Musical Remembering in the Age of Social Media
Abstract
Have you ever heard a song that “took you back” to a previous time in your life? If so, you are not alone. Many people experience this kind of personal recollection formally known as a music-evoked autobiographical memory. Music—especially in its recorded form—has become so intertwined in our everyday lives that it inevitably becomes part of our history. Music technology—cassettes, Mp3s, records, and streaming—replay not just the music of our pasts, but also our memories. But what happens when that technology changes? Social media, which has yet to be broadly considered in the context of music-evoked memory, represents an increasingly prevalent and interactive space in which music is heard, the everyday is experienced, and memory is curated. Like previous technologies, it comes with distinct habits and facilities: recorded music in this virtual space appears sped up and slowed down, remixed and mashed up, a component of viral memes. It is heard repetitively as samples in an endless feed of content. This project is a collection of interrelated studies that investigate—from variety of angles—the ways in which social media shapes music-evoked memory. I suggest that music-evoked autobiographical memory manifests the interdependence of a music-memory-technology relationship. To alter one of these constituents, in turn, changes the others. I draw on methods from musicology but also music theory, psychology, and sociology: within this project are the findings of music analyses, online fieldwork, a behavioral lab experiment, and interviews with listeners and social media users. Through these various approaches I consider how social media facilitates particular types of listening practices that, in turn, create distinct mnemonic relationships to virtual spaces. I argue that social media, in some ways, extends the capacity of recorded music to reinforce autobiographical memory as listeners document, play with, and share their musical associations; in other ways the short-form, remixed audiovisual contexts that connect to popular music recordings can also distort memory. Ultimately, as captured by the listeners featured in this project, the autobiographical outcome is shaped by greater trends in music and technology but also how listeners choose to engage with these virtual communities as they practice listening and remembering