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Category: Project

Description: Studies of music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) show that music is a salient cue for retrieving vivid memories. These MEAMs often are characterised as being emotional, positive, and important to listeners' sense of identity. The aim of the present study is to interrogate how different features of music may predict qualities of MEAMs. As such it will provide insights into, for example, whether highly emotional, vivid or social musical memories tend to be associated with features like tempo or mode. While the growing body of research on MEAMs has focused on details of the evoked memories and reported emotions of those memories, to-date there has not been a systematic investigation into how the musico-acoustic features of those reported songs may play a role in the initial encoding of the memory or in the retrieval of that memory. The current body of research indicates that it is likely that musical features, including auditory properties (key, tempo, energy, etc.), vocal properties and lyrics, do contribute to MEAMs. However it has yet to be investigated to what extent those properties play a role. The present study therefore aims to fill a gap in the current research by evaluating the trends in auditory features of memory-evoking songs. The present study will be a survey study in which participants hear songs that will have been popular in their childhood and early adulthood, and asked to report on any memories that those songs bring to mind. Participants will describe the memory and provide evaluations of emotional and other phenomenological content of the memory. Participants will also report on the same details of a memory of their choosing that is strongly related to a song. Analyses will be conducted into how the auditory features (as extracted using the Spotify API) may predict emotional and phenomenological content of autobiographical memories, as well as how autobiographical memories may differ in their retrieval on account of auditory features. Additionally we will be investigating how self-reported MEAMs may differ from MEAMs evoked using experimenter-selected stimuli, and how the musical profiles of songs that do evoke AMs compare to those that do not evoke AMs.