Fancy that!

From time to time I glance over some of the discussions on The Session. My eye was recently caught by one on musical memory, especially as the opening poster was looking for tips on remembering. As ever the comments varied from the flippant to the serious, but the general gist was that memory works in mysterious ways.

One poster mentioned Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain, so I trundled out to borrow it from the library. It is an interesting book, not too technical, and well written. Dr Sacks was (he died in 2015) clearly a well-read and cultured man and as well as citing standard journals such as JAMA he mentions Darwin, Henry James, EM Forster, Somerset Maugham, Nietzsche amd Proust, among others. He was also a musician from a musical family.

I suppose the clue is in the word "tales" in the title, because in the end it is not much more than a collection of fascinating anecdotes and case stories about the strangeness of the human brain in relation to music. The most concrete finding seems to be that music is independent of other types of memory, so that a man who cannot remember the day of the week or his wife's name will still be able to play from memory hundreds of pieces of music. Learning music may also be different from other types of learning, allowing someone who has never learned to tie their shoe laces, count muffins or draw an elephant to be able to accurately play and sing. Music is also linked in to emotion differently from other things, so where emotion is deadened by dementia, Parkinsons, psychopathy, autism or brain injury, music may bring emotion out.

So all very fascinating, and full of human interest, stories sad and happy, but very short on anything on how musical memory works, and therefore how one should best go about learning.

I suppose it's not surprising. Even my own experience is mixed. Some tunes fall into my head after one or two times having them as background sound in the car. Others will not stick despite repeated listening, on a loop, while doing nothing else at all. Sometimes I can throw dots away almost at once, for other tunes I need weeks or months with dots. Some tunes I can only play once they start to play themselves in my head, other tunes I learn very well but never spontaneously hum. Some tunes I can get if I "look" at the picture of the dots in my head, for others I struggle to "see" the dots, can't "see" enough to help, or just don't need those phantom dots. Songs I find easier to remember, I suppose because I can memorise words more easily than notes, follow the internal logic of the song (most trad songs tell linear stories), and then use the words and fragments of melody to piece together a likely whole.

I think this will all boil down in the end to more practice...