children, characteristic memory activities include remembering who has had a turn and who should play next, imitating a short musical example, and using songs with letters and numbers to scaffold their long-term memory (even adults still use the alphabet song to remember their letters). Music is a particularly useful aid to memory because it provides many opportunities for repetition in a variety of different forms, in a manner that can promote much deeper feelings than simple lists. This makes music both easy to memorize and an aid to memorizing other things. 

Understanding the brain 

So it makes sense that adults who are musically trained tend to show better performance on tests of memory. What’s more, their brains reflect this difference. In particular, their memory for verbal materials seems to be improved – perhaps due to their greater abilities to encode sounds. 

The links between language and music is part of what we’re studying at The Royal Conservatory’s Research Centre – including comparing the memory for sounds between musicians and non-musicians across different age groups. By understanding these links, we can build more effective music curricula and a better understand of how the brain works. Now, if I could just figure out how to get that song out of my head!  

Selected References:

Chan, A. S., Ho, Y. -C., & Cheung, M. -C. (1998). Music training improves verbal memory. Nature, 396, 128. 
Jakobson, L. S., Lewycky, S. T., Kilgour, A. R., & Stoesz, B. M. (2008). Memory for verbal and visual material in highly trained musicians. Music Perception, 26, 41-55. 
George, E. M. & Coch, D. (2011). Music training and working memory: An ERP study. Neuropsychologia, 49, 1083-1094.