When you hear a familiar melody, it can often bring back memories or stir emotions, and fascinatingly, this ability might not fade much with age. A new study published in PLOS One sheds light on how older adults remember music, even when it’s new and unfamiliar. The researchers found that while aging typically leads to declines in various memory functions, the ability to recognize and recall music may remain relatively intact, even when hearing new pieces for the first time.
As we age, one of the most common complaints is difficulty remembering new information. This decline in memory can be troubling, particularly when it interferes with daily activities. However, not all types of memory are equally affected by aging. For instance, while recalling recent events might become challenging, older adults often retain their ability to recall well-known information.
Music is unique in that it engages multiple areas of the brain, including those responsible for memory, emotion, and sensory processing. Given the growing interest in using music as a tool to maintain cognitive function in older adults, researchers have begun to explore how well we remember music as we age. The new study set out to investigate whether attending a live concert, with all its distractions and complexities, would affect an older adult’s ability to remember a piece of music compared to a controlled lab environment.
“This study is part of a line of research looking at aging and music perception more broadly,” explained study author Sarah Sauve, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Lincoln. “One of my coauthors (Benjamin Rich Zendel) found in previous work that an older musician has the equivalent ability to understand speech in a noisy environment as someone 20 years younger who was not a musician, suggesting there’s something about the listening skills that musicians develop that helps them listen better as they age.”
“How could these skills be developed in people who have not been musicians their whole lives? And also, though people tend to find understanding speech in noise more difficult as they age, we don’t really hear complaints about music and people still actively listen to music throughout their lives.”
“Together, these two questions led us to investigate how auditory streaming (separating sounds into their sources), memory and attention (three cognitive skills we think are important to understanding speech in a noisy environment) may or may not change with age, specifically in the context of music. So far, we’ve done the studies on auditory streaming and memory (both published in PLOS One) and we’ve found no negative effects of age.”
The researchers carried out their study in two distinct settings: a live concert and a laboratory environment. Participants were attendees of a symphony concert and members of the general community. The live concert took place at the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra’s 2022–2023 Season Masterworks 3 concert. Participants ranged in age, with some as young as 18 and others as old as 86.
In the concert setting, participants were asked to listen to three different pieces of music: the well-known Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart, and two new pieces composed specifically for the study. These new compositions were designed to challenge listeners with varying levels of familiarity—one piece followed traditional tonal music rules, while the other was atonal, a style that lacks a clear key or tonal center.
Before each piece was played, the main musical theme was introduced and repeated three times to help participants familiarize themselves with it. During the performance, participants used handheld devices to indicate when they recognized the theme as it reappeared within the music. This process was repeated in the laboratory setting, but instead of listening live, participants watched a recording of the concert while seated in a soundproof booth.
The researchers found that age did not significantly impact participants’ ability to recognize the musical themes. Whether in their twenties or their seventies, participants generally performed similarly when identifying the themes. This finding challenges the common notion that memory declines uniformly with age. Instead, it suggests that some types of memory, such as those associated with music, might be more resilient to the effects of aging.
“We expected to find more false alarms (identifying a theme when there isn’t one) in older adults, which is a pattern commonly found in the literature, but we didn’t find that,” Sauve told PsyPost.
The study also found that familiarity played a significant role in how well participants recognized the themes. Unsurprisingly, participants were better at recognizing the familiar Mozart piece than the two newly composed ones. However, when the familiar piece was excluded from the analysis, the results revealed that tonality—the adherence to traditional musical structures—helped participants remember the new music better. The tonal piece was easier to remember than the atonal one, indicating that the brain’s familiarity with certain musical structures can aid in memory retention.
“We’ve found no evidence that the ability to learn and recognize new music is negatively affected by age – in fact, it’s equally challenging for everyone,” Sauve said. “We’re all good at recognizing things we’ve heard many times before though.”
Interestingly, the study also showed no significant difference in memory performance between the live concert and the lab setting. This suggests that the complexities and potential distractions of a live performance do not necessarily impair our ability to remember music. This finding is encouraging for those who advocate for more ecologically valid research settings—studying memory in real-world environments rather than strictly controlled lab conditions.
“We were pleasantly surprised to find that performance on the task wasn’t affected by whether or not the study was in the lab (more controlled) or at a live concert (many concerns over noisiness and control in such a setting),” Sauve said.
The study’s implications for using music as a cognitive scaffold—essentially, a tool to support other cognitive functions—are worth exploring further.
“Ideally, the goal is to use this information, along with existing literature, to develop a training programme using music to develop the listening skills most needed to understand speech in a noisy environment,” Sauve explained. “This is important because trouble understanding speech in a noisy context is one of the most common complaints in older adults with their hearing and it can have negative effects on quality of life – when going out becomes exhausting, you might do it less, increasing loneliness and isolation, etc.”
The study, “Age and familiarity effects on musical memory,” was authored by Sarah A. Sauvé, Praveena Satkunarajah, Stephen Cooke, Özgen Demirkaplan, Alicia Follett, and Benjamin Rich Zendel.
