Music is often all around us: it plays in the background of the films and TV shows we watch, it comes over the speakers in the supermarket, and we often listen to our favourite playlists when out and about. Because it’s such a big part of our daily experiences, and always has been, it forms a big part of our memories as well. (It doesn’t even have to be music we like: Personally, I always associate Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” with my first visit to New York 25 years ago, because it was playing in the shuttle bus that took me from Newark Airport to Manhattan!)

Because music can trigger memories, it’s part of music therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. But even though it has been successfully used in therapy, researchers still don’t fully understand what it is about music that helps with memory recall. One leading theory is that it has to do with the emotional connection that we have with music. This connection is generally stronger for familiar songs, or for songs that we like, so it’s very individual. Despite our individual choices in music, the things that happen in the brain when we hear an emotionally stimulating song are quite similar for everyone and have been well studied. In one study, for example, researchers found that if you listen to music with a stronger familiar connection just after a vocabulary memorisation task, it’s easier to remember the words.

But most memories aren’t just lists of words. Remembering an entire event or scene involves both details and the big picture. How does music affect these different aspects of memory? That’s what researchers Kayla Clark from Rice University and Stephanie Leal from University of California, Los Angeles, have now studied.

Emotional music affects memory recall

The researchers asked 130 undergraduate students to look at many images of everyday household objects. After that, they listened to music and then saw a whole new set of images, some of which they had seen before. They had to indicate whether each image in the second round was new, or one they saw before.

The researchers tested how the music that people listened to affected the results of the memory task. The volunteers were split into different groups who listened to different music samples, and they also all had to indicate how they felt about each piece of music.

Whether they listened to songs that they considered happy or sad or familiar did not seem to make much of a difference in memorization. But what did help their memory was how much they responded emotionally to a piece of music.

“The more emotional that people became from the music, the more they remembered the gist of a previous event,” Clark told the Society for Neuroscience. “But people who had more moderate emotional responses to music remembered more details of previous events.”

So the level of emotional response someone has to music could predict how well they remember either the overall event or the details of an event.

That is useful information for music therapists who work with memory recall activities. But the researchers pointed out that this study was a bit limited because they only selected a few pieces of music. Ideally, this would require a more personalized approach, because not everyone reacts the same to each piece of music.