Neurocognitive approaches to memory in music : music is memory

Musical memory has remarkable features and a wide-ranging scope. For example, it has the capacity to recognize melodies even after long time spans and within a couple of notes. Music is a complex, highly structured, acoustic material that unfolds over time. Memory for musical material includes the capacity to remember a wide range of features, from the pitch of tones and musical timbres to their rhythmic and metric patterns, from associated lyrics and evoked emotions to the combination of these and other features in larger, integrated structures and representations. Psychologists and neuroscientists investigate how such features are encoded, stored, and combined in a memory representation and then reactivated at recognition and recall. The study of musical memory can make a unique contribution to further understanding short-term memory, long-term memory, and emotional memory. Notably, musical long-term memory provides considerable connections to listeners’ autobiographical past. This chapter, drawing from multiple findings, presents the specific feature of musical memory and its neural correlates and compares them to memory in language and other domains.