If you’re a music lover, you’ll know that what you listen to can have a profound impact on how you feel – and can even be exactly the tool you reach for when going through particularly hard times.
However, according to new research, it runs much deeper than this, and music can play a role in how we recall memories and process them.
Think for a moment of a particularly poignant scene from film or TV that struck a chord with you. The musical choices used in these specific scenes — whether that be the score or a perfectly-chosen song — is called “mood music”, and contributes to setting the mood of the moment.
A study from researchers at Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology found was that even in real life, “mood music” can actually be powerful enough to change how we remember our own past.
This study looked at 44 Georgia Tech students, who each listened to film soundtracks while recalling a difficult memory.
Researcher Yiren Ren explained: “We wanted to start off with a random group of people and see if music has the power to modulate the emotional level of their memories.”
While this trial was not clinical, so the participants weren’t identified as people with mood disorders, the researchers did discover that music played a huge role in changing how they reflected on their memories.
Not only can music affect the way we remember things, it also has a lasting effect.
The next day, those that participated in the study were asked to think of those same memories, but this time, without accompanying music. What the researchers found was that the impact of “mood music” was so strong that the participants still had the same emotional response as they did during the first round of the study the following day.
Yiren Ren hopes this will inform future mental health care
Speaking to Futurity, Ren said: “These early studies reveal that music can both help and hinder our memory, depending on its familiarity and structure.
“I’m excited to bring together my lifelong love of music with my interest in human memory. Because I think the next phase of my research could provide valuable evidence to support the development of music-based interventions for mental health and cognitive function.
We sure hope so.