A friend recently sent me a link to a Pandora station he had created and thought I might like. That got me started exploring Pandora (an Internet music service based on the results of the Music Genome Project), in particular creating stations based on music I remember from my teen years and twenties. Music is one of the strongest triggers I know for memories of a particular time and place; I enjoy not only recalling my own memories associated with a particular song, but hearing the stories that people close to me share about songs they remember.
However, I recalled all those details (and more), as well as some of the emotions of that time period, without listening to the song. A recent study examined whether there’s a difference in the strength of recall if people hear the song, see the title or lyrics, or see the album cover. The hypothesis was that hearing the song would lead to stronger recall, and that’s certainly what I would have expected. In fact, in a study of 124 undergrads who were prompted to recall songs from five different periods of their pasts, it didn’t matter that much how they were reminded of the song. The memories came back about as strongly for any of the experimental conditions, as long as the subjects were familiar with it and had autobiographical memories associated with it. This story from Science Daily gives an overview. The paper itself goes into a good bit more detail about autobiographical memory and the finer points of the study: Using music to cue autobiographical memories of different lifetime periods, Elizabeth T. Cady, Richard Jackson Harris, and J. Bret Knappenberger. Psychology of Music, Vol. 36, No. 2, 157–177 (April 2008)
