Credit: Swapnil Sharma, Pexels, CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
A new study has found that while lower-energy, acoustic songs evoke memories of calmness and sadness, high-energy songs evoke more amusing and exciting personal recollections.
“We all know of the experience of hearing a song and being transported back in time to a vivid memory associated with that song,” says Safiyyah Nawaz from the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths University in London.
“As it turns out, the properties of the music itself – characteristics like acousticness, loudness and energy – relate to the emotional and phenomenological qualities of the same musical memories.”
This study builds off the back of previous studies that have found strong connections between music and memories, demonstrating that hearing a familiar song can often retrieve memories.
While music triggering flashbacks may not be a new phenomenon, a greater understanding of the emotional qualities music can trigger and how this links to a person’s perception could prove helpful in clinical settings where people are suffering from memory loss and damage.
Currently, music therapies and interventions are being used to help people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease and have been shown to decrease patient’s agitation and improve caregiver relationships.
To help advance these interventions, the researchers conducted an online survey of 233 participants who were aged from 18 to 76 years old.
The participants answered questions about the kinds of personal memories evoked by their favourite tunes and popular songs from their childhood, which were taken from the Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts.
Songs were chosen from the participant’s childhood as previous studies have identified the peak age for music-related memories to be 14 years old.
The researchers used a statistical approach called principal components analysis and linear mixed-effects modelling to analyse the survey data. This modelling helped the researchers to determine whether any specific song qualities were strongly associated with particular types of memories.
“Among many interesting findings, we discovered that more acoustic songs were associated with memories that were more vivid, unique, and characterised by complex emotions like romance and adoration,” says Nawaz.
Meanwhile, less acoustic, higher-energy songs, such as Prince’s When Doves Cry, tended to be associated with memories of amusement, excitement, and high energy. These types of songs also tended to retrieve memories more quickly.
The researchers also found that, when compared to the memories evoked by songs on the end-of-year charts, self-selected songs tended to bring back more specific, vivid, and positive memories.
“Our in-depth analysis showed that it’s not just the musical features that influence memory, but also how much a person likes a song and how familiar it is to them,” says Diana Omigie, also from Goldsmiths University.
“We hope future research will explore how musical elements interact with such personal elements to bring about the deep and meaningful memories that people experience in everyday life.”
The team has made the archive of songs studied available on the internet, with plans to open up the collection to members of the public so they can share their own personal memories from their favourite songs.
“Generated by the data and inspired by the research, we have begun building an online archive of musical memories,” says Nawaz. The archive can be accessed here.
“We aim to expand the archive beyond the predominantly Western samples that have traditionally shaped psychology research.”
The findings of this study have been presented in the journal PLOS One.