The lifetime soundtrack
Music as an archive for autobiographical memory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v9i2.26642Keywords:
archive, autobiography, memory, music, soundtrackAbstract
The ability of music to trigger memories of one’s own life experiences is, for many people, an everyday occurrence. This article uses material from an in-depth qualitative study of adults’ memory narratives, which reveals the potential for music to encapsulate memories and associated affect on a scale that extends from singular moments to collections of memories situated within distinct temporal boundaries. The ways in which participants’ memories integrated with music that was personally meaningful not only confirmed that such manifestations are common, but that music itself becomes an effective representation of experience: music facilitates the development of a personal memory catalogue. Extending on existing arguments for the integration of memory and music within sociology and cultural studies, this article uses excerpts from research interviews to demonstrate how musical and para-musical elements of recorded music—lyrics, aesthetic sound, technology and entrainment—function in specific ways that enable music to act as an archive for memory.
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Bennett, Andy. 2013. Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully? Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Blacking, John. 1995. Music, Culture and Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Brockmeier, Jens. 2010. ‘After the Archive: Remapping Memory’. Culture & Psychology 16/1: 5–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354067X09353212
Chandler, Daniel. 2002. Semiotics: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203166277
Cross, Ian. 2001. ‘Music, Cognition, Culture and Evolution’. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 930 (The Biological Foundations of Music): 28–42.
DeChaine, D. Robert. 2002. ‘Affect and Embodied Understanding in Musical Experience’. Text and Performance Quarterly 22/2: 79–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462930216609
DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511489433
Featherstone, Mike. 2006. ‘Archive’. Theory, Culture & Society 23/2-3: 591–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276406023002106
Frith, Simon. 1987. ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music’. In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, 133–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—1989. ‘Why Do Songs Have Words’. Contemporary Music Review 5/1: 77–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494468900640551
Horton, Donald. 1990 [1957]. ‘The Dialogue of Courtship in Popular Song’. In On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 11–21. London: Routledge.
Janssen, Steve M. J., Antonion G. Chessa and Jaap M. J. Murre. 2007. ‘Temporal Distribution of Favourite Books, Movies, and Records: Differential Encoding and Re-sampling’. Memory 15/7: 755–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210701539646
Kassabian, Anahid. 2008. ‘Ubiquitous Listening’. In Cultural Studies: An Anthology, ed. M. Ryan, 838–49. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
—2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Listening. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Keightley, Emily, and Michael Pickering. 2006. ‘For the Record: Popular Music and Photography as Technologies of Memory’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 9/2: 149–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549406063161
Loftus, Elizabeth. F. 1975. ‘Leading Questions and the Eyewitness Report’. Cognitive Psychology 7: 560–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(75)90023-7
—2005. ‘Planting Misinformation in the Human Mind: A 30-Year Investigation of the Malleability of Memory’. Learning and Memory 12: 361–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/lm.94705
Milner, Greg. 2010. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. London: Faber & Faber.
Mithen, Steven. 2005. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. London: Phoenix.
Nowak, Raphael, and Andy Bennett. 2014. ‘Analyzing Everyday Sound Environments: The Space, Time and Corporality of Musical Listening’. Cultural Sociology 8/4: 426–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1749975514532262
Panksepp, Jaak, and Gunter Bernatzky. 2002. ‘Emotional Sounds and the Brain: The Neuro-affective Foundations of Musical Appreciation’. Behavioural Processes 60: 133–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0376-6357(02)00080-3
Phillips-Silver, Jessica, C. Athena Aktipis and Gregory A. Bryant. 2010. ‘The Ecology of Entrainment: Foundations of Coordinated Rhythmic Movement’. Music Perception 28/1: 3–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2010.28.1.3
Pillemer, David B. 1998. Momentous Events, Vivid Memories: How Unforgettable Moments Help us Understand the Meaning of our Lives. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Schacter, Daniel L. 2001. How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: The Seven Sins of Memory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Tagg, Philip. 1987. ‘Musicology and the Semiotics of Popular Music’. Semiotica 66/1: 279–98.
Tarasti, Eero. 2002. Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110899870
van Dijck, Jose. 2006. ‘Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory’. Critical Studies in Media and Communication 23/5: 357–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393180601046121
Vroomen, Laura. 2004. ‘Kate Bush: Teen Pop and Older Female Fans’. In Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual, ed. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, 238–53. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Published
2015-12-24
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Istvandity, L. (2015). The lifetime soundtrack: Music as an archive for autobiographical memory. Popular Music History, 9(2), 136-154. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v9i2.26642
