challenged by James to add not one but two last-minute inaugural IndieWeb blog carnival entries to my repertoire before September makes way for October, I was delighted to discover the theme for the September Bear Blog Carnival: music memories.
lately, as I listen at home to vinyl first pressings of the music I grew up with, music is bringing my memories full-circle. I listen to a song encoded with a memory of when I was, say, 15 and in the throes of an emotional crisis, and am able to extend a loving hand to myself across time and space, with a clear message: this too shall pass, and boy does our life get way better; think beating the stuff your wildest dreams are made of! not to mention that the physicality of these historical albums creates a direct link to some of the bands that had an outsized impact on my life, whether Pink Floyd, The Doors, or so many others. I might have been two decades shy of being born when Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright recorded The Piper at the Gates of Dawn with Syd Barrett at Abbey Road Studios in 1967, but that very same album now lives in the lounge I step into each morning, coffee in hand.
the theme being music + memories, what comes to mind immediately is the word association itself. there’s a phenomenon known as music-evoked autobiographical memory1 The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories that we’re all familiar with: hear a particular song and it can instantly transport you back to a particular time or moment in your life as though you’d never left. music can evoke those deeply detailed episodic memories because of the unique interactions it causes in the brain.
neurologically, music is a full-brain workout. it engages widespread networks2 Large-scale brain networks emerge from dynamic processing of musical timbre, key and rhythm across the brain. language, for example, while ultimately distributed across hemispheres, is primarily concentrated in the left hemisphere where the brain decodes syntax, grammar, and vocab. music, however, while leveraging the same areas when lyrics are involved, involves also activation in the right hemisphere for processing pitch, tone, and melody3 Distinct sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation supports brain asymmetry for speech and melody . ever met a musician who can’t speak English yet covers one of your favourite English songs with seemingly perfect pronunciation and not a trace of their native accent? the magic of music is why4 Detecting Foreign Accents in Song .
science and logic have the prefrontal cortex to thank for enabling executive control, abstract reasoning, hypothesis testing, and so forth; music makes use of this part of the brain for things like structural tracking, but it can also engage our auditory, visual, sensory, and motor cortices. music is basically thinking on steroids. as for math, being a dyscalculic I seem to be missing an intraparietal sulcus 🙄 (part of the parietal lobe) so I won’t be commenting on all that spatial reasoning stuff, but music, thankfully, binds fractals and ratios to emotion and physical movement, meaning I get to enjoy it all the same. so whatever the make-up of your cognitive systems, music supercharges the teamwork in your brain like little else can.
if this is too much abstraction and not enough concreteness for your taste, consider this: musical memory can be remarkably resilient even in Alzheimer’s disease5 Why musical memory can be preserved in advanced Alzheimer’s disease . people with Alzheimer’s can still show strong responses to their favourite music6 Increased Functional Connectivity After Listening to Favored Music in Adults With Alzheimer Dementia . (side note: James Leyland Kirby, aka the Caretaker, links the concept of music and memories in one of the most haunting works you’ll ever hear in his album series Everywhere at the End of Time, which portrays through music the progression of Alzheimer’s through a series of six stages. if you’ve lost a loved one to this devastating disease, it’s guaranteed to make you cry. which, at least for me, is a good thing - I find music cries the most healing of them all.)
but I didn’t mean for this to get so serious. back to the magic, because OH how much of it there is! music is a universal language that binds us together no matter who we are or where we came from. in the case of songs with lyrics, it doesn’t even require an understanding of the words - for some of my favourite songs, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about what they’re about (I didn’t know, for example, that Faroese existed as a language until I fell in love with some of the archipelago’s musicians). recently, at a Guns N’ Roses concert in Asia, it amazed me how quickly people of a wide variety of nationalities could become one big family thanks to an American rock band from the 80s; while due to language barriers I wouldn’t be able to have a meaningful conversation with many of my fellow concertgoers, we all bonded emotionally as we jammed our hearts out to Slash’s iconic guitar solos in November Rain7 November Rain music video, Guns N’Roses .
it heartens me to think that, at the end of my life, I’ll get to look back and relive whatever parts of my life I’d like to revisit by virtue of song. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake will always transport me back to the holy respect I developed for the past when my grandmother on the weekend would let me crank up her record player and tell me stories of composers who led interesting, complex lives hundreds of years before I was but a twinkle in the eye. a song I used to sing to my dear now-adult child will always take me back to those moments when we cuddled at bedtime and I conveyed through music to the tiny being in my arms the magnitude of the love overflowing from my heart. music creates portals in our soul through which we transcend the limitations of time, distance, and even death. viva la música!
#100DaysToOffload/1
Footnotes
-
The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories ↩
-
Large-scale brain networks emerge from dynamic processing of musical timbre, key and rhythm ↩
-
Distinct sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation supports brain asymmetry for speech and melody ↩
-
Why musical memory can be preserved in advanced Alzheimer’s disease ↩
-
Increased Functional Connectivity After Listening to Favored Music in Adults With Alzheimer Dementia ↩