comment - ...place, rather the creation of topographic temporal representations, isn't rescindable. Neither are topologic inferences which can include self within those places.
Memory. Music... functions as a meta-language, I think, synchronizing the expression of multiple systems. Part of those represented places and self in those places. Motivation.
In addition to this type of investigation, which does not always give concordant results, there are some that analyze specific situations that allow us to grasp particularly interesting aspects of our relationship with music, but also of the functioning of our memory. This is the case of an experiment conducted by the University of Milan-Bicocca whose results have just been published in an article in Nature Scientific Reports: the aim of the study was to investigate what influence what we listen to, be it music or background noise, has on perceptive and cognitive processes.
The research, conducted by the Milan Center for Neuroscience of the University of Milan-Bicocca (Department of Psychology) and coordinated by Alice Mado Proverbio, professor of Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology at the University of Milan, was conducted on a group of 54 non-musician university students who were given a memory exercise: recognizing familiar faces among the 448 that were shown to them after a learning session.
"Ours was a specific study - Professor Proverbio told Ilsussidiario.net - on visual memory for social information. We started from the context of the music that accompanies the images of films; at the same time we also observed the effect of background noise on cognitive capacity, in particular on the memorization of faces. So we wanted to see how music integrates with visual information and whether other types of auditory information can interfere with memory or not".
The study was conducted through psychophysiological measurements, therefore measuring the heart rate and blood pressure and subsequently also brain activity, to highlight the mechanism by which this music coding integrates with facial recognition. In a first phase of the experiment, participants were shown 56 images of men's and women's faces in association with a background sound (jazz music and natural sounds, for example sea waves). In the next phase, they were shown another 300 unfamiliar faces with a background of music judged to be moving or joyful or agitated by a group of 20 musicians in a previous study, or with the background of the sound of rain, or in silence. In the test phase, the participants saw another 300 faces (200 old and 100 new) without any background music and were asked to use their index finger to “indicate” whether they were new faces and their middle finger for those they had already seen.
«The result was the following. Any auditory information causes a disturbance in the performance of any task, whether visual or verbal or otherwise; even noises like rain, therefore completely natural phenomena, interfere because they overload the cognitive system. Therefore, in general, silence is better. However, if you listen to “moving” music, even of various styles and eras but that induces moods of tenderness, sadness, nostalgia or other “touching” effects, well, this music helps you remember faces. Whatever facial expression a person has, I integrate that morphological information with the music I’m listening to; just like with the soundtrack when watching a movie: what would Agent 007, Indiana Jones, the Pink Panther, the Godfather be without their famous background music? This mechanism of integrating emotional states with visual information helps you remember faces».
In a further study, the Bicocca group examined brain activity while watching faces, finding that there is coding by the limbic system, the amygdala and the emotigenic structures that produce a more solid engram (i.e. a mnemonic trace, ed.) and therefore a deeper memory when the viewing is accompanied by moving music.
In short, if we have to study, silence is better; if instead we want - or have to for some reason - remember human faces, then listening to touching music improves performance.
link - 30 famous soundtracks: