Music, memory, and memories

By Jess Santacroce
Music Writer, 955 The Heat Phoenix Radio

Music and memory have long been known to be connected, but recent studies reveal more intricate links between music’s ability to help us remember, manage our memories, and even just understand some of our little quirks. 

Music’s ability to help us remember information may be much more personalized than previously thought

Most of us have heard that if you listen to music while studying something, you will learn it faster and recall the information or concepts much better. That has not been debunked, but recent studies have suggested music’s ability to help us remember things is a bit more complicated than simply popping in a classical music CD or starting an ambient learning sounds music playlist and settling down to learn. 

Earlier this year, Rice University adjunct professor Stephanie Leal and her graduate student Kayla Clark conducted experiments on music’s ability to enhance memory, with results that add some layers to the old “study to music” technique. Leal and Clark’s experiments concluded that the music that best helps us learn depends not on the music itself, but on our reaction to it. 

We all react differently to different music. Even people who love music, and like at least some of all genres of music, will have favorite genres, favorite bands and artists, and favorite songs, music that is good but not a favorite, and music we don’t care for. According to this study, the music you want to listen to if you need to remember detailed information is the music you react to more moderately. Music we react to more strongly is best suited for those times when we need to remember more general information. 

Results from laboratory studies, especially new ones, do not always play out exactly the way they do in a lab, because, obviously, we don’t all live in labs. Everyone in your study group will not have been measured to determine that nothing else is going on that could sway the results before you sit down to learn material for a class you’re taking, or for your job, or an upcoming job interview or training. And since this study is so new, it has yet to be duplicated. But these results are something to keep in mind next time you’re choosing an album, CD, or playlist while trying to learn new information. 

Music doesn’t just bring back memories, it has the power to shape them

It is no secret that music has tremendous power to bring back memories. Each of us has those songs that remind us of certain times in our lives, specific events, or people we once knew, whether those recollections are happy, sad, wistful, angering, or bittersweet. You may forever think of your old college roommate every time you hear a song they used to dance to at every school dance, or remember a trip you took with your spouse and children three summers ago in detail whenever a song that kept playing on the radio during that trip comes on. 

Last year, psychological researcher Yiren Ren of the Georgia Institute of Technology headed a study suggesting that music does not just bring up these types of personal memories, it has the power to reshape our emotional experience of them (Ren, 2024). Unsurprisingly, the re framing appears to follow the tone of the music. 

This suggests that when remembering something unpleasant, it may be possible to turn to music to help us see things in a better light. Suppose you need to search for a new job this summer, but you find yourself discouraged because you keep ruminating over a particularly upsetting experience at your last job. In this situation, you were demeaned or insulted by a coworker, and you felt incompetent and foolish. Next time the bad memory threatens to put you off from reaching out for that promising new job, listening to music that makes you feel the way you wish you’d felt then, or that seems to be from the perspective of someone who would have reacted much differently to the situation, can help give you that confidence back. The music cannot completely wipe out the memory, and it isn’t going to completely rewrite it to make you remember something entirely different happening, but it may help change how you feel about that bad memory. The music may help you to see that it was just a one-time thing that can happen to anyone, or realize that it would make a funny story someday, or even turn the humiliating incident into motivation to find the type of workplace where that type of thing is not allowed to happen. 

Our ability to remember song lyrics when we can’t remember other details has a perfectly reasonable explanation 

A song we haven’t heard in years or even decades comes on the radio or a playlist. We remember all or at least most of the words. Those of us who can sing, even just as a hobby, can probably even remember how to sing the song, and start singing along, barely missing a note or a lyric. It may not be a stellar performance, since it obviously wasn’t practiced, but we know that song. Two hours later, our spouse, child, or parent asks us to pick up some groceries on the way home, and we show up empty handed. When someone else goes out and gets the forgotten items, we promise to put them away as part of our apology for forgetting, but until we see the bags on the counter, we can’t remember why we walked back into the kitchen from the living room where we were watching t.v. or reading. 

This has nothing to do with aging or illness. It does not mean you care more about some famous person you never met than you care about your family members, or that you’re so immature, you’re more worried about buying albums, CDs, or music downloads than feeding yourself or cleaning yourself or your home. It happens because of where the lyrics are stored in our brain and the form most music takes.

In the past, you likely heard that song several times. This places the song not in our short-term memory, like the request to stop for the forgotten groceries, or the promise we just made to go put them away, but in our procedural memory, the same type of memory that stores things like how to drive a car, ride a bike, or use the bus system or rideshare app to get to work. 

Most musical lyrics also follow patterns that aid in memory. Your family member’s request and your own mental note to go into the kitchen likely did not contain repeated words, rhyming, or a melody, all things that aid in memory. 

What we know about music and its impact on our memory and our memories may slowly shift over time, but the more we learn, the clearer it becomes that music brings great benefits to our memory, our memories, and all areas of our lives. 





Works cited:
Ren, Y., Mehdizadeh, S.K., Leslie, G. et al. Affective music during episodic memory recollection modulates subsequent false emotional memory traces: an fMRI study. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 24, 912–930 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-024-01200-0