Is memory for music special?

It is “Seniors Week” this week in the state of New South Wales in Australia, and I’m just about to play piano at a local aged care facility for a sing-a-long and concert. There are anecdotes and research reports of the capacity to respond to music being preserved in elderly people, including those with dementia, even when other capacities such as spoken language and decision-making are impaired. The anecdotes outweigh “hard” evidence of preservation, and most reports note the need for further rigorous research (see Baird and Samson (2015) for a recent review). However, with that caveat in mind, I would like to toy with the idea that memory for music is special.

Research into musical performance and musical response has led to theories of musical behavior and component perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes. These accounts shed some light on possible reasons for preserved capacity with an emphasis on mechanism and explanation. However, there is scope for such accounts to be challenged or enriched by concepts of the social and identity, place, and culture.

One relevant observation is that many of our expectations for music—memory for what will happen and when—develop incidentally or implicitly, without explicit instruction but rather by mere exposure. Even without musical training, adults enculturated to a particular musical culture or system will identify a musical note that is mistimed or mispitched. Such an error—even in a novel musical sequence that follows the conventions of a particular musical tradition—pops out, sounds “wrong” or surprising. Our expectation for when a note should sound or what a note should be has been violated (Huron, 2006).

In reviewing research into this kind of implicit memory, Reber (2013) argues that implicit memory is underpinned not by a distinct memory system but widespread cortical plasticity. Music is multidimensional and multimodal. A song, for example, comprises auditory, visual (notation, music video, performance), kinesthetic, motoric, verbal, expressive, and emotional dimensions. Perhaps it is the multiplicity of modalities stimulated that is one key to preserving response to music (Cuddy and Duffin, 2005). Current models of episodic memory make similar predictions such as Rubin’s (2006) basic-systems model and the notion of event memory (Rubin and Umanath, 2015). Weakened components in dementia may be supported and reinforced through co-activation processes (Spiro, 2010), and subcortical structures that are spared from progressive destruction of cortical tissue may play a role (Cuddy and Duffin, 2005). When people with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) were presented with material to remember and performed relatively well in a musical condition, Simmons-Stern et al. (2010) theorized either that the brain areas subserving music processing are spared, or that music heightens arousal in people with AD allowing for better retention and improved memory.

Music unfolds in time. The temporal structure of a musical piece affords synchronized movement of one or many bodies, and timely anticipation and adaptation to tempo (rate) and/or key change (Keller, 2014). As far as we know, music has been part of every culture, thus music as a stimulus for, and product of, human behavior reflects constraints on human perception and memory. Music would have been a means to collaborate and communicate about place, hunting, resources and risks, identity, beliefs, and social structures within and across groups and generations. Music perception-production would have been an oral tradition and synchronization of a social activity that may have facilitated group bonding and group cohesion (Wallin et al., 2000). Rhythm and rhyme likely emerged to scaffold the learning, retention, and recall of music from memory (Rubin, 1995). Many (but not all) musical systems are now notated, but the oral tradition of music and dance gives insight into human short- and long-term memory, how long can a musical phrase be, why do rhythms repeat, why do melodies move by step, what perceptual and memory benefits arise from hierarchical organization?

There is a palpable mnemonic benefit of a cultural activity that is the artful and meaningful organization of time. Composer Igor Stravinsky said, “Music is the best means we have of digesting time” (Craft, 1972). Time and timing, then, are at the core of memory for music: for example, the desire to move to groove, expressive timing of solo and ensemble performers, syncopation in jazz. Music epitomizes the development and realization of, and playing with, temporal expectations.

Temporal entrainment—the ability to perceive and synchronize movements to the beat in music—has been described as “beat-finding capacity at multiple neural levels” (Merchant et al., 2015). The capacity to entrain to a rhythm or beat may be a mechanism that is maintained across the lifespan. The fixed temporal sequencing that is prescribed by a song may preserve certain skills such as familiarity for the lyrics of familiar songs, or the ability to sing a familiar tune when prompted by its lyrics (Cuddy et al., 2012; Vanstone et al., 2009).

What other aspects of memory theory might contribute to an explanation for the preservation of musical capacities? Conditioning or associative learning is easy to demonstrate in the context of music—the “they’re playing our tune” phenomenon, where because of temporal contiguity, a particular musical piece becomes associated strongly with another person or product or event (Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008). From a cultural perspective, Cohen (2014) discusses the way that our memories of live music are related to place, and Karlsen (2014) describes the formation of community and cohesion that can arise among festival audiences who have strong experiences with music.

Although music is non-referential—Cross (2012) refers to it as having “floating intentionality”—music is expressive and becomes associated with emotionally significant events. We know too, from De Nora (2000) and Sloboda et al. (2001), of the way music is used “in everyday life” to regulate mood. Using an experience sampling method, Sloboda et al. reported that music was heard during 44% of episodes sampled but rather than it being the primary focus, music was used as an accompaniment to other activities. The experience of music made people feel more positive, alert, or focused. Krueger (2011) depicts music as an “esthetic technology” to enact emotion regulation, identity construction, and communicative expression. He describes emotional and social affordances in music and proposes that “acts of musicking grant access to novel emotional experiences otherwise inaccessible” (Krueger, 2013).

The significance of music and its power to move and to trigger nostalgia have been examined by Davidson and Garrido (2014) (see also http://www.abc.net.au/arts/playlist/). Music, they note, is a catalyst for remembering particular events, people, emotions, and places. Key factors appear to be the autobiographical salience of the music for the individual and how “nostalgia-prone” the individual is found to be (Barrett et al., 2010; Davidson and Garrido, 2014). A reminiscence bump is said to exist for music where music from one’s youth and adolescence is recognized more often, with more facts known about it, and it evokes more specific autobiographical memories and strong emotions than music from later in life (Krumhansl and Zupnick, 2013; Schulkind et al., 1999). According to Rathbone et al. (2008), during the years 12–22 and coinciding with the reminiscence bump, a stable and enduring sense of self emerges. Notions of self and social identity connected with music have also been explored (Bennett, 2013; Frith, 1996; MacDonald et al., 2005). In sum, there appears to be an additional strand of personal significance in some music that may lead to the retention of memories that outlast other procedures and skills.

Research is needed to continue to scrutinize the assumptions and assertions made here and the theorized explanatory mechanisms. Such research can help to inform education programs developed for early and later stages in life, as well as non-pharmacological therapies, and therapist-free, self-guided activities. Although there are some exceptions, much of the music psychology research is Eurocentric and culturally bound to the West. Diversity in settings, participant samples, and musical material is vital. Research questions would also be strengthened by the field of memory studies—the cultural, social, distributed and collective, the historical, embodied, cross-cultural, developmental, creative, and aesthetic threads of music at the heart of humanity, identity, and cultural memory.