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Tuned In

Music and memory. The two words sound right together, and for good reason. Science may not have yet figured out exactly how, or why, human beings respond to music. But research across many disciplines shows that music is a powerful stimulator, shaper and maybe even sharpener of memory.

Certain elderly Alzheimer's patients, largely unresponsive to the world around them, have snapped suddenly, if temporarily, into heightened awareness when played a cherished tune from their youth. In some cases, to both the caregivers' and patients' surprise, the music has opened a pathway to other memories.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has described how Parkinson's sufferers, having lost certain basic physical abilities such as walking, can somehow persuade their bodies to "remember" these skills when stimulated by music.

And there's the intriguing, if hysterically over-reported "Mozart Effect" of a few years ago. This suggested that snippets of classical music might help students remember factual information more readily, and thereby ostensibly improve their chances of acing that midterm.

People tend to be especially receptive to music, as they are to language, when young. And the circuitry is amazingly durable, a fact that has come to the attention of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Is there a Top 40 pop song of the '60s or '70s that hasn't made its way into, and not infrequently furnished the title for, a recent motion picture? Forget curing Alzheimer's - musical memory helps fatten the weekend grosses.

And as baby boomers slide into their dotage, things on the advertising front are getting comical: The prescription arthritis pill Vioxx, for instance, is peddled to achy-jointed seniors to the strains of "It's a Beautiful Morning" by the once-libidinous blue-eyed soul group the Young Rascals. Weirder yet, Cadillac cars, the proud chariots of country club retirees, are at this moment being hawked via Led Zeppelin's frenetic anthem "Rock 'n' Roll."

The ad moguls call this tapping into the soundtrack of our lives.

Musical memory is not just for the suggestive or the sentimental.

What tougher personality has modern popular culture created than Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine, the opportunistic expatriate saloon-keeper of "Casablanca"? Our man Rick could handle anything, except music - he forbade Sam the pianist to play "As Time Goes By," for fear that he'd be undone by the emotional juices thus stirred up. (As it turned out, of course, his concerns proved to be well founded.)

Rick's feelings about the song in turn became our own: Even today, "As Time Goes By," written in 1931 but scarcely noticed until the movie came out 12 years later, is a powerful evoker of romance and loss.

We amateurs are not just passive bystanders in all of this.

Non-musicians will marvel that a professional violinist, say, can memorize a complicated 40-minute concerto. But as Anthony Storr has pointed out in his book "Music and the Mind," almost all of us, trained or not, have remarkable musical memories. That is, given the slightest cue, we can summon hundreds of songs, usually note perfect, and sing them when called upon, even if we haven't heard or thought about them for years. This is true even for those of us who have reached the point in life where we have trouble recalling where we parked the car in the company lot this morning.

There are hazards here. Everybody, for example, gets a tune stuck in their heads from time to time, and there is even evidence that certain people have some kind of musical idea coursing through their consciousness virtually every waking moment. But sometimes the needle gets stuck. A man in Maine was unable to rid himself of a tune from his interior tape loop for something like 20 years and eventually sought therapy. In the case of composer Robert Schumann, unwelcome musical remembrances led to his jumping into the Rhine River in an attempt to end his life.

The very act of listening to music is an act of memory. Consider the basic popular song format, which in the shorthand is called AABA form. The first "A" is the main melody, classically eight measures long. In most songs, that section is then repeated, with a new set of words. Then a contrasting section ("B") is heard, which leads back to a final repetition of "A". Even though the "B" section has lasted perhaps 30 seconds altogether, we feel an almost magical satisfaction at having remembered, and returned to, the original "A" section.

The majority of pop tunes observe this format, from "Beautiful Dreamer" to "Surfer Girl."

More complex but fundamentally similar, longer forms of music, including hour-long symphonies, are constructed this way: a theme is established, it moves to more distant, unrelated ideas, and then returns, sometimes elaborated or altered, but recognizably itself.

The point is that repetition is what makes musical memory work. And today, the capacity for such repetition, though we hardly even think about it, is nevertheless astounding. In the 19th century, a serious music lover might hear a particular symphony of Beethoven performed once or twice in a lifetime. With recordings, we can hear it, if we choose, once a day.

Or think of it this way: If you were in college when the Beatles' "Yesterday," came out, and if you heard the song 10 times a week for the 12 or so weeks it was on the charts (a conservative estimate), and if you heard the song just an average of twice a month thereafter, by the time you turned 50, you would have heard it more than 900 times. And that's just one tune.

No wonder you can't remember where you parked.

"Music is feeling, then, not sound," wrote Wallace Stevens.

More than one social critic has proposed that we surround ourselves with music these days precisely because feelings - genuine feelings, of the sort that even superficial music can convey - are otherwise hard to come by in our smart-aleck, quick-cut, irony-tinged age.

And surround is the right word.

A growing percentage of working adults now report they listen to music constantly throughout the workday. When you then add the music that most of us compulsively play in the car, the music that we pipe through our home sound systems, the music heard as accompaniment to television and movies, the music that comes unbidden in restaurants and malls, it's not a stretch to say music is less a diversion from modern life as it is a constant, essential component of it.

So be careful what you listen to. That is, pay attention to the kind of musical memory you're compiling.

The way the process works today, the soundtrack of your life is your life.

Copyright © 2015, Hartford Courant
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