Hacker News Reader

Comment by aprao | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related, but I have stopped taking pictures on hikes nowadays. I just listen to an instrumental piece of music a couple times and when I play it back a couple weeks or months later, I am able to vividly recall the experience which I could never do from photos.

View on HN

I wish we could do the opposite because every time I listen to the cool music I discovered in high school I'm unfortunately teleported back to all the emotional distraught of those years.

I've found that the associations I have with a song do get weaker the more I listen to it in another context, so it may be possible to disassociate those memories by forcing yourself to listen to those songs enough times.

But I've only noticed this with songs that conjure relatively benign associations. Stuff from times and places I really don't want to evoke I also avoid.

> Stuff from times and places I really don't want to evoke I also avoid.

There are songs I can't listen to like before anymore after some conversations (eg lightning crashes by live) or some time (Champagne supernova by oasis).

But likewise, there are places I don't have the energy to hang around anymore.

This sucks. I live with music but when I feel really bad, I no longer listen to music, to avoid tainting it. Now, days when I feel bad are quiet.

Though I mostly enjoy travelling back in time through music, including to high school. Fortunately these years were not traumatising for me. Specific songs are particularly strong for that.

Some songs are strongly associated with specific emotions that were not very enjoyable at the time, but are strangely comforting...ish today. I hope someone gets this and formulates it better / differently. This is probably a kind of nostalgia, but not really in the sense that it was better back in the day.

The first time I ever heard the Numa Numa song was when I was 10 and had the flu. I was puking in the hallway and had intense nausea for hours. My classmates kept playing the song because it was the new viral thing.

It took me over 10 years before I could listen to the song without feeling sick. It's fine now though.

Maybe there are ways to build up tolerance to the music by combining it with activities that do not allow the mood to catch on because they are too incompatible? Like running or working out vigorously while listening to this music? Maybe the link between the music and the memories would wear of with time?

I'm not a therapist but this sounds like something I would try on myself if I were in this situation.

Back in 2005 I was gifted both Guero (by Beck) and Guild Wars on my birthday and ended up listening to the album on repeat while playing the game and I really vivid visual flashbacks to that game's art style whenever I hear that album.

As a child I was gifted an album (cheesy christian rock, but it's what my parents would buy me) and a full set of the Chronicles of Narnia. Album went on repeat while I read the first few books and now they are forever, deeply linked in my memory.

I read the Lord of the Rings while listening to the 1492 OST on a tape. That album is the real and best soundtrack of the book and the movie to me.

I always associate The Smashing Pumpkins with Doom because of this. By coincidence, one of their songs actually has a Doom sound effect in it.

Not a coincidence actually!

DOOM had Smashing Pumpkins in it first: the cheat IDSPISPOPD ("smashing pumpkins into small piles of putrid debris") gives you the chainsaw due to some inside joke. The Smashing Pumpkins sample is a nod to this.

Doom 1 and Body Count (Ice-T's metal band's first album) for me.

Quake 3 Arena, Music for the Jilted Generation

oh my god

It's fun deciding to imprint yourself in that way, it feels like a conscious decision to re-wire. That said, the most deeply-seated ones are the ones I didn't really decide on.

Jimi Hendrix and Morrowind for me

For me, it's Morrowind and Morrowind. The in-game music was amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xULTMMgwLuo

along the same lines, red hot chili peppers and halo 2 on Xbox live for me!

also morrowind since somehow I managed to accrue 250+ hours of play time on that despite spending about 16 hours out of every day that I wasn't at school (those days were more like 8-10 hours ಠ_ರೃ) playing halo 2 online.

Ultimate early 2000s combination: Linkin Park and Tribes 2.

Switchfoot and Morrowind.

World of Warcraft and Edguy's "Rocket Ride" album. I still listen to this band, but no other album has same "pull" for me.

Ultima 7 and Kate Bush's "The Red Shoes" for me, in the winter of '94.

That's funny. It was Odelay and Kingdom of Drakkar for me.

Morbid Angel - Covenant and Diablo II for me.

Baldur's Gate and Bob Marley over here.

