Song Sketch #2
Song Sketch #2
A short jam from the archive, how the brain remembers music and earworms.
There’s another audio track attached to this post, it’s a song sketch from a couple of years back. The demo features live percussion and listening to it again with fresher ears, the vibe/feel reminds me of the Velvet Underground.
Our brain is a master illusionist, it knows before we do. Though I am unsure how the we is defined here? Maybe the we is our nervous system reacting to instructions from the brain’s neuron network. I think that’s how it works, but please confirm that with a neuroscientist first! Our brains also fill the gaps in our knowledge, what we might call memory. And our memory of music is often wrong, we’ll imagine a certain beat, rhythm style or even a whole song section that is not actually featured in the real recording. When we recall music by memory, our brain makes it’s best guess at what the song might have sounded like, often including bits from other songs.
While the concept of free will is hotly debated among scientists and philosophers, the inescapable reality is a split nano-second delay between brain activity and the physical actions we take. The moments before we settle down to listen to our favourite album the music has already started playing in our memories. We then hope to recapture that same mental excitement in our headphones. Musicians or sound engineers should probably aim to record/mix your tracks exactly as they sound in your head.
The relationship a musician has with their own music is different to that of a regular listener. We’ve heard our own recordings hundreds of times. We are uncomfortably familiar with all the bits of musical nonsense that we threw away, the earlier versions of a song that sounded childish or lame, but served as a valuable starting point. I winced when watching Paul McCartney mumble through the beginnings of Get Back in Peter Jackson’s 2021 film. I’d be hugely embarrassed to share that kind of footage. Only celebrities can get away with exposing all the faults, demos and outtakes. Passive observers are not particularly interested in the creative process unless the people creating music are legendary rock stars with a back story.
Looking at most-played songs in Apple Music I’d hazard a guess that, throughout our lifetime, we might listen to a favourite song, around 20-30 times, not counting the random music we hear in the background, on the radio or in a public space. Apple Music tells me I’ve played Undenied by Portishead 10 times, though it feels like a lot more. I must do an experiment. Pick a favourite song by another artist and play it to death. Will I get tired of the song, as I do with my own music?
GUITAR PK is a musician from Eastbourne in the UK.