Music, memory and megabytes...

[Externet]

Hi all.

Most of us retain in our memory about 1000 songs since childhood, where their exact notes, durations, sequences, instruments, lyrics, tempo, voice, tones, cadence, pitch, chords, echoes, performer, and even more details pertaining particularities of each tune.

To the point that any tiny deviation in one single detail as a note, instrument change, microphone positioning as in a live or different recording is immediately noticeable.

Even we can anticipate passages coming next.

 

How can the brain keep so much fine detail saved ? Any theories about it ? And what would be the Terabytes equivalent of such recognizable detail in a single tune multiplied by the number of tunes remembered ?

 

Movies, in change, seem to be much less remembered in detail for their scenes, dialogs, events...

 

We can remember all that detail vividly and automatically on a perhaps irrelevant need as music; but it is much harder to retrieve/remember the relevant instruction received along the years studying and learning, it just fades away in time...

How come ?

[Mr Skeptic]

Well music doesn't really take up much space, not in musical notation form. An actual performance could be in midi form, still not that much space. We don't remember every single detail of a song.

[Ringer]

First most people really don't remember every aspect of a song. More of just the rhythm and timing of a song. Most people don't know a large amount of the words of a song, even if they listen to it over and over. Also, I notice when songs guitar or bassline skip or something is changed more than most people I know because I play music and tend to listen more attentively. I've seen people not even notice with there is a quarter beat skip in a cd yet it drives me crazy.

 

On how people do it, it's part of how we remember, I can't remember the term for the life of me. We remember things by association with other things; such as being able to remember something you learned in school better if you are sitting. You can remember the pieces of a song because the beat, timing and such primes you for what you are expecting to happen next.

[mississippichem]

I play bass; classical and other. The only songs where I can seem to remember every detail are the songs that I've played a million or so times. However, I think at that point it's just become "muscle memory" and is more akin to typing than playing a song.