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Hit songs spark shared memories in strangers

That song that instantly takes you back to a particular summer may be doing something similar for people you have never met. New research led by Princeton University, with involvement from Durham University, suggests the memories stirred by popular music are far more alike from one listener to the next than we tend to assume. The findings appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For the study, 223 Princeton University students listened to 30-second excerpts of chart-topping pop, rock, country and hip-hop tracks. The selection drew on hits from the participants' own teenage years in the 2010s, among them Adele's Hello, Camila Cabello's Havana, Kendrick Lamar's HUMBLE. and Florida Georgia Line's Meant to Be. It also included defining songs from their parents' youth in the eighties and nineties, such as Wham!'s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Tag Team's Whoomp! There It Is, Billy Ray Cyrus's Achy Breaky Heart and Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You.

The team then used natural language processing to analyse over 1,000 written accounts of the memories the clips brought back. Songs from the same era or genre tended to produce similar scenarios among listeners with comparable backgrounds. Follow-up experiments that relied on isolated lyric keywords or written story summaries did not yield the same convergence, which points to the sound and genre of the music, rather than the words alone, as the force behind these shared mental scripts.

Co-author Kelly Jakubowski, Professor of Music Psychology in Durham University's Department of Music, linked the pattern to everyday listening habits. Finding that your personal memories can closely resemble those of a stranger is surprising, she said, but it makes sense: we all use music to accompany daily life in much the same way as other people do. Wedding reception playlists, for instance, are similar enough to call up comparable experiences in guests who have never met before. That, she added, shows how powerfully music shapes memory and how well it works as a tool for bringing people together through shared experience.

Photo: Music-News
Source: Muzland
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