that certain sound
so for a few months now, i’ve been posting throwback tracks of the week along with why/how it throws me back – recalling certain memories about my life that i associate with said track; i end up doing the same when i post up remixes. what i’ve realized though is that each time i’ve done this little exercise of recollection through music, certain songs have much more vivid memories than others – some songs i can pinpoint the when and where and what i was doing, while others i may just associate a nostalgic feelgood feeling about that certain period of time. this isn’t really news, surely you all experience the same. but i was really trying to figure out the why..
in 2008, UC Davis psych professor Petr Janata concluded a study regarding just that. his results:
Each song was rated for familiarity and like/dislike, and then the students were asked if the song evoked any memories for them. They indicated what emotions they associated with the song, whether the memories were about person, place, or event, and what words they associated with the memory. As the songs increased in familiarity, so did the strength of the autobiographical memories associated with the songs.
cool right? i kinda wish i was in on this study – i’d probably be in the room going ‘oh shit’ all by myself when they play the clips. this made me think about the emotional attachment i have to certain songs, the ‘oh my god this song just reminded me of u!!’ type of conversation. gag me with a spoon, i know i know. but autobiographical memories, atleast the most vivid ones, are usually attached to emotional events, therefore, music that evokes a vivid autobiographical moment should trigger a certain emotion, or emotional event. ’tis true! at first i was taking issue with this, but after actually going through my own vivid memories related to songs, i realized that emotion should actually mean emotion, and not emotion in a lovedovey/sappy/sad sense. por ejemplo: my memory of snow – informer(HAHA) is me with my sony walkman listening to Power in the back of my parent’s Mazda 626, driving north up White Oak towards Victory, hearing this song get played and being absolutely tickled at the thought of this dude getting strip searched. happiness is still an emotion!
what i find interesting is that the more i listen to old school/remind myself of music i grew up listening to, the more i recall such autobiographic memories, helping to unshroud them a little more each time* as well as help reinforce the association between the event/emotion and the song. and i’m not the only one. my main dude Petr Janata just finished up another study earlier this year and concluded:
By making tonal maps of each musical excerpt and comparing them to their corresponding brain scans, he discovered that the brain was tracking these tonal progressions in the same region as it was experiencing the memories: in the dorsal part of the medial pre-frontal cortex, as well as in regions immediately adjacent to it. And in this case, too, the stronger the autobiographical memory, the greater the “tracking” activity.
“What’s cool about this is that one of the main parts of the brain that’s tracking the music is the same part of the brain that’s responding overall to how autobiographically salient the music is,” Janata said.
how fucking cool is that?!?! like way cool on a level of ’so thats why ahhh i get it’, but also way cool on a level of ‘we could use this research to help alzheimers patients feel good instead of lost’, amazing. i wonder if that’s what keeps my gramps in better-than-average memory faculties for his age- dude loves to sing old tagalog songs. albeit its like two or three songs, and he doesn’t sing them as often as he used to, but whatever works. i figure i’ll never get alzheimers since i jog my memory so much through music, but honestly, my memory outside of music is pretty shit.
*hmmm, unshrouding them or making up memories for them?? that’s on some shell beach steez. kiefer sutherland showin up in my memories teaching me how to use my jedi powers and shit. (but foreal though, what about feeling nostalgia for things you’ve never experienced? there’s gotta be a study on that… or a word, atleast..)
