Nickyboy
Staff member
I might have mentioned this a long time ago, but when my father passed away, I made an 8-CD mixed "tape" of the music that was popular in each decade of his life as well as songs that he loved and would play over and over. At his memorial service, I had the discs playing on a continuous loop. I thought it was going to be a thing that I and my mother would recognize as being "dad's music". I was wrong. A number of his colleagues recognized tracks that he would sing casually, or that he would play as the background during one of their many cocktail/dinner parties he and my mother held in the 70s and 80s while he still taught. A number of them asked me to burn them copies of the discs. It's been said many times that the two things that evoke memories the strongest are smell and music.
Music, memory and my dad: how songs define and shape us
The Flying Pickets’ Only You unlocks such visceral emotions for Jude Rogers that it can stop her in her tracks. In this extract from her new book, she asks what science lies behind the power of music to make the past vividly presentwww.theguardian.com
Janata’s hunch proved correct: the songs that promoted the most neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex were those that prompted vivid recollections. “A piece of familiar music [therefore] serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head,” Janata said. “It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye.”
True.
