What were the words again? Singing and long-term memory. A guest post by Justyna Dorris.

I started singing when I was in the fourth grade and we were all forced to take part in chorus. I found that I actually really enjoyed it and ended up doing chorus for nine years, from the fourth grade up until my senior year of high school. I loved music, and we sang a wide variety of songs which was nice too. I remember there was one thing that I always wondered about and that was how it was that we could have our songs memorized for the current concert, yet if the teacher played the music from songs we learned years ago, nine out of 10 times we could remember the words and sing the song as if we learned it yesterday. This thought would also come to mind when I would hear old school music from the 90s, like the Back Street Boys, Britney Spears, and of course ‘N Sync. How was it that I still knew every single word when I would sing along? I eventually googled it and found out that it has to do with our long-term memory and that it has a virtually unlimited capacity for holding information. After this week’s class about long-term memory I now know that it’s a little more complicated than that.

Our long-term memory is actually split into explicit and implicit memory and can be broken down even more so. Explicit memories are memories we are aware of, of which we can voluntarily report its content; it’s declarative. This can then be broken down into episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory is when we remember experiences, personal memories, and mentally time travel. Mental time travel is when you go back to a moment in your memory and picture it in your head. Examples of episodic memories include remembering when your cousin’s child was born, remembering visiting your aunt and uncle in Arizona, and remembering when you first learned someone’s name. Semantic memory is your knowledge of facts and information, but it’s just the facts - no details about how you learned them. For example, you know your mom’s first name, but you don’t remember learning it.

Then we have implicit memories too. Implicit memories are memories we are not aware of, of which we cannot voluntarily report the contents; it’s procedural. So this explains things that we are able to do without thinking or having a skill without being able to explain it. So for example, when I drive from my house to my aunt’s house, I’m on autopilot and don’t have to think about every turn I make and how to get there. I just know how to get there, but if someone wanted me to tell them how to get there, it wouldn’t be that easy.

Back to the music aspect since you now know all about long-term memory. The relationship between music and long-term memory is often referred to as musical memory.  “Musical memory refers to the ability to remember music-related information, such as melodic content and other progressions of tones or pitches. The differences found between linguistic memory and musical memory have led researchers to theorize that musical memory is encoded differently from language and may constitute an independent part of the phonological loop. The use of this term is problematic, however, since it implies input from a verbal system, whereas music is in principle nonverbal” (Wilson). There is some debate, though, over whether music memory is semantic or episodic. In 2005 Platel defined “musical semantic memory as memory for pieces without memory for the temporal or spatial elements; and musical episodic memory as memory for pieces and the context in which they were learned” (Wilson).

Wilson, S. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music-related_memory