It’s no secret that growing older can negatively impact memory. Names, events, and general timelines can all become vaguer over time, even if someone hasn’t been diagnosed with dementia or another neurological disease. But new research suggests that the ability to remember notable parts of music may persist even into old age. The findings, published this week in the magazine PLoS ONE, highlight the unique connections people make with musical sounds, and may serve as a building block to help patients with neurodegenerative diseases form new memories.
The study authors recruited 90 healthy participants between the ages of 18 and 86 who were leaving the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra in St. John’s, Canada. The participants were taken aside and asked to listen to the orchestra playing three different compositions, one by WA Mozart and two completely new, experimental pieces written especially for the study. A separate smaller group of participants watched a video recording of the performances. Before each piece, the orchestra performed a prominent theme that was present in each piece of music. The listeners were asked to remember that theme. When the piece was played in its entirety, listeners were asked to press a button each time they specifically heard the theme. Ultimately, octogenarian participants were able to accurately identify the themes at about the same rate as their teenage counterparts.
“Overall, we find no main effect of age when recognizing a theme in a piece of music, nor any significant interaction of age with familiarity, setting, or musical training,” the researchers write.
Mozart themes were remembered equally well regardless of age or musical background
The experiment tried to see how people of different ages fared at remembering music with different levels of familiarity and tonality. The first composition, the famous one by Mozart A little Night Music, was considered both familiar (because most listeners could recognize it) and tonal because it follows general rules, such as a hierarchy based on a chromatic scale, often associated with traditional classical music. Researchers commissioned the other two compositions from Newfoundland’s School of Music. The first piece, called ‘Pirate Waltz’, had a pleasant but new ‘tonal’ sound. For the second piece, entitled ‘Unexpectedly Absent’, the musicians went in the opposite direction and deliberately created atonal sounds that were shocking and went beyond the tropical rules and boundaries of classical music.
Participants were presented with the main musical themes associated with each piece three times before listening to the composition in full. In all three cases the theme was first performed by the entire orchestra and then played separately by a soloist with one instrument. Listeners were instructed to identify the theme in the entire performance, regardless of whether it was performed by one or more instruments.
Overall, participants were much better at recalling the themes in Mozart’s piece than in the other two compositions, suggesting that the familiarity aspect of the music could play a key role in memory. When Mozart was removed from the analyses, paricants, regardless of age, were better at recalling themes from the tonal “Pirate Waltz” than the atonal “Unexpectedly Absent.”
“The absence of an age effect provides encouraging evidence that music’s diverse cues can promote cognitive support, thereby improving encoding and subsequent recognition,” the researchers write. “Better performance in an ecological versus laboratory environment supports the expansion of ecological studies in the field.”
Musical melodies can act as a ‘cognitive scaffolding’ to build strong memories
The researcher believes that part of the explanation for why listeners were able to accurately identify the themes in Mozart’s piece has something to do with the emotions that themes in certain music can arouse in people. Most of the study participants had heard the performance before and that past performance encoded itself deeply in their memories. The paper’s authors say these findings point to the possibility of using music as a kind of “cognitive scaffolding” or music tool to help people build and store new memories.
“This study further supports the use of music, particularly as a medium for cognitive maintenance and training in older adults, by providing evidence that recognition memory is not affected by age in a realistic listening situation,” the researchers note. “Accordingly, music recognition could be considered a strength on which other aspects of memory could be based in a rehabilitation setting.”
In theory, the research suggests that new words or concepts are easier to remember over time if they are combined with a known musical memory. That analysis also seems to lend some credibility to elementary language teachers around the world, who have integrated music and songs with learning for generations. It may also help explain why this writer still sings a slightly out-of-tune tune in his head when he remembers the alphabet.