The ability to remember and recognize a musical theme does not appear to be affected by age, unlike many other forms of memory.

“You always hear anecdotes about how people with severe Alzheimer's can't speak, can't recognize people, but can sing the songs of their childhood or play the piano,” says feminist musicologist Sarah Sauvé, who currently works at the University of Lincoln in the UK.

Past research has shown that many aspects of memory are influenced by age, such as: Retrieval tasks that require real-time processing, during recognition tasks that occur on known information and automatic processes, are not affected. The influence of age on the ability to remember music has also been studied, but Sauvé was interested in exploring this effect in a real-world setting such as a concert.

In her today inPLoS ONEpublished study 1They tested how well a group of about 90 healthy adults aged 18 to 86 were able to recognize familiar and unfamiliar musical themes at a live concert. Participants were recruited at a performance by the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra in St. John’s, Canada. 31 other people watched a recording of the concert in a laboratory.

The study focused on three pieces of music played at the concert:A little Night Musicby Mozart, which the researchers assumed most participants were familiar with, and two specially commissioned experimental pieces; one of which was tonal and easy to hear, the other was more atonal and did not conform to the typical melodic norms of Western classical music. A short melodic phrase from each of the three pieces was played three times at the beginning of each piece, and participants then noted when they recognized that theme in the piece.

The melodic phrase from theA little Night Musicwas recognized equally well across all age groups and musical backgrounds, with no decline in recognition noted with age. All participants were less confident about identifying the theme in the unfamiliar tonal piece and even more uncertain about the unfamiliar atonal piece. This pattern also did not vary with age. The study also found no age-related difference in outcomes between those attending the concert compared to those in the lab.

Steffen Herff, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sydney, Australia, says that the reason musical memory appears to be resistant to age-related cognitive declines may be related to the emotions that music awakens in people, causing it to become more firmly embedded in memory. “We know from general memory research that effectively the amygdala – or emotional processing – functions a bit like a seal of significance,” he says.

Music also follows certain rules, and so it's "relatively easy to make a pretty good guess about what happened in between," says Herff.

The study collected limited data on the cognitive health of some participants, and therefore could not provide detailed insights into the effects of cognitive impairment or neurodegenerative diseases on memory recall. But Herff says there is a lot of interest in using music as a type of "cognitive scaffolding" - that is, as a memory aid for other information - in people with neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia.