Whenever I hear Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters,” it’s suddenly fall of 1980 when I first moved to San Francisco. I see every detail of my studio apartment in a 1920s brownstone on the border of the Marina district: the honeycomb-patterned tile on the bathroom floor; the wall niche for the telephone; the space in the kitchen that once held the icebox. I relive the emotions of those early days in a new city, the excitement tinged with longings. “San Francisco show and tell.” Most songs don’t have this kind of emotional valence for me. But some do. Why is that?
In his novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust famously describes an episode in which the taste of a madeleine instantaneously fills him with an all-powerful joy because it transports him to particular incidents from his childhood. Such recollections can be triggered by any stimuli: a smell, a taste, a visual scene, a piece of music.
Researchers have studied this kind of involuntary memory, first identified by Hermann Ebbinghaus over a century ago. The results of a 2003 study by Shunji Kamiya of Nanzan University in Japan suggest that involuntary memory serves four functions: 1) confirmation of one’s existence at a given time in one’s life; 2) confirmation of one’s own psychological traits; 3) confirmation of one’s relationship to others; and 4) the direction or regulation of one’s behavior. A study by Simone Schlagman and Lia Kvavilashvili determined that involuntary memories were more specific and were retrieved significantly faster than voluntary memories. They were also more likely to be triggered by negative cues. Unfortunately, none of this adequately explains how or why a particular stimulus elicits such a memory.
At least in western culture, with the availability of constant background music thanks to technology, music appears to be the dominant agent of involuntary memory. A study of 12,420 Finnish Internet users revealed that 91.7% of people reported experiencing a music-triggered involuntary memory at least once a week.
I’m suddenly doing sit-ups at the gym when I hear these Depeche Mode lyrics:
I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours
But I think that god’s got a sick sense of humor
And when I die I expect to find him laughing.
Yet “Personal Jesus” — as much as I like the song — doesn’t recall any similar scene. What was it about the circumstances of first hearing “Blasphemous Rumours” that set it apart? It was a rather mundane moment in one sense. But there was something in the lyrics that resonated with things I was experiencing at the time. It was when the hysteria of AIDS was in full swing — a lot of questions but no answers. The moment became vivid because of an especially strong emotional reaction that accompanied it.
When I hear Tori Amos sing “Doughnut Hole,” the mood of the song perfectly mirrors a winter day with high stratus clouds advancing slowly across the sky, promising rain, while I wait at a bus stop for the 24 Divisadero. The song harmonizes so well with the weather on this day that I forever equate the two, and either one will elicit a memory of the other. Song and sky intertwined to the point that that they become synonymous.
What purpose this serves, who knows. Perhaps it’s simply an artifact of how our brains remember things, the interplay between emotion and experience. But that’s what makes us who we are. And when you hear that certain song, you see for a moment where you’ve been.
