Why music evokes memories

Music is a sensory gift that allows listeners to be taken back in time to a moment so minute, they had forgotten it was even a memory, while allowing the artist to express their most intimate feelings and memories on a platform shared and appreciated by many. You can hear the first few notes of an old school hymn and begin to remember the glare of your old primary school teacher, telling you to stand up straight and smile while singing in assembly.

Cork-born singer-songwriter Stephanie Rainey acknowledges the power of music in terms of its gift of time travel. She credits music as an emotional outlet which brings boxed away memories and feelings to the surface:. I cry all the time listening to certain songs because they just remind me of something.

What an amazing power. It tells the story of loss and heartbreak, a feeling that almost everyone can relate to. It brings me back to a moment and I feel similar energy from people in the room. That is all caused by memory. Irish singer-songwriter Jack Lukeman , better known as Jack L, views music as a memory tool.

He recognises the power of music to re-jog memory in a way unlike any other, and the capability of particular songs to leave long-lasting imprints on the human brain. I have hundreds of songs in my head. I think melody helps to remember things.

We are constantly storing memories in our collective unconscious and subconscious, but it is a matter of retrieving them to determine if we truly remember something. When people go to recall where a letter is in the alphabet, they almost always sing the ABC song in order to retrieve the memory of the letter. It is easier to remember anything to a beat. Personally, my 7th grade algebra teacher taught us the quadratic formula to the tune of pop goes the weasel, and to this day whenever I need that formula I can instantly remember it if I sing the song.

In regards to music bringing back a certain memory, when people listen to music it triggers parts of the brain that evoke emotions. There are implicit and explicit memories. Explicit memories are simple memories such as what you did 5 minutes ago, basically anything in your conscious mind.

Implicit memories are memories stored in the unconscious, yet they can still be retrieved by our conscious minds. Strong emotions help encode experiences in the brain and turn them into lasting memories. The reason events and emotions recalled via music are particularly vivid may be because music is itself emotional, though there are likely a variety of factors at play.

An event, an emotion and a song get bound together in a part of the brain called the medial pre-frontal cortex, says Dr Rickard, who is also academic director at Western Sydney University Online.

When someone hears that music later on, she said, it's like the tip-of-the-tongue effect. The memory is there; the sound helps bring it front of mind.

Dr Jakubowski said there was still a lot of unknowns in this area, a reasonably new field of study. Dr Rickard said: "Music is likely to produce often a very positive mood, and we know that positively-coloured events are actually remembered better than negative events. He seeks out the song now and it triggers something physical — goose bumps, a rush in the stomach — as well as both sadness and pride, allowing him to "celebrate how far I've come".

We asked the ABC audience for their experiences, and the hundreds of responses revealed a similar level of complexity. It takes me back to a spontaneous time in my life where I travelled to Sydney at 18 with a guy who I just got to know who soon became my boyfriend. The song reminds me to just live and I listen to it whenever I need to be transported to a time where I was carefree. It was my parents' song before they separated and I listen to it now, 15 years later, with the memory of a perfect family.

Nostalgia is a mixed emotion — there's warmth and comfort, but also sadness at the realisation that happy period is now past.

It comes up a lot in academic studies of music and memory, and it relates to what psychologists call the reminiscence bump. Participants listened to 30 songs, viewed 30 faces, and reported on memories that were evoked. Memories were transcribed and coded for vividness as in Levine, B. Aging and autobiographical memory: Dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval.