How Many Songs Can You Remember by Heart?

[Ivan Seeking]

I was driving home today and caught myself singing along with an old song. 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?

 

[dav2008]

I can play hot cross buns on the recorder.

 

[chroot]

Probably a hundred or more. Maybe several hundred. Singng and story-telling were the two earliest means of spreading cultural information and heritage. It's a shame we can't learn modern physics by song, though.

- Warren

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I have zero memorized but I know most of the words to quit a few so long as I hear the song playing.
I've memorized a few songs before but I always wind up forgeting. My memory isn't very good.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Probably a hundred or more. Maybe several hundred. Singng and story-telling were the two earliest means of spreading cultural information and heritage. It's a shame we can't learn modern physics by song, though.

- Warren

Physics lab quartets would surely result.

 

[Moonbear]

I was driving home today and caught myself singing along with an old song. 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?

Not many. But, there was a song that came on one of those iTunes 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 seem to have permanently memorized the words to anything I made the effort to learn as a kid. Anything else, I just remember enough for it to stick in my head like a broken record.

 

[Moonbear]

Physics lab quartets would surely result.

I used to memorize vocabulary words to tunes I made up. I don't see any reason you couldn't apply that to other learning tasks, especially anything that requires a lot of memorization before you really nail the concepts behind the terminology.

 

[Gokul43201]

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.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Which is odd when you think about it. Why does the added complexity make it easier to remember? I guess the idea is that the melody is easier to learn, and then the words are learned through the process of association with the music?

 

[Moonbear]

Which is odd when you think about it. Why does the added complexity make it easier to remember? I guess the idea is that the melody is easier to learn, and then the words are learned through the process of association with the music?

It is odd, but it works. I also used to memorize stuff with the most convoluted stories. It seems it would just be easier to remember a word and a definition, but no, that didn't work for me, I would go through this whole story to memorize it.

 

[Evo]

Which is odd when you think about it. Why does the added complexity make it easier to remember? I guess the idea is that the melody is easier to learn, and then the words are learned through the process of association with the music?

Look at the alphabet song. What American kid can't sing the alphabet?

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

 

[Greg825]

Probably a hundred or more. Maybe several hundred. Singng and story-telling were the two earliest means of spreading cultural information and heritage. It's a shame we can't learn modern physics by song, though.

- Warren

This reminds me that the IB Physics teacher at my high school has his students perform something (maybe exactly) like http://www-cchs.ccsd.k12.wy.us/cchs_web/physics/Jingle%20Physics.htm" to random classes every year.

 

[loseyourname]

Which is odd when you think about it. Why does the added complexity make it easier to remember? I guess the idea is that the melody is easier to learn, and then the words are learned through the process of association with the music?

A counterexample is oral poetry (like the old Greek epics, which were thousands of lines long and which every Greek future citizen memorized growing up), which doesn't even have a melody or musical accompaniment. It's just easier to remember sequences of words that follow a certain meter and rhyme scheme. I'm sure there is a reason for this, but I don't know what it is.

 

[wolram]

I can not remember any, well one that we sang at school
i have the worstest memory ever, it is the same with jokes, i think i
am a drone

 

[Hootenanny]

It's a shame we can't learn modern physics by song, though.

It seems we can learn chemistry by song;
http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html

Regards,
~Hoot

 

[honestrosewater]

It seems to me that patterns are a big factor. They can function in two ways, generating and constraining, to both reduce the amount of information that needs to be stored and to aid in reconstructing information being retrieved. For example:

Generating reducing storage: If you were making a list of words, would you make an entry for each adverb that ends in -ly or just one entry for -ly?
Constraining aiding reconstruction: You know that the line following "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see" is 5 iambs, last syllable rhymes with see, you have an idea of its meaning, and so on, so even if you didn't remember the last line at all, you know something about it by virtue of its being a part of the Shakespearean sonnet pattern (and if you do have some of it stored somewhere, this info can help you recall it).


I wonder if I could come up with a thousand songs that I have memorized. A quick check shows 450 files (some repeats surely) in my music folder, and that's nothing. A conservative 10 songs per album count makes me think I can get to 1000. I think I'll start a list of songs and about how much of each I can recall.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

It seems we can learn chemistry by song;
http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html

Regards,
~Hoot

You can also learn about Thermodynamics. http://accwebdb.haverford.edu/psongs/FMPro
This whole site looks great, I wish I could listen to the songs.

 

[turbo]

Look at the alphabet song. What American kid can't sing the alphabet?

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

Mary Hopkin (pretty little Welsh girl - 1960's) recorded a version of that song on her first album - wonderful rendition. Trivia - Twiggy introduced her to Paul McCartney, who got her signed to the Apple label.

I probably know hundreds of songs, having been in bands since the 1960s, and can fake my way through lots more, having hosted blues/rock jams at a local club for a few years. The ones I haven't sung/played for a while and have "forgotten" usually come back really fast with a little practice. I just heard Black Mountain Side by Led Zep earlier this afternoon - I have to re-learn that one. It's not that hard once you get the guitar into that really odd alternate tuning and forget eveything you know about normal chord shapes.

 

[SpaceTiger]

I'm sure it's over 1000. Beatles songs alone is up to ~250 and I've written almost 100. 2000 or 3000 total is more likely.

Of course, it depends on how strict you are. I very often forget verse order and song lyrics are sometimes unintelligible. I don't usually bother to remember them from the CD inserts. On a lot of songs (especially grunge era music), I just mumble something that sounds like what they're saying. Melodies are easy, though. It only takes one or two listenings to be able to remember a melody. Singing along requires that I memorize the lyrics, so I'm guessing it takes something like 5 - 10 listenings, depending on how catchy it is and how many times it repeats in my head.

Then there are the chord sequences. I probably remember a few hundred of those (for playing on guitar) and some are simple enough that I find I've subconsciously memorized them along with the lyrics and melody, even if I've never played them before.

Yeah, I know this isn't the best use of my brain space, but it makes me happy, so .

 

[Chi Meson]

I'm sure it's over 1000. Beatles songs alone is up to ~250 and I've written almost 100. 2000 or 3000 total is more likely.

I would be totally surprised if it were any less than 3000 songs. I am constantly surprised when I'm getting a haircut (for example) and a satellite station is playing 70s music and I hear a song that hasn't been heard since August 1978 and I know every single word (despite the fact that I hated the song).

I know at least 500 children's song. Heck, what's Raffi's discography alone? I've got 250 LP's downstairs, and those are the ones I can't throw away because they "mean so much." That's at least 3000 songs right there.

I'm upping the number: If I don't know at least 10,000 songs, then I'm dead. And no, I don't think I'm special.

 

[blimkie]

i know the words to somewhere in the promximity of 1000 songs

 

[blimkie]

i think
ok i lied 500
but i have 2000 on the pc and i know most of them

 

[honestrosewater]

Well, I just thought of this, but if you consider three features of language, discreteness, semanticity (linguistic units map to other 'real world' objects), and arbitrariness, you can draw an analogy between language and Analog-to-Digital/Digital-to-Analog Converters. I won't ramble on about everything that falls out of that analogy, but a lot of stuff does!

I did a little test-run with a few songs and noticed that I don't really remember the music -- I remember the lyrics -- and I remember them in stanzas, with the intervening music not really stored -- (so) I recalled some stanzas out of order -- and I seem to rely heavily on the pitch information, intonational melody, and such that is stored in the lyrics in order to recall and reconstruct the music. There's also a definite difference between recalling lyrics to music and recalling literary works like poetry and plays. For example, I can recall Shakespeare faster than I can speak it -- and with very little effort -- but it's almost like I need to build the whole song in order to recall just the lyrics. (I'm just learning an audio editing program, and I think this is how they store files -- instead of storing the original song and rewriting each change, they store only the changes that you make, which are kind of layed over top of the originial and need it in order to play -- and note how much easier you can recall a song that you are listening to at that moment. Anywho.)

This doesn't surprise me because I'm a language person and don't know enough music notation and terminology to have built an efficient ADC, if you will. But I wonder what information someone like ST, who 'speaks music fluently', has stored and in what form. Does he remember, e.g., the actual notes (i.e., he recalls auditory signals and hears them 'in his head') or linguistic information like the letters that are assigned to the notes (which he can then convert to sound signals).

