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Music has a prominent role in the everyday life of many people. Whether it be for recreation, distraction, or enhancing one’s mood, a lot of people listen to music from early in the morning until late at night, every day without fail. Moreover, due to its ubiquity, music has been identified as an important factor in the construction and reconstruction of personal memories. When discussing how music conveys certain emotions, it must be taken into account that there are explicit and implicit memories. Explicit memories are simple memories such as what you did 5 minutes ago, or essentially anything stored within your conscious mind. Implicit memories are memories deposited within the unconscious, that can still be retrieved by our conscious minds. So with this in mind, the action of listening to music triggers the section of the brain that invokes implicit memories, and as such acts as a vehicle for memory.
To understand memory in a more scientific context, the hippocampus and the frontal cortex are two large areas in the brain associated with memory, and they consume a great deal of information every waking second of our lives. As a result of this, retrieving these memories can often prove difficult, they don’t simply come when you ask them to, and this is where music comes into play. Music helps because it provides a rhythm and rhyme which helps to unlock specific information…
