Music for Learning

How many elements can you name in order?  (Source: 

http://fiveless.deviantart.com)

My children are driving me crazy.  They are listening, over and over, to a song that lists all the elements of the periodic table to the tune of the Can-Can by Offenbach.  Repeatedly.  Unceasingly.  Again and again.  They enthusiastically sing along, trying to commit every word to memory.  It’s all in the cause of good learning, but still, I’m going cross-eyed.  Even when the music finally stops, it’s still going in my head, on endless loop.

On the other hand:  my kids are memorizing the periodic table of the elements!  I should, just maybe, quit complaining and be geekfully grateful for their eager efforts to improve their minds.  I also love that they are able to do this because the information is set to music. 

The use of song as a mnemonic device is well-known and we’ve pretty much all used this technique, starting with singing the ABC song to learn the alphabet.  Many university students make use of songs to memorize facts; I recommend it to my neuroscience students.  I even own a copy of The Biochemists’ Songbook by Harold Baum, which is a whole book of songs designed to make learning the metabolic pathways easier.  All of this suggests that wrapping information up in music makes it easier to remember.  But is that really true?  And, if so, why?

There are a number of possible reasons that remembering a song is easier than remembering a list of information.  The first is that presenting information as a song provides a temporal structure.  It turns a jumble of unordered information into a sequence, with one idea leading to the next in a particular order.  Imposing structure on information is a key way to improve recall.  A research study by Wanda Wallace in 1994 showed that text is better remembered when set to a simple, repetitive melody than when spoken.  She discusses the idea of sequential recall, and describes how it works:  when we learn information always in the same order, one piece of information cues the next piece in the sequence.  Also, connecting each bit of text to a particular part of the melody means that even if you forget one part of the text, the music will help cue the next line of text.

The second idea as to why music helps us remember information is that the structure of the music provides clues as to the words.  For instance, the shape and rhythm of the melodic line tell us how many syllables should be present in the words that go with it.  This is redundant information:  both the words and melody tell us how many syllables should be present, and so it makes it easier to remember. A study in 2008 by Purnell-Webb and Speelman looked to see whether the reputed effects of music on memory for text were due to melody or rhythm, and whether the music needed to be familiar to the listener to be most effective.  They found that learning text to a familiar tune or rhythm conferred a memory advantage over spoken text, and concluded that it is the rhythmic aspects of the music that help people remember the words, by providing temporal structure and redundant cues, as discussed above. 

Some researchers, however, dispute the effect of music on memory.  If we have to learn both text and music at the same time, this is more information to learn and should make it harder.  There are indeed some studies showing that spoken text is in fact easier to remember than sung text , especially if the melody is novel and non-repetitive.  Even in the studies where music does enhance memory, the effect is pretty small.  And yet, we've all used music to help us learn facts.  Why are the experimental results so different from our real-life experience?  I believe this discrepancy is due to the fact that in the laboratory, the number of repetitions is controlled:  the subjects in the experiment listened to the spoken information the same number of times as they listened to the sung information.

The real strength of using music to remember information is that people love music.  Listening to a lively song about chemistry is infinitely more enjoyable than listening to a dry recitation of all the elements in the periodic table, so we’ll listen to it more.  In short:  music adds motivation. In an article entitled, "Is Memory for Music Special?", Matthew Schulkind suggests, that “the ‘special’ power of music as a mnemonic device may be that it fosters excessive rehearsal”.  In other words, putting the information into a song makes it more fun, so we practice it more.

This is certainly the case with the periodic table song.  My children are unlikely to spend much time repeating a spoken list of chemical elements, but they beg me to allow them to access YouTube so that they can sing along with the video.  I relent, and while the music of Offenbach swells around us, they dance around the living room, chorusing:  “There’s hydrogen and helium, then lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon everywhere, nitrogen all through the air…"

I sigh, but smile smugly on the inside.  These kids are going to ace chemistry when they get to high school.  Thanks, Offenbach and AsapSCIENCE!

References:

Cirigliano, M.M. (2013). Musical mnemonics in health science: A first look. Medical Teacher 35, e1020–e1026.

Purnell-Webb, P., and Speelman, C.P. (2008).Effects of music on memory for text. Perceptual and Motor Skills 106,927–957.

Racette, A., and Peretz, I. (2007). Learninglyrics: To sing or not to sing? Memory & Cognition 35, 242–253.

Schulkind, M.D. (2009). Is Memory for MusicSpecial? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1169, 216–224.

Wallace, W.T. (1994). Memory for music: Effect ofmelody on recall of text. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory,and Cognition 20, 1471–1485.