Our memory of music persists in old age

Musical melodies forge deep memories that appear to persist regardless of a person’s age or instrumental knowledge. Credit: DepositPhotos

It’s no secret that aging can take a toll on one’s memory. Names, events, and general timelines can all become a bit blurrier over time, even if one isn’t diagnosed with dementia or any other neurological disease. But new research suggests that the ability to recall notable parts of music may persist even in old age. The findings, published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, highlight the unique connections humans make with musical sounds, and could serve as a building block to help patients living with neurodegenerative conditions forge new memories. 

The study’s authors recruited 90 healthy participants between the ages of 18-86 who were exiting the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra in St. John’s, Canada. Participants were taken aside and asked to listen to the orchestra play three different compositions, one by W.A. Mozart and two completely new, experimental pieces written specifically for the study. A separate smaller group of participants watched a video recording of the performances. Prior to each piece, the orchestra performed a prominent theme present in each piece of music. The listeners were asked to remember that theme. When the piece was played in full, listeners were asked to press a button every time they heard the theme specifically. In the end, eighty-year-old participants were able to accurately identify the themes at roughly the same rate as their teenage counterparts. 

“Overall, we find no main effect of age when tasked with 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 recalled equally well regardless of age or musical background 

The experiment sought to see how people of different ages fared at recalling music of varying levels of familiarity and tonality. The first composition, Mozart’s famous Eine kleine Nachtmusik, 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 the Newfoundland’s School of Music. The first piece, called “Pirate Waltz,” had a pleasant but novel “tonal” sound. For the second piece, called “Unexpectedly Absent,” musicians went the other direction and created purposefully atonal sounds that were jarring and crept outside the tropical rules and confines of classical music. 

Participants were presented major musical themes associated with each piece three times before they listened to the composition in full. The theme, in all three cases, was first performed by the entire orchestra and then played in isolation by a soloist using one instrument. Listeners were instructed to identify the theme in the full performance whether it was performed by one or multiple instruments. 

Overall, participants were much better at recalling the themes in the Mozart piece than the other two compositions, which suggest 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 may encourage cognitive scaffolding, in turn improving encoding and subsequent recognition,” the researchers write. “Better performance in an ecological versus lab setting supports the expansion of ecological studies in the field.”

Musical melodies could act as a ‘cognitive scaffolding’ to help build strong memories

The researcher believes part of the explanation for why listeners were able to accurately identify the themes in the Mozart piece has something to do with the emotions that themes in certain music can instill in people. Most of the participants in the study had heard the performance some time in the past and that past performance encoded itself deep in their memory. The paper’s authors say these findings point to the possibility of using music as a type of “cognitive scaffolding” or music aid to help people build and store new memories. 

“This study further supports the use of music in particular as a medium for cognitive maintenance and training in older adults by offering 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, onto which other aspects of memory could be scaffolded in a rehabilitation setting.” 

In theory, the research suggests new words or concepts may be easier to remember over time if they are paired alongside a familiar musical memory. That analysis appears to also lend some credence to elementary language teachers all around the world, who for generations have integrated music and songs with learning. It may also help explain why this writer still sings a slightly out-of-tune melody in his head when recalling the alphabet.

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