There was a lovely article in The Guardian this weekend about music and memory and how certain songs can stop you in your tracks and whisk you away, back through the years.
It was written by Jude Rogers (journalist, interviewer, arts critic and broadcaster) and tells the tale of how she lost her father when she was a little girl and the role pop music had in their relationship and the significance of one song in particular. Only You by The Flying Pickets.
I’d often wondered about this time collapsing ability some song have but have never explored it in a more “scientific” way. My hypothesis was that it was the songs you heard often from a particular time but that you didn’t “take with you” through subsequent years that had the ability to transport you back, whereas songs you LOVED and have continued to listen to don’t have the same power. Their familiarity somehow dilutes the the relationship to a particular time in your life.
Jude Rogers contacted Prof Petr Janata of the University of California whose studies into how the brain processes music had altered our understaning of it. He played snippets of songs to his students whilst in an MRI scanner. These songs were from a period of time when his students were between 8 and 18 and found that the music did trigger very specific memories in the subjects. “A piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head,” Janata said. “It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye.”
When these pieces of music “struck a chord” (so to speak) with his subjects “the fMRI scanner came to life”.
It’s an interesting read. I still think there may well be something to my hypothesis too.
Club 30-80 