Oh, and if you add in a writing system, you can switch to the visual channel, so you're not stuck with temporal ordering and can make better use of matrices and such. Anywho, did I say I wasn't going to ramble? Woops.

 

[SpaceTiger]

I'm upping the number: If I don't know at least 10,000 songs, then I'm dead. And no, I don't think I'm special.

Wow! So you think most people know that many by your age and just don't realize it?

 

[-Job-]

10,000 sounds like a bit much. I only have about 8,000 songs in my computer. I can't imagine knowing the lyrics to every single one of them. Most of the time i know exactly how the song goes but i have trouble understanding what the vocalist is actually saying. This is why one of the projects I'm thinking of doing is a music player that actually shows the song's lyrics as the song is playing. I think this would make listening to a song a much more complete experience.

 

[SpaceTiger]

This doesn't surprise me because I'm a language person and don't know enough music notation and terminology to have built an efficient ADC, if you will. But I wonder what information someone like ST, who 'speaks music fluently', has stored and in what form. Does he remember, e.g., the actual notes (i.e., he recalls auditory signals and hears them 'in his head') or linguistic information like the letters that are assigned to the notes (which he can then convert to sound signals).

I'm more of an enthusiast than anything, so I don't know if it's true that I speak music fluently. I think I would need more formal training. One thing I will say, though, is that, unlike numbers, songs carry emotion. I'm sure the fact that I dwell on my emotional response to a melody or lyric makes it easier to remember it down the line.

On the other hand, I know there are a lot of gifted musicians who remember and play music more mechanically -- like a scientist remembers numbers and facts. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they're using an entirely different part of the brain.

 

[Chi Meson]

Wow! So you think most people know that many by your age and just don't realize it?

I don't have the time to check to make sure I know all the lyrics, but I am fairly certain I know most of the lyrics to easily more than 8000. This includes folk songs/pub songs, children's songs, TV and Movie themes, pop songs, anti-establishment songs (From early Bob Dylan, through MC5 & Stooges, past Sex Pistols & Clash, to Minor Threat and Black Flag, I know all those songs and that's a couple thousand right there).

I have a good recollection for sound; I can "hear" a song playing in my head quite distinctly. Pehaps better than some, but by no means phenomenal. I do think most people know far more than they first estimate.

 

[BobG]

I think the more pathways you have to piece of information within your brain, the better the chances of recalling it when you need it. If you involve different parts of your brain in a task, you'll increase the number of pathways.

 

[turbo]

I have a good recollection for sound; I can "hear" a song playing in my head quite distinctly. Pehaps better than some, but by no means phenomenal. I do think most people know far more than they first estimate.

I have a friend who can do wonders. I was driving around (WAY around) Boston on my way to a job in Western Mass and I was listening to a station that had a tag line "the mix is the music" - they played a huge variety of music. I heard a wonderful version of "I Say a Little Prayer for You" and it stayed fresh in my head for days. When I got back from my trip, I stopped at the local record shop and described the song to the owner. The lilt in the singer's voice, the instrumentation (including an accordian of some sort) minimal (but nice) percussion, etc. He thought for a minute and said "that sounds like Mary Black" - Irish folk/pop singer. He ordered her latest CD, and it was her. Her work is fantastic. Having composed and performed for 40+ years, I have a good ear for instrumentation, arrangement, etc, and Bob and I were "on the same page" enough so that he could "hear" the song as I described it to him and figure out who performed it. Pretty amazing.

 

[-Job-]

Are we talking about remembering the lyrics of a song while it is playing, or at any time, even when it's not? Without hearing the song i probably incompletely remember about 100 if I'm lucky. I can't remember the names of 8,000 songs while not listening to them, let alone the lyrics. For example if someone were to ask me right now to name all the Beatle's songs i would probably get about 40-50% of them. If i got to hear the first 5 seconds of each song and then name them i could probably get about 80% (there's some Beatles songs i just don't know). There's a big difference though.

 

[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)