Music for Memory

For many people, music is an indispensable part of life, whether at special occasions or in our day-to-day life. While we listen to music, we can recall vivid memories of our own life, of other people, of places and experience. But how do we actually remember music itself? What does our memory of music look like? The FWF (Austrian Science Fund) Project 4332724 Music for Memory is subtitled Memory for Music because we are interested in two scientific aims: We will explore, how we can remember music and how our brain enables memory for music. At the same time, we want to find out how we can use music for memory. We want to answer both of our research questions by inviting patients with an Alzheimers Disease diagnosis to participate in a music-making based intervention. During the course of the intervention, patients will learn to sing specially composed songs. We will then test with the methods of musicology, psychology, and neuroscience, how our memory for music develops and whether this memory can be improved through the intervention, that is, whether we can use music for memory. We also have more specific questions: Are there musical events within a song that we can remember especially well? We will use musicological methods to study recordings of how patients sing the learned songs to find out, which elements within a song can be remembered especially well. Are memories for songs similar to other kinds of memories? Here we will analyze a particular kind of brain activity which is commonly observed when we recall memory. As in previous psychological experiments, we will use EEG to record the brain activity that can be measured on our scalps. And which brain areas support the formation of new memories for music? Here we will use imaging methods of neuroscience to study whether our brains architecture can predict, how well songs are remembered. Lastly, we ask, whether the intervention can change patients memory. Here in Austria we will recruit patients who live in Vienna to participate in our study. At the same time, our research team will offer the intervention in Norway and Argentina as part of a project funded by the Research Council of Norway, so that we can later compare our results to those from other countries and in other languages. Our research team is international as a result: Apart from researchers from Vienna, our team is made up by colleagues from Bergen (Norway) and Buenos Aires (Argentina). Please get in touch with our research team if you have any questions about our research project.