Catchy, annoying, intrusive: What makes some songs so unforgettable?
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Bad Romance, All Star, Baby Shark, what do all of these songs have in common? Just reading their names is enough to have you singing along in your head all week. Earworm songs like these are notorious for how annoyingly memorable they can be and raise a few questions about what makes them so catchy in the first place. After all, it can be easy to recall the chorus of a popular song years after you last heard it, but the same can hardly be said about all the terms and formulas you memorized in high school or university. How do musical memories differ from verbal memories?
Researchers studying this phenomenon believe there may be a distinct process through which musical memories are stored in the brain. A number of studies on patients with Alzheimer’s disease have found that musical memories tend to decay slower than other types of memory. This effect is particularly strong for songs, as the melody of the song itself acts as a cue to help the brain recall which lyrics come next. It is the predictability of familiar songs that helps us recall information by chunking words together in time with the song’s melody. The use of music and rhythm as a memory aid should be familiar for to those of us who learned the A-B-C’s through song, or still fall back on the “Thirty Days Hath September” rhyme when trying to remember how long a given month is.
Neuroscientists further explain the lasting effect of musical memories through something called neural tracking. Neural tracking is the process through which brain activity ‘syncs up’ with the natural rhythm of speech or music in order to ‘hear’ it more clearly. For example, when people direct their attention the sound of someone’s voice, the neurons in their brain respond by synchronising their activity to the rhythm of that voice. This process can improve understanding by increasing attention and focus. Research has found that neural tracking is even stronger when people are listening to lyrics in music and suggests this may be the the key to what makes songs so memorable. In order to assess this idea, a group of researchers from Western University, and Radboud University in the Netherlands, designed a study that put musical memory to the test.
The goal of this study was to test how well participants could remember song lyrics when they were paired with familiar and unfamiliar melodies. Neural tracking was also recorded with magnetoencephalography or MEG: a neuroimaging technique that uses magnetic fields generated by neurons to record brain activity. To identify the difference between familiar and unfamiliar music, researchers had participants complete a training phase where they learned new songs, and a testing phase where they were asked to recall the lyrics to those songs.
In the training phase, participants learned 12 new songs over four days. In order to test the effects of musical memory only, the researchers used some clever misdirection. Participants were told to count the number of notes in each song they learned and record their memory of the melody – no focus was put on the song lyrics in the training phase. However, in the testing phase lyrics came to the forefront: participants were asked to identify if lyrics they were given matched the ones they had heard during training. These lyrics were presented in three different formats; they could be sung to trained melodies participants had learned, spoken normally, or sung to untrained melodies that participants had not learned. Additionally, participants were asked to report which sung lyrics sounded familiar to them. The researchers expected participants to be best at detecting correct and incorrect lyrics when they were sung in tune to the trained melodies they had learned. However, what they found instead was a little more surprising.
Based off memory alone, participants did not seem to have an easier time remembering lyrics when they were sung to the trained melodies over the untrained melodiesones. In fact, there was no difference in their ability to identify the correct lyrics no matter how they were sung or spoken. The researchers believe this effect may have been caused by the training phase itself. Since participants were exposed to the real lyrics multiple times during their four days of training, they may have had an easier time identifying which lyrics were correct regardless of how they were presented during testing.
More familiar music did not improve memory, but it did have an interesting effect on brain activity. The study found that neural tracking was stronger for lyrics that were sung to a familiar melody compared to those that were only spoken, suggesting participants had better entrainment and were more attentive to songs they thought they remembered. The catch? Perceived familiarity had a much greater influence on neural tracking than the actual training phase did! Just recognizing a melody as familiar was enough to increase participants’ neural tracking to song lyrics, even when those melodies were not part of the 12 songs that participants originally learned. This unexpected finding raises a lot of questions towards how factors such as attention, previous experience, and enjoyment effect the way we create and recall memories.
Evidently, the connection between music and memory is a complicated relationship to untangle. Earworms might be so catchy because their simple and fast melodies act as cues for us to memorize the lyrics by – or it may simply be because they feel familiar to us after spending a summer at the top of the charts or as an unforgettable meme. In either case, these findings suggest that familiarity plays a significant role in our ability to focus on and remember information in songs. So, if you need to memorize a few equations before your next chemistry exam, you might want to try making use of the earworms you know and sing them to the tune of Baby Shark or the always relevant A-B-C’s.
Original article:
Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden, C. M., Joanisse, M. F., Grahn, J. A., Snijders, T. M., & Schoffelen, J.-M. (2022). Familiarity modulates neural tracking of sung and spoken utterances. NeuroImage, 252, 119049. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119049
Other studies referenced:
Simmons-Stern, Budson, A. E., & Ally, B. A. (2010). Music as a memory enhancer in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Neuropsychologia, 48(10), 3164–3167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.04.033
Park, Ince, R. A. A., Schyns, P. G., Thut, G., & Gross, J. (2015). Frontal Top-Down Signals Increase Coupling of Auditory Low-Frequency Oscillations to Continuous Speech in Human Listeners. Current Biology, 25(12), 1649–1653. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.04.049
Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden, C.M., Joanisse, F.M., Grahn, J.A, 2020. Music as a scaffold for listening to speech: better neural phase-locking to song than speech. Neuroimage 214. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116767.