Abstract
Music could play a role in forming memories, whether about specific music pieces, episodes, or other information. Emotions enhance memory processes, and music can evoke strong emotions. Recent research in BMC Neuroscience provided new insight into emotion’s role in musical memory.
Many people live a life that includes music. Music is used for many purposes, including to enhance mood, distract, or entertain, and people listen to it from dawn until dusk. Music is an integral part of our autobiographical memories and is a powerful tool for making judgments about ourselves and others. What musical pieces can we recall, and how does music relate to our memories? This intriguing question has received little attention in scientific literature. Several papers have examined music’s role in forming memory and recalling episodic and autobiographical information. One recent article in BMC Neuroscience provides new insights into emotion’s role in musical memory [6]. These papers, taken together, emphasize the positive impact of music and emotion on memories across various contexts. This is what I will focus on in this review.
Music and Memory
Like all auditory signals unfolding over time, musical sounds also evolve. The auditory system must integrate these sequentially ordered sounds into one coherent musical perception. This series-to-parallel transformation can be viewed as a mechanism for working memory. It temporarily stores auditory units and then combines them to create a single percept (such as a melody, rhythm, or sound pattern). As recent experiments have shown, there is a lot of overlap between working memories for musical stimuli as well as verbal stimuli. This could be why musicians have a slightly better verbal working memory, at least in a tonal language like Chinese. Sluming and colleagues recently published their findings. Sliming et al. Discovered that musicians have more gray matter than non-musicians in the area of the frontal cortex that is known to house neural networks involved in many important working memory processes. It could be concluded that there is a positive correlation between musical performance and verbal memory functions. In other words, learning music can improve the ability to learn verbal tasks.
Memories and music from associated events
When we listen to music or engage in conversation about music, or other episodes or events in our lives that have been influenced by music, we can trigger autobiographical information. A strong sense of knowing is often triggered by music that has been associated with our past. This feeling can be felt for many songs, even if we don’t know the lyrics or the titles. However, we are better at remembering the title of the tunes that we listen to (when they are instrumental) than we are at remembering a melody simply by reading its title. This reverse pattern is seen when it comes to vocal memory. The titles of songs are better cues than melodies for this purpose. This link between music and text is important because it suggests that music may be encoded in semantic memories like text. Researchers believe music is encoded in brains by the perceptual system. This organizes auditory information into rhythms and melodies rather than the semantic memory system, which encodes meaning. However, musical information can be linked to semantic and emotional information (associative memories), in some cases directly or indirectly, as was demonstrated, even though it is not directly related.
Stefan Koelsch and his colleagues have recently shown that short musical pieces can prime the semantic memory system and allow for faster recognition of specific words. Their experiment had one principle. They presented target words that were preceded either by musical or sentence primes. The target words were evaluated for electrical brain responses (the N400 event-related potential, which is a dip in scalp electric activity that occurs 400 milliseconds following the target word). The brain response to the target words was decreased when the musical piece was semantically similar to it. However, when the musical piece wasn’t related to the word, the response was increased. One example of musical prime for the target term ‘needle’ was Schonberg’s String Terzett. This was an excerpt that was intended to musically describe the stitching pains’ during the composer’s heart attack. Other primes were chosen based on their musical terminology. For example, the prime for ‘narrowness was an excerpt where close intervals dominate. Some primes were selected because they resembled objects’ sounds (such as birds) or certain qualities (such as low tones that are associated with a basement or ascending steps with a staircase). These two experiments show that memory systems for melody and language have bidirectional associations.
One particular feature of the perceptually-based music memory system is its ability to recognize changes in instrumentation and tempo. Recent brain imaging studies and lesion studies have revealed that this perceptual memory system can be found bilaterally in the auditory cortical (including the supramarginal gyrus). The recognition of familiar tunes is also possible in the inferior temporal and inferior frontal brain areas. It is important to distinguish between episodic and semantic musical memories in order to determine the location of other types of musical memory. Platel and his colleagues defined episodic musical memory as the “capability to recognize a musical fragment (whether familiar or unfamiliar) for which the spatiotemporal environment surrounding it (i.e., when, where, and how) can still be recalled.” The ability to recognize familiar melodies or songs by using semantic memory is possible by either naming the tune or by humming the melody’s subsequent notes. Musical semantic memory is believed to be a musical lexicon. Although there are strong links between them, it is distinct from verbal one. Platel and his colleagues identified different brain networks that are involved in episodic and semantic memory processing using high-resolution, positron emission imaging. They found bilateral cerebral blood flow increases in the middle and superior frontal regions of episodic musical memory (with a left-sided predominant preponderance and the precuneus), whereas there was an increase in blood flow bilaterally within the medial, orbitofrontal cortex, left angular, and left anterior parts of the middle temporal cortex for semantic musical memories. These findings suggest that the neural representations of these musical memory systems are different. These brain areas overlap partially with episodic and verbal memory systems, which is quite interesting.