How Many Songs Can You Remember by Heart?

[Ivan Seeking]

I was just noticing that if I try to recall a song that I haven't heard in a long time, I do think of the music first; run through it in my mind, and that helps me to remember the words.

 

[honestrosewater]

Hey, what about noise? Just brainstorming a little... if NONE of the music (music = the non-speech sounds) was being stored, which do you think would be the more likely reason: the music is too complex or the music is too simple? I vote too simple. More realistically then, say that the musical patterns are simple enough that very little about them needs to be stored because they can be easily reconstructed/generated, perhaps with a prompt (e.g., hearing a few seconds or a few fractions of a second of the music, perhaps kinda like having the rule to generate a sequence if given the first term(s) or somesuch bit of variable info).

Now, when we heard the speech, it was mixed in with the music. As far as the 'speech processors' are concerned, wouldn't the music be kinda like noise? (Perhaps I'm stretching the notion of noise, but eh.) The idea is that there's a pattern to the noise, which, once we have it, would allow us to extract the speech message from the signal... which would be much more difficult without knowing that pattern. Does that make any sense?

Okay, assuming that, what does it say about how the signal might be stored? First problem I see: Why can't we recognize the musical pattern in the signal now, as we have it stored? Presumably, we could do so if we heard the signal. So perhaps the signal is stored in such a way that we need the pattern to put the pieces in the correct order. That is, we've stored the signal in bits and pieces here and there, so it's difficult to recall the signal without some key from the music.

So the picture: We don't store the music. We store the speech. But the speech has music as noise mixed in, and it's stored in pieces that need help from some info in the music in order to be reassembled into larger pieces of the original signal.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Hi hrw, I'm not quite sure what you are saying, but i had some thoughts that may help or hinder, things like how the one note of a vespar driving past my house will remind me of the opening guitar note of 'Satisfaction', how a bird in the garden has got a few notes of the Pastoral going (from 'By the Brook', but not intended birdcalls), another type of bird always sings a few notes from Don Giovanni, when I replace the phone reciever it chirps the opening notes of a Devo song (She's Just a Girl) that I really don't particular want to remember every time I hang up, but do.
Also, I can recall the German lyrics of an aria, say,without understanding any of them, likewise I love hearing my non english speaking friends sing an english pop song verbatim and then ask what they've sung. Perhaps these support your notion of noise?

 

[nazgjunk]

I'm in a choir, and a music freak so I think I know quite a lot of songs, including many that you wouldn't expect a 17-year old to listen to.

 

[turbo]

Honestrosewater, do you know about compression algorithms for digital information? Many work by not sampling EVERY bit of information, but by sampling some and recording the differences between that information and subsequent (or adjoining in the case of images) information. I think that this is how I remember music. I don't have perfect pitch, so I can't always grab the barre chord that I want to play on the guitar, but once I've got one right, I can accurately judge the interval that I need and get to the next barre chord pretty reliably. I ran open-mike blues/rock jams at a local tavern for a few years, and played in a lot of pick-up bands for parties, etc, and I can tell you that if you can't "hear" the intervals that the chords run in, you might as well hang it up and join a band with steady membership and a set repertoire so you can memorize the songs. I think most everybody has at least a bit of this talent, ranging from "tone deaf" to "perfect pitch".

 

[honestrosewater]

fi,
Thanks, those are interesting examples. The way I mean noise is a little different; I mean it to be understood in the context of a communicaiton system. A simple model starts with a sender who has a message to send (e.g., a person wants to tell you something).

[sender's message]
↓
[encoding]
↓
[transmitted signal]
↓
[channel] ← (noise)
↓
[received signal]
↓
[decoding]
↓
[receiver's message]

Noise is everything in the channel (e.g., other signals, friction) that can make the transmitted signal differ from the received signal. So what counts as noise depends on what is being counted as the message (and as the channel, when there are options).

turbo-1,
Yeah, languages use relative changes in pitch for lots of things, so competent speakers are able to recognize and produce them (subconsciously, at least). I don't know how fine we're talking though. And I'm not really trying to guess at how our brains store songs. I was just trying to think of a faster, easier way to recall the songs that I have stored.

 

[brewnog]

Thousands, surely? Most songs from the past 20 years which have had a good deal of radio play I'd probably be able to sing most of the words to. And loads that haven't. I think if they get stuck in your head for a bit, they're there forever.

I found myself singing "there's a worm at the bottom of the garden" a few years back, and my mum was confused as to how I knew it, - she hadn't sung it to me since I was 2.

 

[dav2008]

I lied. I can't play Hot Cross Buns :(

 

[Janus]

I don't know how many songs I could just sit down and write down the lyrics for, but I do know that this is one:

If you're agile and haven't got the rheumatism
Not too fragile and nimble on your toes
Do the polka and wake up your metabolism
Do the Polka, and here's the way it goes

One two and off we go
To and fro, not too slow
Turn your partner round and all about
Round and round we go
All over town we go
Once you're in the dance you can't drop out.

Frills a flouncing and every little bustle bouncing
Folks with straight hair will come out with it curled
In the fastest polka, fastest polka
Fastest polka in the World!


This is a song I sang my sophmore year in high school for a musical production of A Christmas Carol (I played Mr Fezziwig. )

This was 32 years ago!

 

[Ouabache]

Every now and then it strikes me that we all seem to remember dozens if not hundreds of songs, or more; an amazing number of them really. So, how many songs do you think that you know by heart?

As a musician, I recall 100's probably 1000's (melodies, harmonies, rhythms) by heart. (lyrics are different story).. Now here is a kicker, when you think of those songs, how many of them, do you recall in the same key you learned or originally heard them?

 

[Ouabache]

I remember singing the "inchworm" song to my kids.

Inchworm, inchworm
Measuring the marigolds
You and your arithmetic
You'll probably go far

Inchworm, inchworm
Measuring the marigolds
Seems to me you'd stop and see
How beautiful they are

Two and two are four
Four and four are eight
Eight and eight are sixteen
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two

I liked this song too.. Seems we sang this as a round.

 

[Ouabache]

Not many. But, there was a song that came on... radio stations yesterday that was an old country song that I hadn't heard since I was a kid, and I remembered every word.

I'll byte .. what song did you hear?

 

[moose]

Everyday in math, my friend starts singing a song whenever he hears a word that reminds him of a certain song...

I think I know more than 3000.

Now, how many songs can you recognize? That would probably be in the 12k range?

 

[BobG]

I heard in the news, a couple of days ago, about a school (in New York or New Jersey, I think) that took poorly performing students from nearby inner-city schools and produced amazing results out of them. The big difference in their teaching technique was that it involved memorization through singing - from multiplication tables to the periodic table...they had songs for everything.

They must have learned this song then: The Elements by the legendary Tom Lehrer.

Another unforgettable song is about Thermodynamics: http://www.uky.edu/~holler/CHE107/media/first_second_law.mp3 by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann

 

[BobG]

Ever wonder how they get so many bits on those new MP3 players? With both music and visual animations, how could you ever forget?

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

(Disco never gets old)