I've taken to playing certain songs for certain scenarios. My favorite example of such being Blast Off (Human Pyramids) played just as my flight is taking off, that windup taxi and the acceleration to flight. I've kept that particular song pure specifically because I've captured the essence of traveling/vacation in that 5 minute period.

The problem I have with recalling memories/feelings through msuic, is that the recollection gets weaker every time I listen to it. So there are a number of songs I listened to often to relive a particular moment, but listening to them now only vaguely recalls that moment, and additionally also has the association of reliving the moment later. Reliving the reliving of a moment is less vivid than the initial reliving, unfortunately.

I also have experienced this "musical recall", but I don't think vivid memories completely replace photographs. No matter how well you can recall a memory, there's still the task of communicating that memory to others. Photographs and videos greatly help with this.

No, but photographs can destroy vivid memories, or at least commingle and taint in ways that make them impossible to distinguish from the original memory. I avoid looking at photographs of events I've personally experienced. Taking photographs is disruptive in a different way, but it's difficult to take photographs and not look at them later.

> No, but photographs can destroy vivid memories

If anything, our brains taint and alter memories over time, which causes them to be misaligned with photographs. The photograph doesn't lie. The brain lies to us and often.

Sure, memories fade and become distorted. But that's precisely the problem with photographs: they're intensely vivid. So every time you look at a photograph you're creating, transforming and reinforcing an experience you never actually had, accelerating the loss of aspects of your personal experience.[1] Photographs aren't the only way to do this: simply hearing people recounting stories can do this, but photographs are just an immensely powerful and almost instantaneous way to have such vicarious experiences.

I'd rather have my own memories, however faded and worn, though there are strategies (like music association) that can help minimize that. Nonetheless, however distorted, they're principally distorted by my own emotions and desires; they're faded by my own lack of interest; they're mine, which I'd argue is the very definition of a personal memory.

Many people couldn't care less. And that's fine. And if you don't know (or believe) this happens to you, then I suppose it doesn't matter, either.

[1] I want to say that losing the personal visual memory might be related to losing the memory of other aspects, like the emotional experience, but that's more of a fear than anything I'm confident I've experienced personally or have read in the literature.

You're saying looking at a photograph is like overfitting your brain to a specific aspect of a memory. I don't see how music association is any different in this regard. Looking at a photograph of a memory represents the memory in a certain basis. Listening to a song does the same thing, just on a different basis. So this idea of overfitting or potentially losing part of the original memory is not unique to photographs.

I would guess that having as many associations as possible is the healthiest for any memory. This is also the principle behind mind palaces and other memorization techniques.

I have a really strong memory for that kind of stuff yet minor details like what time my flight is I have to re-check constantly. I can also recall music itself pretty much verbatim regardless of the complexity but not the lyrics. Fingerstyle guitar pieces I heard years ago are still burned into my brain yet I couldn't sing you the same song if it had lyrics. I would just remember the notes.

Entirely baseless speculating here, but I wonder if music as notes, instruments and structure aren't stored in memory more similar to spatial memory which I also find to be rather permanent.

I visited Washington DC on a band trip in high school about 15 years ago. Right before I left, I bought Five For Fighting's CD: The Battle For Everything. I listened to it the entire time I was there (as I only had a CD player). Anytime we were on the bus, I was basically listening to that CD.

Now, If I ever hear any of the tracks from that album, I have a flood of memories that come back, and I think that is the reason why I remember that trip so well.

Works really well with podcasts for me. My memory of daily experiences is generally incredibly poor, when I first experienced nearly photographic recall after re-listening to a podcast I almost cried. It's a cruel joke that this capability is in there but I can't seem to activate it on my own.

I do this with code and architecture, or any complex system really... It works pretty well! It's similar to physical space having a sort of memory... except it's mental space.

I like listening to ambient Fallout music while working on the Fallout-like game I volunteer for. Seems to actually work pretty well.

Yes, I do see some specific pieces of code I wrote up to 13 years ago when hearing some songs. Although It's not on propose.

For me, it's LSD and "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" by The Incredible String Band.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com