Who sings that song? Is music recall affected by age?

According to researchers, your ability to remember and recognize musical themes seems unaffected by age, unlike many other forms of memory.

“You’ll hear anecdotes all the time of how people with severe Alzheimer’s can't speak, can’t recognize people, but will sing the songs of their childhood or play the piano,” says Sarah Sauvé, a feminist music scientist at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom.

Research has shown that while many aspects of memory decline with age, tasks involving well-known information and automatic processes, like recognizing familiar music, do not. Sauvé was interested in exploring this effect in a real-world setting, such as a concert.

In her study, published in PLoS ONE, she tested how well about 90 healthy adults, aged 18 to 86 years, could recognize familiar and unfamiliar musical themes at a live concert. Participants were recruited at a Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra performance in St. John’s, Canada. Another 31 people watched a recording of the concert in a laboratory.

The study focused on three pieces of music played at the concert: "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" by Mozart, assumed to be familiar to most participants, and two specially commissioned experimental pieces.

One of these experimental pieces was tonal and easy to listen to; the other was more atonal and did not follow typical Western classical music norms. A short melodic phrase from each piece was played three times at the beginning, and participants logged whenever they recognized that theme during the performance.

Recognition of the melodic phrase from "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" was consistent across all ages and musical backgrounds, with no decline in recognition with age. All participants were less confident in recognizing the theme in the unfamiliar tonal piece, and even less confident with the unfamiliar atonal piece. This pattern did not vary with age. The study also found no age-related difference in results between the concert attendees and those in the lab.

Steffen Herff, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sydney, Australia, suggests that musical memory's resistance to age-related decline may be due to the emotions music evokes, making it more deeply encoded in memory. “We know from general memory research that effectively the amygdala – or emotional processing – operates a little bit like an importance stamp,” he explains.

Music tends to follow certain rules, making it relatively easy to guess what happens in between, Herff adds.

The study collected limited data on some participants’ cognitive health, so it did not provide detailed insights into how cognitive impairments or neurodegenerative diseases affect memory recall. However, Herff mentions the growing interest in using music as ‘cognitive scaffolding’—a memory aid for other information—in individuals with neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia.

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