An old song comes on while you're buying groceries. By the chorus, you're thinking about the back seat of a car you haven't been in for twenty years. You remember who was driving, where you were going and how normal it felt to hear that song everywhere.
Music can bring back a single afternoon or the feeling of an entire summer. To understand why, it helps to look at what happens when a familiar sound becomes attached to a place, a person or a period of your life.
A familiar song gives memory something to grab onto
A song can serve as a retrieval cue. A voice, a guitar tone or the opening rhythm can bring a past experience to mind because you heard that sound in the middle of it. The same recording might remind one person of a wedding and another of a kitchen where they used to work.
In an experiment with 100 young adults, Kelly Jakubowski and her colleague found that more familiar musical excerpts brought up more personal memories and brought them up more quickly. The researchers also found that the emotional character of the excerpts influenced the kinds of memories people recalled. Study on familiarity and music-evoked memories
Neuroscientist Petr Janata examined part of this process in a 2009 brain imaging study. As participants listened to popular music excerpts, activity in parts of the medial prefrontal cortex varied with how strongly the music connected to their own lives. The study traced an association between hearing a song and recalling something personally meaningful. Janata's study in Cerebral Cortex
Why music from adolescence stays with us
Researchers use the term reminiscence bump for the concentration of personal memories from adolescence and early adulthood. Music offers a way to study that pattern because recordings can be linked to particular years.
In a 2020 study, 470 adults aged 18 to 82 saw the titles and artists of songs that had appeared in the charts between 1950 and 2015. They rated how familiar the songs were, how much they liked them and how strongly they associated them with personal memories. Familiarity and personal associations peaked for music that had charted when participants were around 14. Liking followed a different pattern depending on the listener's age. Jakubowski and colleagues' study of the musical reminiscence bump
Fourteen was the peak in that study. The broader idea is easy to recognise. Adolescence gives songs plenty to attach to. You might remember the first album a friend lent you or the track everyone played on the way home from school. Years later, even a song you rarely choose to play can bring one of those moments back.
Why the feeling can be happy and sad at once
Frederick Barrett and colleagues asked 226 university students to listen to excerpts of popular songs and rate their nostalgia. Familiar songs and songs with stronger personal associations tended to evoke more nostalgia. Stronger nostalgic reactions were also associated with a mixture of positive and negative feelings. Barrett and colleagues' study of music-evoked nostalgia
Think of a song you played with a friend who moved away. You can enjoy remembering how much time you spent together and miss the ease of seeing them every day. The recording gives both feelings somewhere to land. That is how an upbeat song can leave you with a lump in your throat.
A song can be older than the memory it brings back
In 2013, Carol Krumhansl and Justin Zupnick played young adults excerpts from more than five decades of popular music. They found a second peak in personal memories and other responses for songs from the participants' parents' generation. The researchers suggested that hearing this music at home during childhood could help explain the result. Krumhansl and Zupnick's study of musical memories across generations
A song released in 1982 can remind you of a car journey in 2008. The release date tells you when the recording entered the world. The journey tells you when it became part of yours.
Synthwave offers another way into that feeling. A new recording can suggest an imagined 1980s through sounds you recognise from film scores and games. Music scholar Mattia Merlini has explored how synthwave soundtracks draw on those cultural associations. For someone who knows the decade through a screen, the sense of familiarity may come from years of watching those films rather than from having lived through the period. Merlini's study of synthwave soundtracks
The songs that will do this to you in ten years might be playing during fairly ordinary moments right now. A track you keep putting on while making dinner could one day bring back the light in a kitchen you haven't seen since you moved out.