EP/40: MUSIC & MEMORY
Why do Songs Stick in Our Heads. The Fascinating Link Between Music and Memory.
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Have you ever wondered why certain songs get stuck in your head or why certain memories are triggered when listening to music? In this episode we get into a mind-blowing discussion about everything from ear worms to how music can be applied as an Alzheimer's therapy.
We’re joined by Dr. Kelly Jakubowski, a researcher specializing in music and memory. Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Music Psychology at Durham University in the UK. She studied Music Performance (on the violin) and Music Theory for her undergrad at Baldwin Wallace University - and her Masters at Ohio State. She then pursued an MSc and PhD in music psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Learn more at her work at musicscience.net and follow her on Twitter: @kj_jakubowski
About KELLY
Dr. Kelly Jakubowski is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow undertaking a project entitled ‘Prevalence, features, and retrieval of music-evoked autobiographical memories’. She studied Music Performance (violin) and Music Theory for her undergraduate (Baldwin Wallace University, USA) and Masters degrees (Ohio State University, USA) before pursuing an MSc and PhD in music psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her PhD research focused on developing new behavioural and computational methods for studying musical imagery and involuntary memory for music (including the phenomenon of having an “earworm”, or tune stuck in one’s head). She has also published research on absolute pitch, memory for musical pitch and tempo, and musical synchronisation and entrainment.
In 2015, she was awarded the Hickman Early Career Researcher Award for her PhD research on temporal aspects of involuntary musical imagery, which included a plenary session talk at the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) conference in Manchester, UK. Kelly is on the Editorial Board of Empirical Musicology Review, and has served as an Editor for the journals Music & Science and Music Performance Research and as Advisor to the Executive Committee of the SysMus conference series.
Previous academic posts include Postdoctoral Research Associate in Music at Durham (AHRC-funded ‘Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance’ project), Teaching Fellow in Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Visiting Lecturer in Music at King’s College London.
