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Human musical memory is surprisingly durable: Babies can recognize familiar tunes, and people with dementia can often recall songs from their youth. Some tunes are especially sticky, whether we want to remember them or not. But scientists still don’t entirely understand how memory for music works. A new online game (doubling as a science project) called TuneTwins, which you yourself can play, might help.
The researchers behind the project, from the Music Cognition Group at the University of Amsterdam, are hoping that collecting participants’ scores from the game will allow them to measure how memory for music is influenced by various musical elements—pitch, rhythm, and other dimensions—as well as by prior experience both playing and listening to music.
“We are primarily interested in whether listeners focus more on pitch, timbre, or rhythm when remembering music,” says Henkjan Honing, professor of music cognition at the University of Amsterdam, in an email. Studies on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (known as WEIRD) populations suggest pitch is the dominant cue, says Honing. “But in other contexts, different aspects of sound may be more salient and better remembered,” he says. The group doesn’t have a fixed hypothesis yet.
TuneTwins is really a series of games: Each iteration features 16 virtual playing cards on which you can click (like the game “memory”), revealing a complex musical fragment; eight pairs are matches. But the trick is that in some of these pairs, one of the samples has been distorted along dimensions of frequency and temporality, creating degradations in pitch, timbre, and rhythmic structure that turn it into a fun-house reflection of the original.
The fragments are borrowed from three different music styles—popular TV theme tunes from the West, traditional Chinese music, and polyphonic/polyrhythmic music from BaYaka hunter-gatherers in the Congolese rainforest. Before participants get started, they are asked to answer a few biographical questions: age, gender, history playing music and familiarity with the different types of music.
I consider myself a relatively musical person: I can pick out most melodies on the piano by ear and keep a steady rhythm on drums. But when I tested my own musical memory in TuneTwins, I found it challenging to keep one sample of music in mind while listening to other fragments, and to remember which fragment went with which card. The rhythms and melodies were complex and the distortions were disorienting. I clicked on one sample, and a sweep of polyphonic chanting tumbled out like a stampede, set to a syncopated series of drumbeats, like hooves clattering. I clicked on another, and the chanting was deeper and more hollow, the rhythm more sparse, and the whole was layered with a static-y distortion. They were not a match! I kept clicking.
Honing says that in the beta testing phase, the researchers found that children performed especially well, particularly in the Netherlands and the Congolese rainforest, which suggests years of musical experience might actually not help much. “It’s hard to predict,” says Honing. But he adds, “experts often develop alternative strategies for solving such tasks.”
As I kept playing the game, I got a little better at it. Perhaps, in the end, remembering a tune on purpose is as much about having a bang up strategy as it is about having a strong ear or an affinity for music. 
Lead image: beast01 / Shutterstock
